Career
How the Value of Educational Credentials Is and Isn’t Changing (via Harvard Business Review)
Depending on the stats you review, the value of a college degree is still strong even though some companies are relaxing that requirement. The core is that continuous learning is a requirement in the modern workforce. There has been a rise in credibility for online degrees, which are often considerably cheaper than an in-person degree.
Yes, Employers Do Value Liberal Arts Degrees (via Harvard Business Review)
“…colleges and universities must partner with business and industry to develop the skills that will prepare our students not only for a wide range of workplace options, but that will also equip them to deal with a future none of us can fully predict.” We need people to think broadly, deeply, and critically to build a better world. Focusing on vocation alone is too narrow.
Why Even New Grads Need to Reskill for the Future (via Harvard Business Review)
The pace of change in the workforce combined with the increasing amount of automation can leave new grads unprepared. This article lists things that career-builders can do to be more adaptable (e.g., improve communication skills), and things employers can do to find good people and help them grow.
Communication
Why Asking for Advice Is More Effective Than Asking for Feedback (via Harvard Business Review)
Feedback is often associated with evaluation (like a grade); advice is more actionable to help you improve.
6 Ways to Set Boundaries Around Email (via Harvard Business Review)
The introduction to this article is fantastic, describing the role email has come to fill. As the title states, email is not the problem — boundaries are.
- Add text to your signature to explain when they can expect a reply
- Use your auto-responder for more than out-of-office messages
- Add similar instructions to your website / social media
- Tell people what requests will be ignored
- Set communication guidelines for your team
- Lead by example (e.g., don’t reply at 11pm)
Economics
What Will It Take to Solve the Student Loan Crisis? (via Harvard Business Review)
There’s a perfect storm of rising student debt combined with the cost of education outpacing inflation. It will likely be a combined effort of policies and cost-cutting to address the issue.
Leadership
Why New Leaders Should Make Decisions Slowly (via Harvard Business Review)
There’s an instinct to prove yourself by getting quick wins; sometimes those hasty decisions backfire. Learn first, act second. One approach is to keep a journal of decisions, then review those later on to see how successful they were. Another approach is to talk to many sources, not just ones eager for your attention so they can push their agenda. Lastly, set one area you’d like to focus on for the year.
Are You Developing Skills That Won’t Be Automated? (via Harvard Business Review)
Emotion and context are two skills that (hopefully) won’t be automated. Automation excels in areas of repetitive work or decisions that can be made with sufficient training data (e.g., x-ray reading).
Developer Burnout: How Can a Manager Spot it and Stop It (via Tomas Torok)
This comprehensive post covers how to spot the signs of burnout, what you as a manager can do about it, and some comments from management in the field about how they deal with it.
The Case for Hiring Older Workers (via Harvard Business Review)
Our culture glorifies younger people and is biased against older people (less likely to learn new things, less capable, etc.). However, there are more baby boomers retiring than there are millenials to fill those positions, and industrialized countries are having fewer children. Having meaningful work is important, and older individuals are capable in many regards (as the article lists).
Facebook’s Julie Zhuo on Navigating the Leap From Individual Contributor to Force Multiplier (via Software Lead Weekly)
Nothing too unexpected in this post. If you’re looking for some general tips and tricks for transitioning into management, this post has several of the ones I’ve seen in other posts.
Thoughtful Work of Real Management (via Software Lead Weekly)
I normally don’t read these Twitter threads (wrong medium in my mind; a blog post is more appropriate), but there are some good nuggets here. My favorites were concrete examples of good/bad feedback (positive and negative).
Process
Don’t Let Metrics Undermine Your Business (via Harvard Business Review)
Metric surrogation — where a metric is thought of a proxy for strategy — means you optimize for what’s measured. The article talks about the cross-selling metric at Wells Fargo which, combined with other factors, sent a message that cross-selling was important instead of building long-term relationships with customers. To address this… (1) get the people implementing the strategy to design it, (2) loosen the link between metrics and incentives, and (3) use multiple metrics to help you sense whether your strategy is working.
The Secret to a Great Planning Process — Lessons from Airbnb and Eventbrite (via Software Lead Weekly)
This is a thorough post about the major movements when planning a large coordinated effort, along with contexts where things usually tip over (and why). The main strokes of the brush are (1) leadership sharing the high-level strategy with the teams, (2) teams propose plans, (3) leadership integrates the plans and shares the combined plan with the teams, (4) the teams buy in and get it rolling.
How I Build Learning Projects — Part I (via Software Lead Weekly)
Continual learning is the name of the game to maintain (or grow) your career. This post describes how to figure out what to learn, then build a plan to get there. I agree 100% on figuring out what a former professor of mine called “first principles” — focus on the what, not the how. I also like the idea of finding what the author calls “adjacent skills.” The part I’m unsure about is creating the learning plan. How would I know this plan is any good? How can I tell if forward motion is good when it’s in the wrong direction?