Early in my professional life, I took on a Web Developer role at a big media company. Back then, a welcome package from the company with its very familiar branding arrived at my doorstep. To some degree, I felt like I had “made it.” I felt like I knew so much about the working world (in truth: I was Jon Snow, I knew nothing – it was my 2nd real job out of college).
I remember deciding I was ready to give back and go back to my alma mater, the high school I attended, to do career day. They encouraged more recent graduates to attend since it was sometimes easier for the students to envision themselves in roles seeing someone that might be closer to their age.
Before the session, I remember talking to the administrators at the school and telling them about how “slides” are a thing of the past, especially for technologists. And the Jen of today thinks back on that and chuckles (as I work on 3 different presentations, all likely due in the next week).
In a lengthy career in technology, it seems like you live long enough to laugh at the hubris of your past self and develop the humility to know that you will often be wrong, but at least not catastrophically so.
I was reminded of this situation in a recent conversation where someone made a bold assertion as to the imminent uncertain future for certain types of project management roles within teams. To be clear, the robots are definitely angling in but, the biggest wildcard (or some might call it a competitive advantage?) around keeping work on track is human nature.
Humans are not usually consistent. Humans are often terrible at communicating with other humans, even in the face of clearly shared goals and alignment. Humans are not always great at being self-directed.
We need coaching. We need folks to hold us accountable when we’ve made commitments to ourselves and our team. But also, we need people to give us grace when as a friend put it, “life is life-ing.” And we need people to help diffuse tension and push us to move forward, even when our ego might be lagging behind.
I am a big fan of technology to help people but I genuinely believe some ways of operating are distinctly human-centered and can’t be fully automated away — at least not today.
For example, in a past life, I was a Director of a Product team hired to ensure the success of a product, working through my direct report team. However, I was also tasked with oversight of the strategic alignment of many working teams to assure that, while my team was meeting their marks, the end-to-end customer experience within the portfolio was a success. Success meant teams upstream and downstream of mine were also meeting deliverable expectations.
In short, the need to track that work is actually getting done is unlikely to go away. However the proliferation of “certifications” that folks might have thought they needed is likely going to change significantly.