Work

business & working

Where the jobs are

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As I said earlier this week:

I would infer that as cheap and easy Internet tools proliferate, those with specialised skills in coding, etc, may begin to lose their market worth – unless they also have the skills of inventiveness, empathy and meaning that Daniel Pink believes will be necessary for future employability.

It seems that this is already happening, according to this post from Daniel Lemire, on the lack of jobs for computer science graduates:

The message is quite clear, I believe. If you want to train yourself or students to produce software (programming or software engineering), you better be damn good because the job market is not there anymore. Will jobs come back? Automobile workers in North America are still waiting for the jobs sent to Mexico or elsewhere to come back. Now, programming or software engineering are not useless skills, far from it, but it might be a better strategy to aim for a business jobs where your programming or computer networking skills can be put to good use, for example. It seems that the job market is moving toward information technology (security, networking, using the right technology at the right time, understanding the implication of a given technology for business).


More eLearning Jobs

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Following up on last week’s post on PulseLearning, it seems than another Fredericton company is hiring – Isomni Solutions. The word is that they’re looking for an instructional designer, two business analysts (with over 10 years experience) as well as a passel of .NET programmers. From their website, Isomni states that they are focused on eHealth and portal development, amongst other areas.

Analysing Performance at Work

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I listened to a report on the radio this morning about presenteeism, defined as “the practice of always being present at the workplace, often working longer hours even when there is nothing to do.” Once again, there seemed to be a focus on how to deal with the individual who has a problem, or the manager who cannot manage his or her workers. Little was said about systemic issues, such as the hierarchy that exists in most workplaces that forces many people to comply and park their brains at the door.

I previously quoted a fellow performance improvement practitoner, Klaus Wittkuhn, on the importance of initial work system design:

It is not an intelligent strategy to train people to overcome system deficiencies. Instead, we should design the system properly to make sure that the performers can leverage all their capabilities.

One of the models that I use is based on Mager & Pipe’s classic reference book, Analysing Performance Problems, which provides a step by step approach to finding out what the real work performance issue is, and how to deal with it. Based on this book, I have developed my own graphic, which shows some of the basic steps that you can take before jumping to conclusions on how to deal with problems like presenteeism.

PA2

“This Internet Thing”

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Seth Godin marketing and branding guru, and author of Purple Cow, latest post is on how the importance of the Internet is only beginning to be felt. For instance:

Penetration. There are 50 times as many people using the Net as there were then [ten years ago]. 50x is a multiple you don’t see every day.

For those in the elearning or social networking business, this is a very important fact. It may mean that business models that failed 5-10 years ago, could work now. Time to clean out that closet of ideas.

Tools. You can launch most any online service with almost no custom programming. Changethis.com demonstrated to me how straightforward this has become. It also means that finding the world’s greatest programmer is no longer a critical component for most services.

I would infer that as cheap and easy Internet tools proliferate, those with specialised skills in coding, etc, may begin to lose their market worth – unless they also have the skills of inventiveness, empathy and meaning that Daniel Pink believes will be necessary for future employability.

 

Market Diversification

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Godfrey Parkin has an excellent post on what is really happening in the global economy; namely that multinationals will follow the money. The next century is looking like it will be the Chinese century.

Corporate America apparently no longer values having brain-power or talent on the domestic payroll – the notion of human capital as an investment is being replaced with the notion of human ingenuity as an expense. If our money, our designers, our R&D, our manufacturing, our management, our business partners, our suppliers, and our major markets are all in Asia, where does that leave the USA?

In Canada, we continue to focus almost exclusively on exporting to the US. As Godfrey puts it, Wal*Mart does more business with China than all of Canada does. The business development strategies that I see presented at every “innovation” forum in the region have the same old story presented by analysts, bureaucrats and government. That story is about exporting our products and services to the US. The talk about diversified global markets is negligible. Given the warning signals on the state of the US economy, it would make sense not to put all of our economic eggs in one basket, n’est-ce pas?

New eLearning Company in New Brunswick

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Well, this is news to me, but I’m probably way behind on the local gossip.

It appears that the Irish elearning company, PulseLearning has opened an office in Fredericton, NB. The company focuses on compliance training, which seems like a sustainable business model, as the creation of new rules and regulations is not likely to end soon. PulseLearning is currently hiring project managers and instructional designers, and they join a number of established elearning companies in Fredericton, making for good job prospects in the capital city.

From Cluetrain to Wirearchy

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In 1999 we had the Cluetrain Manifesto, with its 95 theses à la Gutenberg; the first ten being:

  1. Markets are conversations.
  2. Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors.
  3. Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.
  4. Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived.
  5. People recognize each other as such from the sound of this voice.
  6. The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.
  7. Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy.
  8. In both internetworked markets and among intranetworked employees, people are speaking to each other in a powerful new way.
  9. These networked conversations are enabling powerful new forms of social organization and knowledge exchange to emerge.
  10. As a result, markets are getting smarter, more informed, more organized. Participation in a networked market changes people fundamentally.

Many business executives do not realise the underlying reason of the Cluetrain Manifesto, and continue to build defensive walls between the company and their customers. They even use military terminology when referring to their markets. Get real folks, the customer is your lifeblood, and now has the tools to figure things out with or without you. Take thesis 7 – today we have more than just hyperlinks; we have peer-to-peer and Voice over IP to connect with anyone, anytime. Jon Husband, with his Wirearchy perspective, has developed his own 2005 manifesto on a similar theme [updated link]:

#1 Customers, employees and other stakeholders are all interconnected, and have access to most, if not all the information that everyone else has.
#2 The organization chart usually reflects power and politics in the organization … more often than not, customers and employees find work-arounds to create the experiences that delight.
#3 People interconnected by the Internet and software have ways of speaking to each other – and so they do that – all day long.
#4 Champion-and-Channel replaces Command-and-Control.
#5 Conversations are where information is shared, knowledge is created and are the basis for getting the right things done.
#6 Trust, Transparency and Authenticity are the glue that holds it all together.
#7 The Workplace of the Future will be more diverse – in terms of demographics, values, gender, race and language.
#8 New, integrated and sophisticated technologies are being developed and implemented – and the knowledge workers of tomorrow will be more interconnected than ever.
#9 We’re All In This Together
#10 There’s No Going Back to “Normal” – Permanent Whitewater is the New Normal.

Here are some ways that I can think of to develop a new company, based on Jon’s principles. You see, I always have to make things concrete – it’s in my nature ;-)

  • Build the company with an open connection to your customers, whether with the two-way web (e.g. blogs) or with a physical presence.
  • Develop your organisation chart based upon your customers needs, not your own. When I lived in Germany, what I found unique was that the bank tellers were the most senior people in the bank. Bank employees were not allowed to interact with customers until they knew how the entire system functioned. This meant excellent customer service.
  • Have all of your marketing material written by someone who can write in plain language. Maybe even pay your best customers to write it for you. In this way, it will reflect the customer, not you.

Please feel free to add your own …

Innovation in IT

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I attended the ITANS CEO Boot Camp in Halifax yesterday. It was geared to small & medium sized businesses in the IT sector. There were a few of us from New Brunswick as well as at least one person from Newfoundland in attendance. I decided to attend because of the great price – $75 and the presentation on e-Health in afternoon.

The morning started with a presentation from Michael O’Neil, Managing Director of IDC Canada. He talked about the various definitions of innovation and commercialisation, stating that commmercialisation should be the focus of any IT firm. I think that this is just quibbling over definitions. Many definitions of innovation include wealth creation. For an excellent, and non-mainstream, read on innovation and its underlying principles, read Dave Pollard’s 30 page – A Prescription for Business Innovation (2004) instead.

What I found the most useful part Michael’s presentation was his description of the typical growth curve of a company and how a company needs different kinds of partners, depending on where it is in its growth. For instance in the initial stage, IT product companies need sales partners, usually hired at great expense, to get those first product sales. In Stage 2, companies need services partners, with existing relationships in vertical markets, who can refer their products. Later, in Stage 3, companies need logistics partners, to smoothly handle customer service. Finally, in Stage 4, companies need to find hyper-efficient channel partners, such as Dell is for the computer hardware industry.

Michael also likened the typical IT company’s perspective toward its customers as wearing your suit jacket inside-out. Only the company can see the nice, finished fabric. He said that vendors have to stop considering themselves as the centre of their solar system, and put their customers at the centre. His presentation was then followed by two IT company representatives who rarely mentioned their customers, and one talked about the need to get the "message to the market" correct. An inside-out approach, I would say.

For small companies, there were a few more nuggets of wisdom during the morning, but you had to dig hard to find them. Many of the models shown would have worked well during the dot com bubble, but I’m not sure how well they will work today for a start-up tech company. For now, I’m sticking with Dave Pollard and his work on Natural Enterprises and Clayton Christensen’s theories on innovation.

Pedagogical Praxis – Shaffer

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David Williamson Shaffer’s paper on Pedagogical Praxis: The professions as models for post-industrial education provides a theoretical model, with case studies, on how educational institutions can better bridge the gap between learning in formal education and learning in the workplace. These three studies show how relatively easy it is to ground a learning program in a post-industrial workplace context, by using what are today quite cheap and accesible technologies.

Perhaps the power of new technologies to bring professional practices closer to the purview of middle and high school students provides an opportunity to move beyond disciplines derived from medieval scholarship constituted within schools developed in the industrial revolution. Learning environments such as
those described here, based on professional learning practices and deliberately
constituted outside the traditional structure of schooling, suggest a
way to move beyond current curricula based on the ways of knowing of
mathematics, science, history, and language arts.

These case studies include students working as biomedical negotiators, online journalists and architects using complex mathematics. These three stories make this academic paper a delight to read.

For a more academic review, see this eLearning Review.

Update: Link fixed :-)

The New Skills – Inventiveness, Empathy, Meaning

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Just before I stepped out on my own, I read Daniel Pink’s Free Agent Nation, which I would recommend to every freelancer. The CS Monitor has recently featured Pink in an article on the end of jobs. Pink sees another shift in the employment market, speculating that off-shoring is going to continue, and that “There are going to be plenty of opportunities…. But it’s not going to be ‘knowledge workers,’ it’s going to be creators and empathizers.” His new book, A Whole New Mind, is based on this idea:


The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind. The era of “left brain” dominance, and the Information Age that it engendered, are giving way to a new world in which “right brain” qualities – inventiveness, empathy, meaning – predominate.

I take this to mean that synthesis and conceptual thinking will be in high demand, as businesses and organisations keep up with technology, market and cultural changes. Seeing patterns will be necessary. If this is the case, then Dave Pollard’s critical life skills will be essential for more and more people [take the hint, educators].

Pink’s first book was based on many interviews with free agents across the US, and I hope that this next one will have good data to back it up. The book is due out in March 2005.