I noticed something interesting yesterday. Like any other day, I had clicked over to an article, and after reading the article, I saw some of the comments being made about it. Mind you, the comments sections of many major news sites are generally the kind of place I would think about wondering into only when I felt like I had too much optimism about the human race and needed to quell that a bit. But something in there caught my eye, and made me wonder about something. I decided I needed to take a sample.

So I went back to the “headlines” area and looked for obvious political or cultural stories. The kind that usually attract the real trolls. Sure enough, they were there. There were posts spouting political positions of all kinds, personal attacks against other commenters, folks who felt no qualms about spouting hateful opinions about overweight people and on and on.

The only difference on this site, was that the articles being commented on were in the “influencers” section of LinkedIn, and all of the commenters were identified using their LinkedIn profile and the company they work for was listed right there, with their comments.

Talk about a way to really give your company a bad name. Talk about a way to run afoul of your company’s social media policies. Talk about an easy way to find yourself fired, or find your company being boycotted, or talk about a way for your company to face a PR nightmare. This isn’t some random website where you appear as some anonymous person and it would require a ton of work to track you down. This is freaking LinkedIn!

I avoid making just about any political or social comments here because a lot of people do know where I work, and it’s easy to find out if you don’t. Plus I really don’t think it’s possible to have intelligence conversations about either online, but I surely would never say anything close to controversial when my title and company are attached to it! Obviously, not everyone has really thought this through.

Recently, I read Seth Godin’s book Linchpin, and there was a quote in it that I wrote down because I wanted to truly think about just what the quote said, and how it relates to careers, management, and life in general. The book is a thought provoking read all the way through, but this particular quote seemed to stick with me long after I read it:

There are no longer any great jobs where someone else tells you precisely what to do

As Seth goes on to explain, once upon a time a great job was one working at a factory or a mill, where you put in an honest days work for an honest days pay. It was stable, solid work for stable, solid people.

Unfortunately, the world doesn’t work that way anymore, even if we continue to try and treat the workplace as if it does. If your job entails doing exactly what someone else tells you to do, that means you are eminently replaceable. As a manager I can get almost ANYONE to simply do exactly what I tell them to do all day long. Therefore, as a worker, the only thing you have to compete on with other workers is price. Basically, it makes sense for me to hire the person who will do exactly what I say for the least amount of pay if all I really need is someone to do what I say all day long. There’s very little skill differential between candidates for this type of job, so it comes down to how much it will cost me to hire someone for it.

The problem, of course, is that society hasn’t yet caught up to this reality. Education is still focused on teaching students to follow instructions, corporations are still focused on procedures and reporting structures that encourage following instructions, and managers are still busy running around telling their directs what to do all day long. In a nutshell, society is doing everything it can to develop a workforce that can follow directions, when that skill set is an absolute dead-end.

Let’s see how this works out in real life. Let’s say you’re a programmer. Each day you go in to the office and your manager tells you exactly what you should be coding, how you should code it, etc. Basically, you are there to simply do precisely what they tell you to do, along with the other 5 programmers on your team. There’s no real difference between your jobs, there’s no chance to really stand out among your peers, and there’s really nothing about what you’re doing the deserves to be recognized above your peers. You’re nothing but a cog in the machine that keeps spitting out code. For your manager this is both good, and bad. In the short term, it’s great. You keep working and putting out code that makes them look good, and they don’t have to really worry about paying you more or needing to replace you, because they’ll just bring in someone else to do exactly what they say. Over the long term though, this means that the manager is never going to get any fresh ideas from his or her reports. When the people above want something new, the manager will look out upon the sea of programmer cubicles, and there won’t be anyone there to step up, because that’s not the job they’ve created and filled with these programmers.

Yet, we see this play out over and over again in the corporate world. Because having irreplaceable workers means having to work hard to keep them, it’s easier to create jobs that are easily filled. So we just continue along the path of pretending that telling our directs exactly what to do = a great job, because….. “the economy”!

Yes, yes, of course, the problem with the labor market is the economy, once that picks up things will go back to the way they were. Except as the economy has improved, the labor market has not. Could that be because the way we structure and hire labor is out of whack with the reality of life in 2013? Management keeps pretending that they can do pretty much whatever they want in terms of crafting existing jobs into meaningless and low-paying cogs because we should just be thankful to have a job, but those same companies are now at a point where there’s nowhere else to go. They can’t pay less to make a less expensive product, we’ve hit rock bottom there. They don’t have anyone with great original ideas on staff any more, those people left for more money and the chance to have the freedom to create something new, and a whole lot of people who truly believed they would be taken care of if they just followed directions and worked hard, are out of a job, or seriously underemployed.

The only way this changes if we change our approach to work, both from the management and labor sides. Management, quit looking for the cheapest cog. You can’t compete on price alone any more. Labor, quit settling for jobs where you never get a chance to stand out or create something new. You’re better than that, but you’ll never get better than that if you don’t take some chances.

Simply put, there’s no mill or factory that is going to provide for your family for the rest of your life. The new economy requires different skills, and it requires a whole different approach to work than we’ve been taught. One that does not include someone else telling you what to do.

Before I start, let me just say that I am a big advocate of the outlook presented at the beginning of the recent Business Insider article, 6 Questions to Ask During Your Interview That Will Make an Employer Want to Hire You

It’s common advice among job seekers: when you’re interviewing, you need to interview the employer right back. After all, you’re the one who is potentially going to fill this position, so you need to know if it’s going to be a good fit, right?

As I said, this is absolutely true. It doesn’t help anyone, least of all yourself, to try and be something you’re not to get a job that you’re probably going to wind up hating in a very short time, so you should absolutely ask questions about the culture, management style, etc. to make sure that this is a place where you actually want to work.

The difficulty comes in knowing whether the person answering your questions is telling the truth.

I’ve seen this in my own experience, and heard this story countless times from others. They went into an interview, they asked all the questions about how they measure success, what the culture is like, what the priorities are, etc. Then they started the job, and it didn’t take long to discover that the person conducting the interview obviously works somewhere else. Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t necessarily think the interviewer is lying in most of the cases I’ve heard. (Although in some, I do think they were absolutely lying, so it does happen, in my opinion) Rather, it appears that the view from the managers office is quite a bit different from the rest of the company.

How many people do you know who work for companies that do not appear to value new ideas? Do you really think during the interview that they were told “We really like the way we do everything now, and don’t really want our employees questioning that…”. Of course not. Or do you think anyone told them during the interview that they will absolutely be micromanaged, held to conflicting standards, or that doing a good job will result in absolutely no recognition, but will result in the transfer of duties from employees who don’t do a good job but no one wants to deal with? And yet, here we are, where lots of people work under exactly those types of circumstances.

There are times when people are telling me stories of their workplace that I ask them what sort of answers they were given during their interviews, and I harken back to that line from The Princess Bride.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

For example. During the interview you may be told that your boss is not a micro-manager. (Of course not, don’t be silly.) Yet, when you start working, you discover that your team is required to CC the manager on every client or internal email related to any project, to “keep them in the loop”. Of course, with all those emails coming in, the manager doesn’t have time to actually read any of them, so you still need to have status meetings, to repeat the things that were in the email. Or they may talk about creativity and innovation being an important part of their culture, only for you to find out later that new ideas will be frowned upon, or that any attempt to create new processes will be undercut by those with the authority to actually carry them out. Of course, during all of this, you will be held responsible for the lack of process improvement, which is always nice.

So the real question is, what questions can you ask that will demonstrate that the person interviewing you really understands the culture, or is saying what he/she thinks would sound good about the organization? No one wants to admit to being a bad boss, but we all know there are plenty of them out there. What question is going to help you weed them out?

I was reading this article the other day, Turnover is Turnover: What Churning Employees Says About Your Culture, when this passage struck me:

Even now, with a new title and lots more money, she said that she will eventually leave. Working 50-60 hours is commonplace, and she said that she cannot live the rest of her life like this

I stopped and thought about this for a minute, and how it applies to certain fields. In IT and Legal, two fields I am intimately familiar with, it is commonplace, and expected, that you work that much, but should it be? Are we driving really good people out of the industry because of this expectation? Let’s leave the question of whether it is possible to have a family life and continue to work those sorts of hours, and look at whether it’s even possible to have much of a social life when you work that much? How do you make plans for any evening during the week? How do you get personal errands taken care of during business hours when you work that much? How do you, god forbid, take a vacation?

The answer, of course, is that you don’t. Your life is out of balance and you suffer the consequences of that. Most of us are willing to make that sacrifice to get ahead, or advance in our career, but I’m not sure all that many people would be willing to do it for the entirety of their lives. That way can only lead to burnout, and unhappiness. When I look back at my experiences, this is what I see. I can work 50-60 hours per week for some time, but it leaves me unhappy and unbalanced. I never feel content, there’s always something else that needs to get done, so I never just relax, I never feel like I can disconnect, etc. Oh sure, I feel important, but that sense of importance isn’t worth all of that.

Of course, I also realize that I now hold a job that requires me to travel quite a bit, and that presents the same kinds of challenges. I may not be putting in 60 hours every week, but not being home is not being home, regardless of what the work day looks like. It’s hard to have much of a social life, it’s hard to be as involved with my wife as I’d like to be, and it can be just plain exhausting sometimes. As much as I’m enjoying the adventures of traveling and working with new groups of people at every stop, I have to face the reality that I may well burn out. I don’t know if I want to spend the rest of my working life like this. Right now, I don’t know that I don’t want to either. We’ll see what happens, but one thing I do know, is that I need to be prepared to move on when the travel load is no longer good for me, just as the women in the article has to be prepared to leave, because the job isn’t going to change.

But, maybe the job should change instead of burning out everyone who holds it? What do you think?

OK, granted, I am a trainer by profession, and when I see something like Seth Godin’s piece about listening better, I want to scream “Amen!”. Let’s take a sample:

The hardest step in better listening is the first one: do it on purpose. Make the effort to actually be good at it.

Don’t worry so much about taking notes. Notes can be summarized in a memo (or a book) later.

Pay back the person who’s speaking with enthusiasm. Enthusiasm shown by the expression on your face, in your posture, in your questions.

The thing is, speakers are generally only as good as the feedback we get from our audience. When I am training, whether it be onsite or online, I’m making subtle adjustments all the time based on what I see and hear from my students. When I see that they are actively listening, and understanding a specific point, I know that I’m safe to move on to the next one. If I don’t see that, I don’t know that it’s safe to continue on, and I’m very likely to go back over a point to make sure you get it. That’s my job, to do the best I can to make sure you walk out of the class with an understanding on how the tool works, and what you might do with it. I know that is being accomplished when you, as a student, start to form your own ideas and start to take the things I’m teaching you and apply them to your own work. If you simply sit there, looking down at your iPhone, staring out into space, I have no idea if the training is accomplishing what it’s supposed to.

There’s nothing worse than having a class full of people who do not interact at all, do not appear to necessarily be listening, and then get feedback that the class was too slow-paced and repetitive. The truth is, it probably was, but only because the speaker didn’t get any indication from the audience that it was safe to move at a faster pace. So, you didn’t get the best that a trainer could do, you could the trainer responding to your lack of listening. Believe it or not, you do have some responsibility here. As Seth says later:

Good listeners get what they deserve–better speakers.

That’s because good listeners give better feedback, verbal and non-verbal, that a good speaker can adjust to. Good listeners make it clear that they are thinking about what is being taught, and starting to apply it, and take advantage of the opportunity to discuss those applications with a trainer. They get a better classroom experience, by far, than the students who sit and count the minutes until class is over. Good listeners understand that the classroom is an opportunity for them to learn something new, and take advantage of it. They challenge the trainer to up their game, to adjust the curriculum to match the questions being asked and ideas being discussed. Bad listeners get the same stuff, taught the same way, because there’s nothing to adjust to, the focus has to be driven by the trainer instead of the student. Even the best trainer in the world is not going to always drive the class to match your focus if they are left to simply guess what the focus should be. It’s up to you, students, to make sure you get what you need. If you walk away from a class without some key bit of information, and you don’t speak up or give any indication that you need it, how can you blame the trainer for that? Sure, we do our best to pass on as much information as we can, and prioritize it as best as we can, but that trainer up there can’t read your mind. If you don’t actively participate, you share some of the blame for not getting the speaker you wanted.

As Peter Sims said in another article I saw today, Going From Suck to Non-Suck as a Public Speaker:

It’s an experience for us all, not a lecture.

Experiences will always be better than lectures, especially in a training environment. If you aren’t an active part of it, then the experience will be driven by other people and their interests. Is that going to be the best training for you?

How in demand must ediscovery skills be that you can have one website dedicated to Litigation Support careers conducting a talent drive, while another hroup is launching another site dedicated to ediscovery careers?

I’d say there must be some serious demand out there, wouldn’t you?

Now, since I’m not really in the market, I haven’t been involved much in either of the sites, but if you have been looking at them, from either the employee or employer side, what do you think about it?

While I’m not necessarily convinced that this statistic would play out over a larger study, I also know that I’ve been recruited twice in the last couple of years, by people who I’ve met as either a direct, or indirect result of having a blog. So as I looked at the infographic below, I find a lot that could prove very useful for job seekers. What other advice would you give?

Courtesy of: Online Colleges

For the second year, the fine folks over at TRU Staffing Partners are offering scholarships to cover the costs of some great eDiscovery and legal technology education. If you’re looking to get some great education in this field, you may want to consider applying before the deadline of Feb. 15

According to the link above, the courses being offered are:

DTI/Litworks Certified Litigation Support Professional
Four-day course offering industry best practices learned through hands-on experience, networking with peers, and reviewing leading software tools. The course is designed for professionals with one to five years of litigation technology support experience or for litigation paralegals, document review attorneys and legal IT professionals.

DTI/Litworks Certified Litigation Support Project Manager
Three-day course that focuses on sharpening litigation support project management skills and techniques, with an eye towards building skills. Attendees receive practical resources and tools, including checklists and templates that can be immediately applied to daily work as a litigation support project manager.

Georgetown University SCS Paralegal Program – Advanced Litigation & Trial Technology Course
Covers the tools and thought processes that drive the use of technology in today’s litigation landscape. You will gain hands-on experience with tools such as Forensic Toolkit, Concordance, CaseMap, and TrialDirector; but more importantly you will learn how these tools create a more efficient and effective litigation workflow. The course will include lecture, hands-on work and course projects that will enhance your learning in this exciting field.

Georgetown University SCS Paralegal Program e-Discovery course
This course introduces key e-discovery concepts that paralegals will apply in most of the matters that they support. Through a combination of lectures, hands-on classroom exercises, and written assignments, students will learn how to spot critical e-discovery issues and how to best resolve them.

Georgetown University SCS Paralegal Program Legal Project Management Course
Students will first learn Project Management Fundamentals, and Project Management Planning and Controls and then how to apply concepts to legal scenarios via case studies in Collection Plans, Production Plans, Trial Preparation Plans, and eDiscovery Program “plans“. Students will create group project plans and present them to a panel of leading Litigation Support and eDiscovery professionals. The course will satisfy the education requirement to apply for the CAPM or PMP credential.

LIU Post Paralegal Studies Program Litigation Support/e-Discovery course
This brand-new course is designed to give students an in-depth perspective on the litigation support industry. Through discussion and hands-on application, students will be introduced to the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) and learn common best practices and workflow techniques for electronic data processing and analysis. The course will also familiarize students with the basics of e-Discovery Project Management. A group project allows students to apply their knowledge to a mock real-world scenario on the final day.

Bryan University e-Discovery Project Management Certificate Program
An online, real-time fully accredited 7 1/2 month intensive practical e-discovery project management curriculum taught by a nationally renowned faculty. The program utilizes a comprehensive prepare/collaborate/engage teaching model combined with practical experience handling digital data with state of the art e-discovery processing, search, review, and production software and tools. Click here for a downloadable pdf with course details.

Learn About e-Discovery
This program will help you to find the educationally valuable information that you need to grow in your understanding of electronic discovery. First, you will have a 30 minute phone call to discuss your learning objectives, how much time you have available each week to dedicate to learning more about e-discovery. You will be sent a dynamic customized learning plan that meets (or exceeds your learning objectives based on what you’d like to learn and how much time you have to spend on it. The plan includes Internet accessible blog posts, videos, presentations, articles, white papers and podcasts organized in a manageable order in order to maximize your learning experience.

So, are people with no social networking profiles at risk of being disenfranchised?

I’m not in a hiring position, but if I were, the lack of an online presence wouldn’t necessarily be a deal breaker for me. But it would be a bit of a concern, and all things being equal, if I had one candidate active on Twitter, and one with no presence at all, I’d probably prefer the one who uses social networking.

Now, when I say that, also understand that I’m talking about someone with a professional profile, not someone who is publicly sharing things that they really shouldn’t let perspective employers look at. On the other hand, responsible social networking use shows some initiative. It shows that you not only do good work, but you have a curiosity about your industry and a desire to educate yourself and do better work. The good candidate without any online presence doesn’t seem to have the same drive and initiative. That’s not to say that candidate doesn’t have those things, but they are going to have to do more to prove it.

As a hiring manager, if I can find you on LinkedIn and Twitter, I can get an idea of how much you are doing, what kinds of things you are sharing, what you consider good sources of information about your industry. I can also get a feeling about what kind of communicator you are, and how open you are to different ideas. If you don’t have those things, I have to guess a little bit more about you. When you are competing with other qualified candidates, the last thing you want is for me to have to guess anything about you when I don’t have to guess about the others.

What do you think, would the utter lack of online presence bother you when making a hiring decision?

Over at Ligitation Support Careers, they are starting up a Winter Talent Drive to try and hook up eDiscovery talent with employers looking for that talent.

LitigationSupportCareers.com announces the start of the third annual eDiscovery Talent Drive!  The career fair will last for one month, and is a virtual event connecting employers with talented job seekers in the legal vertical worldwide!  The eDiscovery Talent Drive will focus on litigation and support jobs.

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Those job seekers interested in participating should go tohttp://www.litigationsupportcareers.com/careerfairs.html to find details and register.  There is no cost to job seekers to register for this event.

I’m not in the market for a new position right now, but if you are, I’d at least check it out.