Cut Your Learning Curve

Nate and Eve recently sat down with Swarm's Product Design Manager Claire Harr on The Cut Your Learning Curve Podcast. Before transitioning into product design and product management, Claire worked in the related realms of visual design, research, marketing, and business development. Throughout her career, she has worked with companies of all sizes — and has worked as a designer in an agency setting, as a freelancer, as a business owner, and in-house. Prior to joining SWARM, Claire led the in-house marketing team at construction management company Turner International in their New York City headquarters —  where she provided strategic brand management services to align their marketing and business development objectives globally.

While the term “freelance” has been in use since the 1800s, it was the development of the Internet that enabled the rapidly growing freelance marketplaces that we have today. Now freelancers are available from around the world; they generally work on a set of tasks for an organization on a short term basis. 

As freelancing continues to play a bigger and bigger role in the workforce, what are the ups and downs of this type of work? In this week’s podcast, Nate and I discuss the glamour and reality of freelance work across different industries. We talk about the appeal of being your own boss: both the chance to set your own schedule and the resilience this level of personal responsibility can bring. Freelancing can also broaden your professional network. At the same time, freelancing work has challenges: the unpredictability of the work coming in and the feeling of always hustling for the next gig. Finally, in 2021, Nate and I agreed that the opportunities to be a freelancer are greater than ever.

In this week’s podcast, Nate and I discuss our thoughts on the new normal. Given the market landscape of 2021, what are the conditions for small companies to grow and thrive? The relentless onward march of technology and globalization continues to impact small business. Companies of all sizes can access a more global pool of talent and potential customers. More industries are open to market disruption by small players. At the same time, with the amount of information on the Internet increasing exponentially by the day, a big challenge for small businesses is connecting with their audiences and being heard through the noise.

After touching on different areas of worklife throughout this season of podcasts, Nate and Eve today are looking at resilience. In this week’s podcast, they first talk about the idea of resilience as “the ability to recover from difficult experiences (and simply the unknown), to adapt, and sometimes to even experience growth.” Throughout history, people’s ability to respond and recover from hard moments has been hugely influential in their overcoming obstacles and achieving success. 

Today clearly the workplace is shifting - from in person to remote. From regional to global. From long term employment to more and more short term opportunities. How then can an employee or a freelancer seize upon opportunity and carve out a way forwards for themselves, and ultimately flourish? 

Resilience, on the individual level, comes partially from our own background. Also in the mix is the particular working environment - is there sufficient opportunity and support to help staff grow and rise? Finally, curiosity, an eagerness to learn, flexibility, hustle, and luck all play a role.  As technological advances massively accelerate and the workplace itself continues to transform, the ability to foster resilience among staff will be critical for future growth. 

As massive change occurs in the workplace, so too have the concepts of “leadership” and “management” continued to evolve to adapt to the modern day.  Leadership is commonly understood as the big broad strokes that paint the vision of the organization, while management is responsible for executing this vision in the day-to-day. As my former CEO described to me, the leader announces “there’s the hill we must climb,” and the managers figure out how to get there and ascend to new heights.

All of this has implications in the field of education. A company like Nokia is a cautionary tale of how even successful, entrenched companies are vulnerable due to the accelerating speed of change in technology and consumer preferences.  MBA programs focus on developing leadership skills in the fast moving digital world, and how to effectively pivot the small army that is a mid to large size organization in a new direction. 

At the same time, effective management has become an interesting dance: of adapting to high team turnover, open offices (some with even shared desks) and continuing shifts in strategy, while at the same time ensuring consistency, accountability, fairness and support to employees to help them, and in turn the organization, succeed.  It is a play on an old song, now at a much faster cadence for today’s world. 

As an educator and trainer in project management nationwide, what I see is very little curriculum covering the fundamentals of effective management at either the K-12 or post-secondary level. Yet as the remote and freelance economies continue to rise, and as small independent businesses continue to blossom, the need for even a basic understanding of how to manage - how to set expectations and then ensure they are met - will only become more critical as work teams form and re-form with greater fluidity across the globe.

In the past year, the spread of Covid-19 has dramatically upended both work and college life.  Much of the “knowledge economy” workforce has migrated to 100% remote. We had almost 2 feet of snow fall on New York City in the past week. Instead of delayed commutes and trundling through the slush, our work days were basically unchanged. So too have universities shifted to a mix of remote and in-person classes, with each school and school system designing its own policies for testing and reducing transmission. 

As the vaccine rollout continues and tentative plans are being made for the return to the office, what does this mean for hiring, particularly for recent graduates in the past five years? In this week’s podcast, Nate and I discuss our own experiences hiring and working with recent hires for our specialty areas - engineering, design and project management. 

The credentials of graduating from an elite university still have considerable value, particularly in terms of prestige and the network of contacts.  For many recruiters, a four year degree is the first box to check. Yet at the same time, the needed skills continue to evolve rapidly. A big focus for employers is show us what you have done - your portfolio, your code sample, your work experience. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has written about how we will all need to become lifelong learners to adapt to a radically changing world of work. I believe Covid has only accelerated the changes that we will see in the future. 

In the Industrial Age of the19th and 20th century, the assembly line came to dominate manufacturing. The building of everything from ships to shoes was split among a line of workers, each completing a set of distinct tasks that were repeated, in order, all day long. 

The rise of the Information Age, and the nature of how software is developed, demanded a different approach. 

Hackathons, which were first developed around the year 2000, realize this new way of working. A group of coders, designers and marketers are sequestered in some kind of space, away from the distractions of daily living - laundry, cooking, sleeping and the like.  The team has a common goal to build a new project; work is shared among the group and then hours upon hours are dedicated to designing and coding free from interruptions. Working this way - in an organic, fluid manner in a shared time and space - can empower the individual and the team. It can lead to big creative breakthroughs. Plus, there’s pizza.

If companies of the twentieth century looked to Ford, General Electric and IBM as the gold standard for organizational performance, companies today model themselves in the image of Apple or Facebook - innovative, nimble and incredibly successful. Both Apple and Facebook share an origin story of small beginnings: of a few young men gathering in a garage or a dorm room to create The Next Big Thing. While the unicorns (tech firms valued over $1 billion) earn the most attention and headlines, the majority of tech start-ups are still in the “small and growing” stage.

In this episode we dive into our own work experiences. Join us to hear our take on the drawbacks and benefits of life inside a tech start-up.

Today more and more people are asking “what does it mean to be an expert?”  

The disruptive technologies and the new careers to support them are being created far faster than regulations, education programs and any state or federal certifications. Today there are more state testing requirements to be a hairdresser than for an engineer building software for a large phone provider or major bank. Another common yardstick for expertise, “years of experience” simply is a poor fit in a digital landscape where the products themselves are only five years old or less. 

At the same time, easy access to video recording and website hosting platforms enables each of us to be an expert. We can stand in our corner and proclaim loudly that “we know best” in an increasingly fractured media landscape. So then how is expertise determined? What does being an expert mean at a time when the traditional barriers to access and the role of institutions to validate expertise are all radically changing? 

The scientific method still holds true. Subject specific knowledge and the maturity to work effectively in teams in an era of turbulence is more important than ever. Real expertise matters. 

A new government administration is taking over in the US this week; the problems they face are many.  Defining and cultivating expertise in our current era will be essential for us, as a society, in order to take on the great challenges of our time.

In the past year, Covid has radically upended offices in the USA. Co-working spaces, open offices and company cafeterias emptied out as office work swiftly moved online.  Some of the benefits became clear - reduced commuting time and a relatively small drop in productivity. The challenges have also been equally well-documented, from news articles to memes on Twitter: squirming kids and pets in the workspace, seeing faces only on a screen, and never really turning off.