Tristram Hooley

The seven most important trends on the web

OK, so that is a bit of a naughty title. I’ll admit that it was designed to get your attention. I can’t promise to tell you what the most important trends on the web are, but I can have a stab in the dark and see if people agree. I’m trying to look at what the implications/opportunities of new technologies are for careers work, but in order to do that I need to come up with some kind of list of what is going on. What might offer the kind of work that I write about some kinds of opportunities. I’ve been reading around and I haven’t found anyone who has set this out very clearly. Tim O’Reilly’s What is web 2.0 is a pretty good, but it is too tech heavy for a mere mortal like me. I want to try and get my head round what the implications of current developments in technology are for the users rather than for those in the web business.

I also wanted to keep away from identifying trending technologies. It is easy to say that Twitter is the flavour of the month this month etc but we all know these things ebb and flow. I feel like I need to identify trends at a more conceptual level. So here goes – this is my attempt to identify the seven most important things that are currently out there. I’m doing this to be told that I’m wrong – so shoot away. I want you to tell me what the seven (or even better six or five) trends should be. I’d also be interested to be pointed to things that attempt to do similar things.

So my trends, in no particular order are:

1. Ways of talking: In Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam argues that the key issue in assessing the impact of the internet is whether people use it more like the television (alienating, individualised, consuming) or whether people use it more like the telephone (connecting, social, producing). It seems pretty clear now that the internet has become a super-charged telephone rather than a new television. A large number of the opportunities associated with new technologies are about finding new ways for us to talk to each other, both one-to-one (chatrooms, videoconferencing etc) and in groups and communities (every social networking site out there). If we are evaluating the opportunities offered by new technologies we need to recognise that people love to talk and we can now talk more than ever before. Furthermore we should recognise that the cost of developing and maintaining social capital has dropped as the systems that enable us to talk have got easier and cheaper to use. The new ways of talking are likely to revolutionise everything.

2. Together everyone achieves more: Current technologies allow us to harness collective intelligence in ways that radically alter the way we understand the role of expertise and the production of information. Systems, like Wikipedia, provide new ways of aggregating knowledge and support the development of a public sphere within which ideas can be shared, debated and synthesised together. The generation of huge amounts of user content and equally important of user metadata mean that services which are based on expertise and the possession of information are going to need to rethink their unique selling points pretty quickly.

3. Located in the cloud: The trend for everything to be located in the cloud is enormously challenging for organisations that have spent millions of pounds developing their own resources, systems and applications. How do we own, control, regulate and safeguard? People want to be able to access their stuff from wherever they are, they don’t want to worry about firewalls, ownership and branding. They want to be able to move stuff from one bit or their life or identity to the next. They don’t want to use your system they want to use the one they’ve found that works for what they want it to work for.

4. Getting beta and beta: Forget about launch dates. If you’ve got something that might be useful put it out there and see if people use it. Find out what they complain about and fix it. Even better, get them to fix it for you. This cycle of continuous improvement is a massive social change that business and the public sector will struggle with. Again it pulls against ideas of branding and of expertise, it breaks down the barriers between expert and amateur, professional and client and so on.

5. Beyond the computer: Next up is the reminder that technology is not confined to your desktop. The ways that people are accessing online services are becoming more diverse and more integrated. You can pull content off the web to your phone or TV. You can integrate your Sat Nav or fridge into your computer. How we utilise these opportunities in the delivery of services is going to determine what our services look like in the future.

6. Let’s play: Everyone keeps talking about gaming. I’m not a gamer, but I can spot a zeitgeist when it slaps me in the face. I can also recognise that I’ve been using face to face games as part of my everyday teaching and management practice for years. I haven’t figured how to move this online, but others have. People interact, entertain and learn through gaming and so it is not going to be possible for mainstream services to ignore this for much longer. It is also not going to be possible to pretend that only kids play games for much longer either.

7. Bringing it all together: Finally, I’d like to suggest that aggregation is a trending theme in technology. Things that allow you to bring stuff that interests you together to help you assimilate it and to build relationships between different things. The development of mashups and portals enables the user to personalise their interactions with individuals, organisations and information. Again this challenges ideas of branding and means that the often cited argument that organisations should become a “one-stop shop” or that we should practice “joined up thinking” become more meaningful at the individual level and less meaningful at the organisational level.

So there you go…

Suggestions please! Are these meaningful trends? Is this mix of technological, social and cultural trends a workable way to discuss what is happening? If not suggest some alternatives or argue with me about the trends I’ve found.

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Posted 10 hours ago

Sorry

Due to technical hitches this got posted twice. See the actual post.

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Posted 10 hours ago

Manchester Humanities PGR Blog

I’ve been asked by the team at Manchester University to push their new Humanities PGR blog. So here goes…

Check out the Manchester Humanities PGR Blog as it is a good example of how you can use a blog format to support training and development activity. The blog contains a mix of news and views and would certainly be worth all Manchester PGRs adding to their RSS feed.

The blog also regularly features articles that would be of interest beyond Manchester. A few of my favourites are

I’d be really interested to see how other careers and skills development professionals are using web 2.0 to publish content and interact with clients, and I’m very happy to give a shout out to anything that is as good as this blog.

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Filed under // blog Humanities PGR phd web 2.0

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Posted 4 days ago

Telling your career story in a web 2.0 world

To understand the impact of web 2.0/the social web on careers work it is important to do some thinking about how the web 2.0 world will impact on our careers. This post is just a starter for ten, I suspect that there will be more.

Technology has recently made two things easy that until relatively recently were quite difficult. The first is accessing information while the second is maintaining contact with people. We are now in a position where we can easily find and access information in ways that would previsiously required not only a library, but also a librarian. Alongside this we have seen the cost of maintaining personal and professional relationships fall dramatically. I no longer need to buy all of my friends a drink every few months to stay in touch with them. In fact I don't even need to buy a Christmas card any more. Facebook, Twitter et al have expanded my personal networks meaning that I'm in touch with people I would otherwise have lost touch with and that I can find, access and possibly even gain social capital from these people. The world is changing and this must have implications for our careers.

Career is a sort of story that we tell to ourselves and to others. It is a way of linking up our learning, our work and our values in ways that are meaningful to those telling and hearing the story. We tell the story again and again and we tell it differently to ourselves as we develop our own narrative - but we also tell it differently to others depending on why we are telling the story.

My father (who has lived all of his life in and around London) has recently moved to a Leicestershire village. He was talking to me the other night about how he finds it odd that everyone in the village knows each other. What is more they have known each other since childhood. This community embeddedness clearly limits the extent to which they can reinvent themselves. Career stories do not become fixed by connections to others, but they do become more stable.

Our journeys through life often provide us with opportunities to move on, change the environment and resituate our narratives. Most of us don't live our whole lives in villages and we often enjoy the freedom to reinvent ourselves that this offers. This is not to say that there are not benefits to being embedded in a community. Rather it is to note that the retelling our our career story is dependent on talking to people who haven't heard it all before.

Hopefully it is fairly obviously what this has to do with the web 2.0 world. The availability of information about us and the extension of the reach of our professional reputation mean that we are likely to have fewer and fewer opportunities to tell our stories to people who haven't heard at least some of it before. This is not to say that there won't be a need for stories. In some wasy the availability of ever more information makes the need for the development of some kind of narrative structure within which we can interpret it even more important. The process of articulating your career becomes about helping people interpret the various facts that they encounter about you online.

Our careers are currently like a secret diary. We show them to others when we trust them or when we want to engage their interest, but increasingly our careers will be given digital form through our activity online. Our role then becomes to tell and retell our stories in ways that can engage the interest of others and draw them into a relationship with our career.

It is worth swinging sideways into how this might impact on recruitment. Why would employers ask for CVs/applications forms when they can just Google you? Why would they want a partial story when they can easily gain a wider sense of your impact on the world from looking at who you are, who you know and what you say and do? The price of headhunting just got a lot cheaper and the dialogue between employers and prospective employees may have just got a lot more complex.

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Filed under // careers narrative story web 2.0

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Posted 7 days ago

The Wisdom of Crowds

I’ve just finished reading James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds. It is a book that I’ve heard bandied about as a seminal text in the Web 2.0 world. It is therefore rather surprised me that the internet isn’t mentioned in the book at all. The book has been picked up by Web 2.0 enthusiasts who see echoes of their own enthusiasms in its conclusions – but is isn’t actually about Web 2.0.

Wisdom of Crowds is subtitled “Why the many are smarter than the few” and as such sets about proving in a variety of ways that individuals, even very brilliant ones, are unlikely to have all of the answers. The book is based on experimental economics and social psychology and uses a variety of different bits of research and anecdote to demonstrate that an aggregated answer from a number of people is usually more likely to be right than the best guess of an expert. This is all good stuff and seems all the more valuable now Web 2.0 technologies are helping people to collaborate and aggregate their opinions.

Surowiecki is keen to explain that group opinions are not necessarily better than individual opinions all the time. If the group is working closely together there is a danger that they will all come to the same decision or that they will simply norm towards the view point of a particularly persuasive member. If the group is too similar they will lack the diversity that leads to a strong aggregated opinion. Surowiecki sets out the following three principles

Independence
Diversity
Decentralisation

As being essential for the wisdom of crowds to function.

So far so left wing platitude. The many are greater than the few, the people have the answer etc etc. What is interesting however is the way that Surowiecki’s message is articulated largely as an appreciation of markets. Generally he feels that markets represent the strongest tool for aggregating opinions, better than collective consensus, better than democracy and so on. This is the case because in other aggregating mechanisms (such as democracy) the answer usually emerges as the result of some discussion. Through the discussion people tend to come to some kind of consensus and the value of having diverse decision makers involved is reduced. Although Surowiecki doesn't say this it seems that first past the post democratic systems are more likely to lead to this kind of compromise that more proportional systems.

As I read this I suppose I was a little uncomfortable with the enthusiasm for markets. I've tended to view free markets as a pretty problematic element of governance and one that tends to reward the rich and powerful at the expense of the poor and numerous. I've probably moderated some of my opinions on this somewhat and have come to believe that a mix of state power, markets and common ownership exist in all economies, even those that claim to be lassez faire or command economies. The question therefore remains what the blend between state, market, individual and collective needs to be. However reading Surowiecki has made me realise that the market is a mechanism that can be employed in a variety of contexts. When we speak of markets we are not only speaking of capital markets, we can also be speaking of markets in ideas or markets in prediction. Twitter is a good example of a market in ideas - things live or die on Twitter because people retweet or engage in them. There is no vote, no majority decision etc, it is therefore not democratic in any meaningful sense, but is rather a vibrant market in ideas.

So what are the implications of this for careers work? On one hand it represents a very significant challenge to the idea of expertise. Surowiecki would argue that the advice that is given by an expert is much less likely to be right than that given by a wide range of individuals. So the answer to questions like "what should I do?" or "what is it like to be an accountant" is likely to be better if the people giving the answers include a range of people (parents, friends, accountants, people in other professions etc etc). From this viewpoint the careers worker's role might be to design appropriate systems for people to aggregate the opinions of others in a productive way. Advice would be about how to network, gather diverse opinions and synthesise them, rather than providing a simple answer to a question.

I think that some careers workers have been doing this anyway. However, reading the Wisdom of Crowds might help people challenge some of their assumptions and come up with new ways of thinking about their roles.

As ever all thoughts and ideas on this are appreciated...

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Filed under // crowds decisions economics markets social psychology web 2.0

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Posted 9 days ago

National all-age guidance services

I’ve just read Tony Watts' National all-age career guidance services: evidence and issues from the current issue of the British Journal of Guidance and Counselling. This is a useful summary of the current policy situation in England in the context of existing services in Scotland, Wales and New Zealand. Tony is a major supporter of the all-age approach, so unsurprisingly the article concludes that “the case for an all-age service as a professional spine within a lifelong guidance system is strongly supported by the existing evidence.”

Along the way the article rehearses the pros and cons of this approach and I thought that it might be useful to set it out these here.

Pros

· Cost-effectiveness

· Coherence and continuity of provision

· Avoids rigid cut-off points

· Provides the possibility of synergies and added value

Cons

The needs of young people are different from those of adults
Young people and adults don’t want to go to the same kinds of places for services
Age specific services are more likely to be holistic
There is a danger that young people would marginalise adults if all were together in an all age service.

The article takes on each of these points and makes the argument that the evidence points us towards an all age service. This is very likely to be the case and an all age approach seems to have strong support within the guidance profession. However, the reason I thought I’d blog this was to see if I could get any discussion going. I’d like to hear a bit more from the advocates of age specific services before I really make up my mind on this one.

So over to you….

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Filed under // all-age careers service Tony Watts

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Posted 12 days ago

We’re all career researchers now

I’ve just finished reading Phil McCash’s article ‘We’re all career researchers now: breaking open career education and DOTS’. Essentially the article is a critique of the DOTS model of career education, making the case that this creates an artificial distinction between the individual and their environment. McCash argues that we should see career as a social act, situated in an environment rather than an individual act that is conducted in relation to an environment. I find this to be a useful distinction – our careers are influenced by others, and also influence others. By focusing on the individual all the time we tend to construct other people as the problem “you can’t move to get this job because of your family”. Whereas if we see career as an interaction within a social environment we get a much more textured view of career where individual actions have consequences and implications for others and where family, friends and community can be constructed as part of the career rather than an alternative to it.

McCash then goes on to propose a model where the career learner is transformed into a career researcher. By engaging with career theory people can be encouraged to explore various conceptions of career and by developing the skills to interrogate the world around them (becoming researchers) people have the tools to investigate the viability and implications of these conceptions. McCash then goes on to locate this within the higher education curriculum essentially making the point that if we understand career education in these terms it fits very comfortably into a higher education curriculum that emphasises critical thinking and self-directed inquiry.

This focus on critical thinking and inquiry obviously has implications for the training of careers workers. Encouraging other to develop this kind of relationship between theory and practice requires the development of a very different set of skills to those required to support people to identify and match themselves to labour market opportunities. It also has implications for careers workers relationship to other professionals. This is especially true in the HE context where an increased focus on educational and employment outcomes has been seen as being in opposition to a tradition of liberal education. If we can reconceive careers work around the idea of critical inquiry and then communicate this to others we have the opportunity to relocate it within the progressive centre of higher education ideology.

As ever translating theory into practice is the real challenge. However, there is much food for thought in this article.

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Filed under // career education careers careers work DOTS IAG Phil McCash

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Posted 12 days ago

CREATE - are you signing up?

I don't know whether people have seen the new campaign from the ICG - Create: a campaign for careers.

The campaign encourages people and organisations to sign up to the following:

C = careers services that maximise individuals' talents and

skills

R = realising everyone's potential through universal,
targeted and high-quality careers provision with consistent
standards across the UK

E = entitlement to impartial careers information, advice
and guidance

A = access to diverse well-trained and qualified careers
professionals at times and places most relevant to
individuals' needs

T = tangible results demonstrating that professional careers
work contributes to employment, social mobility, diversity
and equality

E = excellence in careers services, equipping individuals
with confidence, resilience and motivation to
succeed in a fast-changing global economy

I'd be really interested to hear what people think about the campaign. Will you be signing up?

I think that these are all worthwhile statements - although currently a little short on detail. I'll be really interested to see how the campaign unfolds over the next few months. I think that raising the profiles of careers work is very important in the current economic and political situation - however, I think that we want to be very careful not to claim that we have all the answers. Careers work is broader than professional careers advisers and also requires that careers professionals build strong lateral relationships with other professionals. If this campaign can raise the profile of both the work and the workers then you can count me in.

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Filed under // campaign careers careers work CREATE icg

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Posted 13 days ago

A book on online research methods

I've been asked to write a book proposal for a book on online research methods. A brief version of what I've come up with so far follows. I'd appreciate any comments - would you buy this? read it? suggest it to students? have I got the contents right? is there anything missing?

Any thoughts appreciated...

What is online research? Using the internet for social science research

This book will provide an invaluable overview of the field of online research in the social sciences. The book will set out the key issues faced by social scientists undertaking research online. It is aimed at a non-technical social science audience and will be useful for existing researchers who wish to develop their practice to include research online and for new researchers who are studying social research methods.

Online research methods draw on a wide range of methodological and disciplinary traditions and this eclecticism can make the literatures difficult to access. This book will provide a broad survey of the field and introduce readers to the theoretical, ethical, methodological and practical issues that should be considered in undertaking online research. The book will examine both research that is designed to investigate online phenomenon and research that uses online methods to examine offline phenomenon. It will also discuss how the increasing blurring of the online and offline environments (e.g. through mobile technologies) creates a need for new composites of online and offline methodologies.

The book will examine how a range of methodological traditions have been translated online and will include chapters on online surveys, focus groups and interviews, ethnographies and experiments. All of these methodological approaches will be discussed within the broader context of a consideration about the nature of the online space and the ethics of undertaking research within it.

The book will provide researchers with the skills and knowledge that they need to undertake online research projects. Key to this will be a series of case studies which will illuminate the different approaches (surveys, ethnographies etc) by drawing on the experiences of seasoned online researchers. These case studies will be based on research published in peer-reviewed academic journals but supplemented with interviews with the researchers about their methodological decisions and the challenges that they overcame in conducting this research.

Recruiting researchers: survey of employer practice 2009

Vitae’s newest publication (written by Maica Rubio and myself) explores the practices of non-higher education employers in relation to doctoral graduates. Recruiting researchers: survey of employer practice 2009 argues that around three quarters of employers are interested in recruiting doctoral graduates but that only around a third have a clear strategy for attracting this group. The report also highlights the fact that where employers are well informed, have strong relationships with universities and have experience of doctoral graduates they are much more likely to target them in recruitment. There is a clear need for the higher education sector to communicate the value of this cohort more effectively. However there is also advantage to be gained for those employers who actively target researchers. Employers who had experience of researchers rated their competencies higher than those who did not have experience of the group. In the right roles researcher can clearly add a lot to a business.

Hopefully you’ll think that the report is worth a read.

One of the things that struck me as we were finishing it off and presenting it at the Vitae Policy Forum this year was how the context for giving careers advice for researchers has changed over the last few years. When I started working with this group we knew almost nothing about the labour market for doctoral graduates. We now have the What do researchers do? series which provides quantitative information on researcher first destinations and qualitative career histories. The addition of this publication on employer practice fills out the picture even further. We now know a huge amount about the researcher labour market. What is more we know that the researcher labour market is very broad (both inside and outside of HE). The LDLHE also tells us that postgraduates are likely to perform better in the labour market than undergraduates. So, those of us who’ve been involved in the Roberts Agenda should feel pretty pleased as we can now confidently say that researchers have lots of career options and that there is also lots of information to help them make their decisions. Well done us!

So what do we need next to fill out the picture further?

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Filed under // doctoral graduates employers researchers survey Vitae

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Posted 20 days ago

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The seven most important trends on the web

Sorry

Manchester Humanities PGR Blog

Telling your career story in a web 2.0 world

The Wisdom of Crowds

National all-age guidance services

We’re all career researchers now

CREATE - are you signing up?

A book on online research methods

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Recruiting researchers: survey of employer practice 2009