Tom's latest eBook has been released on Amazon: "The 7 Myths of IT Integrations". Tom is also a Program Director for a large Midwest corporation and has been an adjunct faculty member at Walsh College. He has managed global web initiatives, data center moves and large multi-million dollar programs.
Employers often favor candidates who already have real-world execution experience. That leaves many capable professionals stuck trying to break into a field that increasingly expects them to already know how to operate inside it.
Thinking about volunteering? A longtime practitioner reflects on her 33-year journey that began after attending her first conference in 1992. Through her many roles, she gained invaluable skills, friendships, and opportunities, and encourages others to make a meaningful impact.
Conscious unbossing as a professional’s career choice and conscious unbossing as a leadership philosophy not only have no intersection, but can be detrimental in implementation. When does it become reckless leadership?
Read any headlines or news sites in the last six months and you will get the strong sense that the economy is in a slowdown. No kidding, right? Keep on reading the opinions and will also get the undercurrent of a general uneasiness with not just the economy, but our world. I like to look at current events through the prism of history. Particularly because we are in the IT industry there is a more profound point that we should be aware of. It will help us plan for not only the next year, but the rest of our careers.
Agriculture
Not too long ago, all of the food in our country (and around the world for that matter) was grown largely by hand. Farming techniques that involved manual labor and animal-drawn equipment was how we turned out all of our produce. Then something happened--the industrial revolution. Soon large tractors were taking over farms and one tractor driver could now cover hundreds of acres of fields that used to be worked by many people. Think of the plight of the displaced farming families looking for work that Steinbeck dramatized in his novel The Grapes of Wrath.
Advances in tractors and machinery quickly took over what the farm family used to do for a living. The economy changed, and as a result the culture changed, too. People had to learn new skills and adapt.
Industrial
As men and women began moving from farms into the factories, they began to build “things”. As is natural, people started looking for new ways to produce those things even more efficiently and faster. Assembly lines and standardization helped speed up production, and ultimately machines began to be employed more in the manufacturing process. The operation of machines required less people and slowly began to displace the factory workers. Soon, the robotics ushered in the next era of technology-driven manufacturing. As a result, less people needed to be involved to produce even more products.
Eventually, those manufacturing jobs and capabilities began to go to other countries where the cost of labor was lower. Industrial workers saw their world change. People had to learn new skills and adapt.
Music
Back in the 1930s and 1940s, radio was the largest broadcast medium for entertainment. All radio programs that contained music employed musicians who played live during the programs. Every network had large stables of musicians to cover every program throughout the broadcast day.
Bing Crosby, a popular performer of the era, wanted to record his radio programs to edit out mistakes and to have the ability to replay shows during the summer season. The head of the Musician’s Union at the time was a man named James Petrillo. He was one of the main obstacles to the introduction of recording tape in radio broadcasts. Allowing his musicians to be recorded once and played back anytime on the radio limited his ability to employ musicians and collect payment for performances.
Petrillo saw the changing of his world and tried to resist it. Ultimately, the market and technology forced a change and the recording of music became the norm rather than the exception. What constitutes a recording has changed drastically over the years since the 1940s, and tangible medium has given way to recorded music being a sharable (and easily duplicated) digital file. We are all aware of the industry battles around digital music a few years ago.
The point is that at each step along the way, whatever was considered “normal” is what drove an aspect of the economy and employed people to perform a service. But the economy, and culture, is not static. Only the best musicians remained employed; the rest of them had to learn new skills and adapt to a new world.
Digitization Remakes the Economy
Set aside the issues surrounding global markets, currency rates, crude oil prices, etc., and one of the main drivers behind what we are experiencing today is an essential technology change within our economy. An echo of what we have seen happen so many times in the past is happening again, just dressed up differently.
Our world continues to change. The economy and the marketplace are dynamic and alive, not static and unyielding. If you were to think quickly about businesses and industries that have fundamentally changed or been nearly eliminated due to recent technology advances, it would not be hard to do. Think of what has happened to:
Travel Agencies--With the introduction of online flights and travel itineraries, the work and opportunities for travel agencies diminished greatly. Don’t we all book the majority of our flights across the internet now? New opportunities have been revealed, too. The whole idea of bidding on unsold seats for a cheaper price not only worked in the airlines but extended to hotel rooms as well.
Post Office: Electronic mail has replaced some of what you used to receive in the postal mail. As the move to digital has occurred, the Post Office has reacted by focusing on new types of services and packages with which they can keep their distribution channels.
Brick-and-Mortar Stores: Amazon.com has remade the way we all browse and buy books. Many of the smaller shops and small businesses that people used to shop at are extremely challenged by that competition. I have often seen an item in a specialty shop and checked the product online to see if I could get a better price. Sell locally, compete globally.
Photography: Digital photography has completely remade the way the average and professional photographer takes pictures. Digital is the standard format for images today. Photo printing shops had to change their business model to emphasize “superior” printing quality and re-packaging options for our digital photos.
Tax Preparation: The local tax preparation services have had to adjust and accommodate the fact that software applications have made the preparation of most “normal” tax routines pretty straightforward. If it can be captured into logical steps and a “Q&A” format, it can be systematized.
Newspapers/Magazines: Technology literally gave birth to the “new media.” Small- to medium-sized newspapers struggled as more and more of us got our news from the internet. Larger newspapers saw their readership (and revenues) dwindle. New business models had to be created that incorporated the internet as part of the news delivery process. Smaller online news sources sprung up everywhere to challenge the older and established media.
Real Estate: Not too long ago, to sell a home you needed a real estate agent. Similar to the self-service lane at the gas station, technology has allowed millions of homeowners access to a digital marketplace to find buyers for their homes.
Financial Services: Banks have embraced that he fact that people are banking 24/7. “Banker’s hours” no longer exist. Stock brokerage firms saw basically their entire business moved to the network. Stock trading sites are the primary way most people handle their portfolios. Transaction triggers and rapid trading are occurring faster than was ever before possible. Look to the fluctuations in the stock market to see just how fast traders can respond to the slightest bit of news now.
Ideas drive our workforce, and in turn the workforce drives our economy. During periods of great change, the workforce has to learn what its role (and job) is in the new economy as these new ideas continue to come and radically change what it thought it knew. This ability to learn new ideas and new ways of making yourself valuable is critical to survival going forward. It’s not a new concept; people have been applying this skill in one way or another for most of recent history.
The rich PCs, de-centralized computing and the web-browser were just the beginning--only now are we at the cusp of the first fruits of what a truly librated marketplace will bring us. Some people will (and are) thriving, most of us will have to adjust and others will be scratching their heads wondering what is happened.
IT project managers are in the best position to be the integrators of all of the new change before us. We have to open to all of the new possibilities that will be coming our way. IT today will not be the IT we will see in 10 years.
Our ability to remain flexible and to be constantly learning will be a critical skill both for the next year and for the rest of your career. What your job or occupation looks like today will change 12 times before you retire. The only way to prepare for the unknown is to sharpen your learning skills.
Eric Hoffner said it best: “In times of change learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped for a world that no longer exists.”
Formal education stops with a diploma or a degree, but learning continues for the rest of your life. We are in times of even greater change right now. Don’t worry about how you make a living today; focus on increasing your ability and the speed with which you learn new concepts and skills. You will find yourself constantly in demand.
While many people stand still out of fear during a recession, this is your opportunity to make great strides forward and secure your future, and project management can lead the way.
