Understanding the Pace of Change: How to Stay Relevant in Your Role
Sometimes we need to stop and quantify the rate of change for us—in our world, our lives, and our companies today.
What I see as a key takeaway is the importance of understanding the foundations of the technology that is critical in our jobs, and then being able to tie that back to what businesses are trying to accomplish—instead of entrenching in a certain technology and allowing it to limit what we do as a business.
The rate at which we need to change and the speed of change are so much greater than they used to be. We don't have as much time to get as deep in our skills, and we need to be more comfortable being generalists and picking up new skills, technologies, and processes quickly.
The average employee entering the job market today expects to have at least fifteen jobs over the course of his or her working life. That really highlights how many times people have to "sell" themselves to a new organization.
It’s important to keep current our skills, resumes, and ability to talk about our talents. Spending time learning how to be good communicators, building our networks, and picking up new skills quickly will be key assets for today's workforce.
In some circles, this transition is being called technology’s “humanist era,” and leaders in this space now have different skills than we used to see in the industrial era of technology.
What should we do with this information? I think we need to educate ourselves on how technology is changing, similar to what we saw during the Industrial Revolution in manufacturing.
We need to take a critical look at our skill sets and not focus solely on our technical aptitude, certifications, and degrees, but understand where we sit with our emotional intelligence and humanist skills that we bring to the workforce as well. I am not suggesting that certifications, degrees, and technical aptitude are not important, but you will need more than that going forward. As technology professionals, we usually don’t focus on our soft skills as much as we really should.
Think about this: How much focus do you put on building and maintaining relationships that will help you in your career and work versus just getting your tasks done? I would suggest that both task focus and relationship focus need to be consciously thought of in our daily work, and we need to put effort into both to be successful.
I leave you with this last bit of food for thought. If you were given notice that your job were being eliminated tomorrow, name five people you could call who would be able to help you land your next position. Can you do that? When was the last time you reached out and had a conversation about what you want in your career with those five people? I challenge you to pick up the phone and open those lines of communication!
Jennifer Bonine is presenting the tutorials What’s Your Leadership IQ? and Innovation Thinking: Evolve and Expand Your Capabilities at STARWEST, from October 12–17, 2014.
