#workplace change

We all know that work and family life are intertwined and research supports this demonstrating that employees who are highly committed to their roles as parents and spouses benefit companies. Conversely, employee performance and satisfaction occur easiest when outside influences like family are considered through workplace contracts and the provision of flexible work arrangements. Whilst…

I've been in my new job for a few months now and I've learned a few big things. Not only am I a new worker, but a new remote worker-- there are pros and cons to this and it's changing workplaces everywhere, especially for new workers. Here's why:

As a part of the Class of 2020, I’m lucky to be a college graduate with a job right now. Back in March, I wrote a postabout some of the ways that college graduates handled the recession back in 2008 because at the time, a lot of them were facing the same changing job market, hard money issues, and layoffs much in the way my class currently is. While there was a lot of advice offered from past…

10 things people tell me

Sometimes it just takes a good pandemic for some people in positions of authority in their business to learn what leadership is and to recognise how much better things can be from all perspectives.

I’ve been talking with senior managers and business owners about not only leadership but how doing business is likely to change.

They have been talking about how they can better manage the costs of…

Beth Pinsker, Reuters, May 1, 2018

NEW YORK (Reuters)--When Andrew Chamberlain started in his job four years ago in the research group at jobs website Glassdoor.com, he worked in a programming language called Stata. Then it was R. Then Python. Then PySpark.

“My dad was a commercial printer and did the same thing for 30 years. I have to continually stay on stuff,” said Chamberlain, who is now the chief economist for the site.

Chamberlain already has one of the jobs of the future--a perpetually changing, shifting universe of work that requires employees to be critical thinkers and fast on their feet. Even those training for a specific field, from plumbing to aerospace engineering, need to be nimble enough to constantly learn new technologies and apply their skills on the fly.

When companies recruit new workers, particularly for entry-level jobs, they are not necessarily looking for knowledge of certain software. They are looking for what most consider soft skills: problem solving, effective communication and leadership. They also want candidates who show a willingness to keep learning new skills.

“The human being’s role in the workplace is less to do repetitive things all the time and more to do the non-repetitive tasks that bring new kinds of value,” said Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce in the United States.

So while specializing in a specialized STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) field can seem like an easy path to a lucrative first job, employers are telling colleges: You are producing engineers, but they do not have the skills we need.

It is “algorithmic thinking” rather than the algorithm itself that is relevant, said Carnevale.

Out in the field, Marie Artim is looking for potential. As vice president of talent acquisition for car rental firm Enterprise Holdings Inc, she sets out to hire about 8,500 young people every year for a management training program, an enormous undertaking that has her searching college campuses across the country.

Artim started in the training program herself, 26 years ago, as did the Enterprise chief executive, and that is how she gets the attention of young adults and their parents who scoff at a future of renting cars.

According to Artim, the biggest deficit in the millennial generation is autonomous decision-making. They are used to being structured and “syllabused,” she said.

To get students ready, some colleges, and even high schools, are working on building critical thinking skills.

For three weeks in January at the private Westminster Schools in Atlanta, Georgia, students either get jobs or go on trips, which gives them a better sense of what they might do in the future.

At Texas State University in San Marcos, meanwhile, students can take a marketable-skills master class series.

One key area hones in on case studies that companies are using increasingly to weed out prospects. This means being able to answer hypothetical questions based on a common scenario the employer faces, and showing leadership skills in those scenarios.

The career office at the university also focuses on interview skills. Today, that means teaching kids more than just writing an effective resume and showing up in smart clothes. They have to learn how to perform best on video and phone interviews, and how to navigate gamification and artificial intelligence bots that many companies are now using in the recruiting process.

Norma Guerra Gaier, director of career services at Texas State, said her son just recently got a job and not until the final step did he even have a phone interview.

“He had to solve a couple of problems on a tech system, and was graded on that. He didn’t even interface with a human being,” Guerra Gaier said.

When companies hire at great volume, they try to balance the technology and face-to-face interactions, said Heidi Soltis-Berner, evolving workforce talent leader at financial services firm Deloitte.

Increasingly, Soltis-Berner does not know exactly what those new hires will be doing when they arrive, other than what business division they will be serving.

Powerful

A rather nice find that may have been otherwise missed, since at first glance it could be yet another business-type book that promises the earth but leaves you wanting. Here is the personal story and brain dump of a former chief talent officer at Netflix, who helped create a high-performance...

Low Man on the Totem Pole

Described as a ‘tough love-letter to the employee in all of us, this book seeks to shake the jaded employee (that we can be at times) and try and get you have better control of your career. The book doesn’t promise the earth, nor anything that it cannot deliver, but it does offer at least some st...

By Gwen Moran, Fast Company, May 4, 2017

Think about the workplace 10 years ago: The first iPhone wouldn’t be released until July 2007. There probably wasn’t “an app for that.” And people weren’t obsessed with “the cloud.”

The way we work has been transformed over the past decade, and it’s hard to know exactly what the workplace will look like in 10 years, says Barbara Mistick, president of Wilson College and coauthor of Stretch: How to Future-Proof Yourself for Tomorrow’s Workplace. So keeping yourself marketable and relevant for a long career is a constant process of evaluation, education, and adaptation, she says. Here’s what you need to do to keep yourself prepared for--and even ahead of--what comes next.

Pay attention to what’s going on in (and outside of) your industry. The first thing you need to do is evaluate the best sources of information about your industry or career path, Mistick says. What conferences, organizations, websites, publications, or other resources have the best and most insightful information and resources? Connect with those resources so that you’re staying apprised of the information they have to offer.

Beyond that, you should also be watching innovation in other industries, says strategist and adviser Elizabeth Crook, author of the new book Live Large: The Achiever’s Guide to What’s Next. Technology and process innovation aren’t typically limited to one sector. For example, if you’re in marketing, keep an eye on what’s happening in finance. Could the machine learning and automated approaches to checking out customers’ financial health give you clues about better targeting your market?

When you explore different areas, you never know what you’ll find that’s relevant, she says. Crook says she recently read a book about quantum physics that reminded her there’s more than one way to do things. That seems like a basic concept, she says, but it helped her not get mired in stale thinking.

Schedule checkups twice a year. You probably go for a medical checkup every year or two. You get your car serviced regularly. But are you scheduling time to ensure that your own skills and education are up to date? If not, that’s a mistake, Mistick says. Her strategic plans for customers are typically focused on two to three years because 10 years is too far out to accurately predict. Similarly, professionals need to “reevaluate every couple of years to make sure that whatever skills you’re working on, they’re still the skills you think you should be working on,” she says.

Find ways to stretch your skills. Once you get to a certain point in your career, it’s easy to get complacent or think you know it all. That’s deadly. In order to stay relevant and marketable, you need to keep finding ways to stretch your skills, Mistick says. “Your company or organization is not going to provide the level of professional assistance or development that you need in order to keep your career relevant. I’d say the No. 1 thing you have to do is realize that the responsibility for your professional development is on you,” she says.

So seek out projects where you’ll need to learn new skills or tools. For example, if you’re trying to develop more managerial and leadership skills, seek out opportunities to work on your company’s strategic planning projects. Share your goals with your supervisor and mentor to help you find opportunities, she says.

Document your development. Keep a professional development log to track the classes, continuing education, and other development opportunities in which you’ve participated, advises Mark Anthony Dyson, creator of The Voice of Job Seekers blog and podcast. He recommends blogging or podcasting to develop an online presence and brand yourself as a leader and lifelong learner. However, if you’re not comfortable with such a highly visible format, building an online presence by publishing occasional content about your sector, viewpoints, and achievements can be a good way to build your visibility. Your interviewers are going to be looking for that, he says.

“You’re giving yourself a chance to be different than everyone else,” he says.

Step out of your comfort zone. Don’t adopt storylines that will hold you back, such as “I’m not a tech person, or “I could never learn to code.” You’re probably going to have to get increasingly comfortable with technology as it becomes a bigger part of every job, Mistick says. Work on skills that are obviously more in demand, such as the ability to collaborate virtually and manage change. Staying ready for the future will likely mean doing things you really don’t want to do or feel prepared to do. But the minute you let that fear or hesitation stop you from learning what you need to navigate the future of your work, you’re beginning to let your skills expire.