Greetings from SXSWedu! This evening, I will have the privilege of moderating a panel titled Tech Skills Gap: What Can Employers and Educators Do? I'm representing DeVry University's Career Advisory Board and will be joined by Robert Paul, president of DeVry University, Randi Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Zuckerberg Media, and Sara Ley, digital learning and technology leader at GE.
Without giving too much away, we'll be discussing the Career Advisory Board's recent research, for which we asked 500 hiring managers, human resource professionals, and c-suite executives to reflect on the importance of both applied tech skills and hard tech skills, the challenges they face in recruiting and retaining tech-savvy talent, and the degree to which educational institutions have been successful in preparing students with the right level of technical competency.
Our employer respondents indicated significant pressure to keep up with the pace of technology and its ability to inform and impact business strategy. Technology is increasingly important to companies in all areas of business, with four in five respondents (79 percent) agreeing that for technology to be effective, it must integrate people, processes, data and devices. Interestingly, 87 percent of baby boomer respondents supported this overarching view of technology, more than their younger counterparts in Gen X (76 percent) and the millennial generation (76 percent).
Seventy-seven percent of all respondents said a company’s competitive advantage lies in using technology to solve problems, and they desire a workforce that is well-schooled in how to do this. Seventy-five percent agreed that employees should understand how to use technology to inform and drive business decisions, while 84 percent claimed that employees who know how to use the right tech tools in their fields are more effective.
Furthermore, over 80 percent reported that companies that integrate data and processes are more successful, and 74 percent said that employees need to master the skill of integrating data and information from various sources in the service of better business decisions. According to the survey, the ability and willingness of employees to fully leverage data varies by age. While 72 percent of respondents agreed that millennials are keeping pace with technology, only half said that baby boomers are.
For more about our Tech Skills gap research, visit CareerAdvisoryBoard.org. If you are attending SXSWedu, we'd love to see you at the JW Marriott (Salon A) at 5PM this evening. If not, stay tuned for updates via @alevit!
Funding can be a major hurdle for business owners. While many owners traditionally turn to banks, loans are increasingly harder to obtain thanks to increased regulations. From credit cards and grants to self-funding and venture capital, entrepreneurs are finding creative ways to make their business dreams a reality.
We asked three small-business owners—Nick Gentry, CEO of Iconic Solutions in Raleigh, North Carolina; Wesley Mathews, co-founder of High Level Marketing in Detroit; and Hesam Meshkat, CEO of Guzu in Los Angeles—to share their experiences with funding and their advice for securing enough financing for their businesses.
How did you initially get funding for your company?
Nick Gentry: At first, we pursued every funding option available, including applying for credit lines; giving up equity for convertible notes and seed investments; and even government-sponsored grants.
We chose to bootstrap our operations and fund everything ourselves. After discussing our business model with key advisers, we realized that a large cash infusion significantly limits how you're able to pivot the business as time goes on. We knew that we would have to evolve our offering as the market changed, and with outside investors this would be more difficult.
Ultimately it comes down to deciding if you’d rather own your own business or partner in a larger, potentially more successful one. We knew that an external investment would provide operating cash, business expertise and connections, but it also meant loss of control and ownership of our business.
Wesley Mathews: High Level Marketing was self-funded via credit card. I bootstrapped about 40K to get things going and float expenses for the first six to nine months. This was the only option I considered.
Hesam Meshkat: Initially when we launching Guzu, my partner and I decided to self-fund so that we would maintain ownership. The pro is that we had more control, but the con is that we were personally liable for the business.
Looking back, what’s one key lesson you learned about accepting and using funding?
Meshkat: Since we launched, we did receive a small funding round. The most critical lesson is to allocate those funds to marketing campaigns and expenses that directly connect to revenue coming in.
Mathews: Make sure you have a plan for the dollars. Have a clear vision of what the money is for and how you are going to use it, track it and repay it. Stick to a playbook.
Gentry: After launching multiple products, I’ve learned that it always takes more money and more time than initially anticipated to bring something to market. Make sure there is a clear understanding of cost and timelines, as external investors want their return as quick as possible and will be less likely to fund a subsequent round if they begin to doubt the delivery.
For more where this came from, check out the full interview on the AMEX Open Forum.
Succession planning means different things to different people, but it can be broadly defined as a process of developing high-potential employees to fill future strategic roles within the organization. Many organizations engage in succession planning activities informally or not at all, especially if they are small to medium-sized businesses.
However, lacking an official succession plan opens up a company to substantial risk and danger. Many baby boomerleaders act like they’ll be working until they die, but if something happens and they have to leave the organization suddenly, without an adequate knowledge transfer what will happen to those key roles? There is grave potential for at least a moderate disruption of business.
Why Succession Planning is Good for Everyone
Obviously, senior-level talent is essential to keep an organization meeting its current goals, but growth plans should be considered as well. As a company expands and offers new products and services, it will require more fully trained employees to guide its hand.
Formal succession planning not only provides a ready pipeline, but communicates details about that pipeline to the organization so talented candidates can be placed in the best possible role. And frequently, these roles are difficult to fill externally.
Formal succession planning is also one of the most effective ways to motivate and retain your best employees. Employees who understand that they are being groomed as future leaders experience increased loyalty to and respect for the organization.
By focusing on these individuals’ career development and customizing a plan for each person that might include classroom training, cross-functional assignments, and temporary project leadership, companies appeal to a universal hunger for new skills, challenges, and innovation. They also show high-potential candidates that they are valued and worth the investment of time and resources.
For more where this came from, check out the SilkRoad blog.
Today’s workplaces are politically correct. We are careful not to say anything that might be perceived to marginalize or offend a particular group, and when it comes to age, ethnicity, race, religion, gender, and sexual orientation, companies want to make sure every employee is respected and equally represented. We do this not because of profit, but because it’s the moral thing to do. This goal is at the heart of what most of us think of when it comes to diversity and inclusion.
But as of this year, the millennial generation (comprised of those born 1980-95) constitutes a majority of the U.S. workforce – and this group of younger professionals has a unique idea of what true diversity and inclusion should look like.
Most baby boomers and even Generation X-ers view diversity and inclusion in terms of representation and assimilation. But for millennials, walking into an office lobby and seeing all types of people should be a given. True workplace diversity and inclusion means that people can come to work and be their genuine selves without fear of negative consequences. This is known as cognitive diversity.
The study’s millennials shared that cognitive diversity is the secret sauce for better engagement and empowerment along today’s fickle employees; inclusion is important not as an abstract ideal that checks a box and makes everyone feel good, but as a critical tool that enables business competitiveness and growth.
When we think of the gig economy, ride-sharing companies like Uber and Lyft come immediately to mind. However, it’s much bigger than that. The US Department of Labor actually breaks down the four main types of alternative work arrangements into independent contractors, on-call workers, temp workers and workers employed by contract firms.
Since 2005, the number of workers in alternative arrangements has climbed by more than half, rising to nearly 16 percent of the workforce from 10 percent a decade ago, according to new research by Alan Krueger of Princeton University and Lawrence Katz of Harvard University. But the on-demand workforce (i.e. companies like Uber) employs only about 600,000 people or less than 0.5 percent of the workforce, the research found.
Krueger and Katz hired Rand Corporation to replicate their survey, sampling roughly 4,000 people. The findings showed how alternative work has spread across industries and occupations—including those not usually associated with the gig economy. For example, they estimated the share of workers in alternative arrangements has more than doubled to 11 percent in manufacturing and to 16 percent in health and education. It has quintupled, to 10 percent, in public administration.
For more about the professional contract workforce, visit the SilkRoad blog.
In 2014, I worked with Deloitte on a survey that assessed the state of millennial leadership across the globe. We quickly learned that millennials were not the kids anymore. Instead, fully half of our respondents consider themselves leaders, with decision-making authority and direct reports. And they want to do things a bit differently than their predecessors.
When we asked millennial professionals about the most important actions required of future leaders, they cited the ability to develop skills in others, the ability to inspire, encourage, and motivate others, and the ability to foster an inclusive work environment.
Millennials diverged from prior generations in their significant emphasis on inclusion. For millennials, workplace diversity is mandatory and they expect team members to be treated with the same level of respect and dignity regardless of their gender, ethnicity, and experience level.
Defining the Ideal Leader
Perhaps due to the impact of globalization, we found surprising cross-cultural similarities in how millennials portrayed the future business world and described their perfect leader. There were, however, subtle differences. For instance, millennials in more mature markets such as Germany and the United Kingdom admire leaders who solicit and take action on their feedback while explaining business contexts and communicating a vision.
Less developed markets like Brazil and Mexico like leaders who encourage risks and provide constructive feedback and resources. Across all geographies, millennials expect 21st century leaders to be more transparent – departing from the baby boomer model of leader as distant and autocratic.
Many working millennials came of age at a time when senior executives were under increased scrutiny due to ethical violations, which may explain their desire for future leaders to be truthful and trustworthy. These traits were consistently listed as the most critical leadership characteristics among millennials in most geographies.
A few months ago, I attended an employee engagement workshop. The facilitator suggested that millennials require performance feedback more than once a year. “Maybe once a quarter,” she said.
More like once a day!” I couldn’t resist calling out.
I wasn’t kidding. For the 80 million millennials who now make up a majority of the workforce, no news is bad news. If they don’t hear from their managers frequently, they think they’re doing something wrong and quickly grow disillusioned.
Nevertheless, an open door policy in which employees are invited to stop by a manager’s office for extended feedback sessions multiple times a day simply isn’t practical. So what’s the solution?
The innovative concept of microfeedback originated in the consumer space and consisted of collecting a small amount of information from customers at key moments in their shopping experience. The goal was to gather relevant customer feedback for a more accurate assessment of their satisfaction.
Think about this, though. Why can’t the idea of microfeedback be extended to performance management? We certainly have the technology. Intra-company messaging systems like Yammer, Skype for business, and Slack are growing exponentially and with some groups (like millennials), are even more popular than email.
Imagine that your direct report gives a status update in the departmental meeting for the first time. You think she did an exceptional job, but instead of noting it in her file to be reviewed in six months (or worse, forgetting about it completely), you send her a “thumbs up” emoticon via Slack. The action takes you less than 30 seconds, and yet your employee has a piece of encouraging feedback that will make her day.
According to the Pew Research Center and the U.S. Census Bureau, in mid-2015, the millennial generation (comprising those born from 1980 to 1995) became the largest cohort in the workforce.
By now, millennials have been in the professional world since the early 00s. The oldest ones turn 36 this year and have progressed substantially in their careers. A 2014 Deloitte millennial leadership study illustrated that due to demographic shifts, the millennials are entering leadership positions an average of 10 years earlier than prior generations. In fact, at the time of the study, half of all global millennial respondents self-identified as leaders, meaning they had decision-making authority and direct reports.
Although millennials have had sufficient time to prove themselves, negative stereotypes persist. And if organizations want to grow and support multi-generational teams, we must dispose of these myths and treat millennials as smart, innovative and conscientious individuals who are dedicated to changing business for the better.
Stereotype #1: They’re entitled.
One of the most frustrating misconceptions of all is that millennials are lazy and expect to be handed a career without paying their dues. In a 2015 article, the New York Post cited a recent study finding that 71 percent of American adults consider millennials selfish, and 65 percent find them entitled.
“Millennials seem to have helped themselves to an extra portion at the entitlement buffet (which is all-you-can-eat, obviously, because it’s their right),” wrote Post columnist Mackenzie Dawson.
The truth is that millennials are eager to work hard, as long as they are empowered to do so efficiently and on their own terms. They may eschew bureaucracy and the status quo, but a 2014 Bentley Universityfound that 77 percent of millennials believe flexible hours are the key to better productivity and 89 percent regularly check work email outside normal work hours.
“I recognize that hard work will get me far in my career, but I understand the importance of balance and moderation that will lead to a happy life,” said millennial writer Erin Heilman in a recent op-ed for the Baltimore Sun.
Stereotype #2: They lack critical skills.
Many supervisors believe that the lack of basic skills is killing America’s young professionals. “The more I interact with millennials -- whether I'm interviewing them, overseeing internships or giving speeches to rooms of them -- the more I see it. It's an entire generation that doesn't know how to communicate,” proclaimed theSilent Partner Marketing blog.
“Little emperor syndrome is one of the primary reasons millennials lack soft skills. Adults have catered to their needs their entire lives,” explained Heather Anderson in the Credit Union Times Magazine. Nobody locked them out of the house and forced them to entertain themselves, building imagination, curiosity and trial-by-error decision making skills.”
But, according to 2015 research conducted by DeVry University’sCareer Advisory Board, the skills gap for entry and junior-level professionals is narrowing. Hiring managers are increasingly finding desirable skills like flexibility, business acumen, problem-solving and communication skills in millennial candidates.
Millennials also bring innovation expertise, which is critical for organizations to remain competitive in the 21st century business world. And, as businesses rely more and more on technology, millennial digital natives help companies navigate the space.
For the rest of this article, a collaboration between Yarden Tadmor of SwitchApp and myself, head over to Entrepreneur.com.
My 4-year-old daughter Serena will be 30 in 2041. Assuming that she has a college degree and eight years of work experience, how might she fare in a world dominated by contract workers, fluid teams, human-centered work, persistent pay gaps, blurred work-life boundaries, and biases that have been around since the beginning of time? Well, let’s investigate.
1. INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION
Serena was born in 2011, the year the U.S. birth rate dipped to its lowest recorded level. As the U.S. birth rate keeps trending below 2.0 births per woman, that doesn’t mean young women will face less competition for school acceptance and jobs in the coming decades.
Instead of vying with other Americans her age, my daughter will fight for a place among hyper-qualified professionals from around the world. While her generation struggles to support the population of adults over 65—projected to triple by mid-century—it will face a global talent pool from which companies can hire the best people no matter where they're based.
2. CONTINUING GENDER GAPS IN LEADERSHIP
Will my daughter preside over her own company? She probably won't, and yours isn't likely to either—unless current trends make a dramatic turnaround.
According to Judith Warner at the Center for American Progress, women’s presence in top management positions today remains below 9%, and their percentage on all U.S. corporate boards has been stuck in the 12.1–12.3% range over the past decade. A 2014 Babson College study showed that, on average, just 60 female CEOs got VC funding in the years 2011–2013. This is surprising given that women are the majority owners in 36% of all businesses in the U.S.
It’s been estimated that at the current rate of change, it will take until 2085 for women to reach parity with men in leadership roles. That’s too late for Serena.
3. REVOLVING DOORS OF EMPLOYMENT
Rather than heading up her own venture, Serena is far more likely to be a contract worker—a segment of the workforce that's been projected to overtake the single-employer workforce by 2040. And she won’t just have to compete for jobs every few years. She will be in a constant cycle of promoting her services, securing a project, and promoting her services again.
"Businesses will consist of owners, talent assemblers, and contract workers for everything else," the writer Tad Milbourne has argued on Techcrunch. "Platforms will spring up that know what contractors have certain skills, what they’ve done, and whether they’re available. Contractors will get instantly matched with talent assemblers.
For my daughter's generation of working women, networking with these "talent assemblers" will likely become a top priority.
4. SHORT-TERM VIRTUAL TEAMS
In preschool, Serena likes to flit from station to station, playing with a different group of kids every five minutes. That’s good, because in 2040 she'll work on a variety of remote project teams that form and disband quickly after accomplishing a specific business outcome. She will have no physical office outside her home, yet she’ll interact with thousands of professionals of all ages and across many cultures each year.
What will Serena do on these teams? Your guess is as good as mine, but according to futurist Gerd Leonhard, she’d be smart to pursue something related to growing technology segments like data science, artificial intelligence, cognitive computing, deep learning, and robotics.
Or she could pursue a career that makes good use of human skills like imagination, curiosity, understanding, empathy, and social and emotional intelligence—like design, therapy, negotiation, or invention.
What will she want to avoid? "It’s pretty clear than hundreds of millions of jobs that are primarily routine-based, repetitive, and rules-based will increasingly be done by machines," writes Leonhard.
5. AGE-OLD GENDER BIAS
And in the narrowing breadth of roles reserved for people, women are set to continue lagging behind men despite equal educational opportunities. How come? One reason is that "unconscious bias", or the implicit people-preferences we form through socialization, is deeply embedded in the human experience. It starts early, too—research shows that it’s present in children by the age of three or four—and enters the workplace already deeply rooted in each of us.
A recent study by VitalSmarts researchers Joseph Grenny and David Maxwell found that women’s perceived competency drops by 35% and their perceived deserved compensation by $15,000 when they're seen to be assertive or forceful—violating ingrained cultural expectations for women to be caring and nurturing.
This is a problem that’s unlikely to be solved in my daughter's lifetime, even though, according to London Business School professor and The Key author Lynda Gratton, we shouldn’t lose hope. "It’s surprising how quickly societal norms can change," she says. "I see my sons being taught not to make any assumptions about what men and women do—and of course, more young people are now being brought up by working mothers. So in some parts of society, gender bias may be seen as something from the past."
Let's hope so.
6. BETTER WORK-LIFE INTEGRATION
According to the 2014 OECD Better Life Index, when compared to 35 other developed nations, the U.S. ranks as the eighth-worst country for work-life balance. The pressure to conform to standards set by countries like Germany and Denmark is likely to grow. As workforces become less global, top U.S. employers may feel more impelled to compete with foreign companies' perks in order to retain the best talent. So we may well have come a long way on work-life issues within the next 25 years.
On the other hand, future workers will be even more continuously connected to their work through technology than we are today. But by then we may have worked this way long enough that my daughter's generation will be better equipped to manage it.
Lynda Gratton believes that some work-life conflicts may be alleviated by a longer window for childbearing and more involvement from fathers. "Women may have more leeway in terms of sequencing their family and careers, and we will see more see-saw couples in which both partners take turns supporting one another."
All in all, there are likely to be more opportunities than obstacles for professional women in 2040, but there's plenty that we can do right now to make sure of that.
In 2016, millennial IT professionals aren’t working in back offices. Increasingly, they are finding themselves in the CIO role. I chatted with IDC’s Christopher Chute, who is vice president of the SMB Cloud and Mobility Practice, about his recent studyassessing how millennial CIOs are investing in digital transformation. Here’s a recap of our conversation.
Chris, what does digital transformation mean to millennial CIOs? Cloud and mobile-enabled workplaces, or something else?
That’s a big part of it. Millennial-aged midmarket CIOs interpret the digital transformation (DX) end-state as a cloud and mobile-first workplace revolving around modernized endpoints or devices, Internet of Things enablement, and a streamlined back office that outsources functions like printing. Basically, they want to IT-ify all of their business processes where it makes sense.
What were the biggest “AH HAs?” Anything you weren’t expecting?
Across every spending priority, executive-level millennials are adopting cloud-based technologies more rapidly than baby boomer and Gen X CIOs. This generation is having a profound impact on the transition from client server to SaaS (software-as-a-service) on millions of individual devices including notebooks and phablets. However, millennial CIOs are at the helm of mature IT infrastructures in which onsite and cloud systems are both supported – a hybrid approach. Millennial CIOs are prioritizing Windows 10 alongside mobile computing, and for now, they are erring on the side of keeping critical data on in-house servers while moving applications to the cloud.
It was surprising to us that millennials had moved into these CIO roles so quickly. When thinking about their customers, IT suppliers really need to factor in the age dimension.
How are millennial CIOs saving their organizations money with the hybrid approach?
Millennials are ahead of the market curve because they’ve moved the back office into the cloud. Instead of the organization hiring more people, IT buys a set of cloud services that makes existing office managers in HR and finance more productive. Millennial CIOs are also vigilant about auditing the existing infrastructure to see what onsite capabilities are really needed.
