Big Kid Digital Merit Badges

There was an interesting piece in the New York Times a few days ago titled 'For Job Hunters, Digital Merit Badges', a look at a recently announced MacArthur Foundation sponsored competition for the creation of a system of 'digital merit and achievement' badges, not at all unlike the kinds of badges that have been typically awared over the years to Boy and Girl Scouts for accomplishing tasks, demonstrating skills, or achieving mastery on specific subjects. Merit Badges for Big Kids

Some addtional details on the MacArthur Foundation contest and the goals and expected benefits of the new system of Digital Badges:

(the competition) for leading organizations, learning and assessment specialists, designers and technologists to create and test badges and badge systems. The competition will explore ways digital badges can be used to help people learn; demonstrate their skills and knowledge; unlock job, educational and civic opportunities; and open new pipelines to talent.

The idea being that job seekers, well really everyone, could 'earn' and post these digital merit badges on their personal websites, their social network profile pages, and I suppose even as images on traditional resumes.

The Mozilla organization is participating in these efforts by creating the technical infrastructure to make the awarding, and more importantly the verification and portability of these digital merit badges possible. According the the Times piece, 'The badges can be verified in several ways. For instance, a badge can include a verification link that makes it possible to check with the issuer about authenticity and status, should the badge have an expiration date.' 

More color on this from the MacArthur Foundation announcement:

(the) Open Badge Infrastructure—a decentralized online platform that will house digital badges and can be used across operating platforms and by any organization or user. This approach will help to make digital badges a coherent, portable and meaningful way to demonstrate capabilities. It will also encourage the creation of "digital backpacks" of badges that people will carry to showcase the skills, knowledge and competencies they have gained.

It sounds like a fantastic idea that will be incredibly difficult to pull off. But the idea that workers should be recognized for the unique set of skills and capabilities that they possess, most earned over time and on the job as opposed to in formal education and training settings is certainly compelling. Additionally, one of the sub-projects that the MacArthur competition addresses is specific to a set of badges and recognitions for military veterans, aimed to help them translate their skill sets to better match civilian employment opportunities. And any efforts that can potentially help veterans transition to civilian work should be explored and supported.

What do you think - could a set of standards for the creation and awarding of a more universal set of skill and achievement badges that could operate across the web actually be an effective way to help workers and job seekers better communicate their qualifications?

Note - for readers in the USA, have a Fantastic Thanksgiving tomorrow and enjoy the long holiday weekend!

Senior HR Executive Conference - Social Technology and Innovation

This afternoon at the Conference Board's Senior HR Executive Conference Trish McFarlane and I presented a talk titled 'How Social Tools Can Empower a Global Organization'. The slides from the session are can be found here, and are also embedded below, (email and RSS subscribers may need to click through).

How Social Tools Can Empower a Global Organization

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Mainly, what Trish and I tried to share are some examples, both well-known and a few lesser-known, of how organizations have and can use social media, social networking, new tools for innovation and collaboration, and probably most importantly how looking at business challenges with an eye towards how social and collaboration can help meet these challenges.

These types of short presentations are really meant to be a kind of starting point to thinking about social in different organizational contexts, and for leaders and organizations that have already begun projects and programs, perhaps offering some awareness or insight to new opportunities they have yet to explore.

The feedback to the session was great, (thanks attendees for your time and attention), and many thanks to Trish and to the Conference Board for allowing us to present today.

I'd love your comments and feedback on the presentation as well!

Yes! Automation! Now let's hope the volume picks up

This weekend while perusing the Human Resources news and headlines, (in the almost unusable 'new and improved' Google Reader), I came across this story from the Wisconsin State Journal:What's the URL again?

City's Job Application Process Goes Online.

The 'city' in the headline is Madison, the capital of Wisconsin. Madison has a population of about 230K, and employs about 3,000 or so people in a number of professional, technical, service, and administrative positions. And the linked story describes Madison's transition to a new system for posting available jobs and for accepting job applications.

While in late 2011, a city and employer of that stature and size to finally move to an automated online job application process might paint them as being a little late to the HR and Recruiting technology party, it still is a move that should be recognized and congratulated. Progress is progress, and it stands to reason that whatever the new technologies being implemented would have to be an improvement over what was likely a combination of paper, email, and disconnected databases that would have been used to keep track of job openings and applications.

So being the curious guy that I am, and interested in checking out the new applicant tracking system and process, I hit up the City of Madison's Human Resources and Employment page here. If you visit the page you will see a normal, if uninspiring career information page, with links to the different areas of employment, pages to get additional information, and a front and center 'Welcome' message that is kind of too long, (about 300 words), and does not really do anything to 'sell' the city as an employer.

But to check out the newly designed and launched online application system, I actually had to perform a search for open jobs, to see the search functions, how the open jobs present, how the registration and application process would work - things the average HR Tech geek finds fascinating. So I clicked the link titled 'Job Openings' to do what I figured was a 'blind search', one with no filters or screens entered so as to return all the open jobs at the City.

The new system immediately returned the list of open jobs. All one of them, an opening for a 'Streets Superintendent' with a pay range from $84,616 - $114,231 - not a bad gig at all. But that was the only job listed on the site. Pretty disappointing even for me, who only wanted to check out the new system and process, imagine what a real Madison, Wisconsin job seeker must have thought after reading all about the new online technology, and how it would be sure to streamline and improve the job application process. Streamline and automate? For one entire open job?

I get that times are really hard, particularly for cash-strapped cities and towns. And eventually, hopefullly, the City of Madison will soon be able to resume more 'normal' hiring for a 3,000 employee organization. But after reading about the new system and process only to find that the shiny new process is essentially useless, (unless you are a potential new Streets Superintendent), you're definitely left a little disappointed and perhaps even angry.

New systems for online job application and posting aren't free, and installing a new one, and then issuing press releases and statements indicating the same, at a time when there is almost no practical application for the system strikes me as a little unwise. Let's hope the new system was put in place at a downtime in hiring so that it will be ready and have all the bugs ironed out for when things turn around.

Until then, Madison you better make sure each and every candidate for Streets Superintendent gets the A-treatment. 

The Invented Crisis

Many years back when a few friends and I were plugging away deep in the bureaucracy of a massive American corporation, occasionally the lunchtime conversations would veer from fantasy football to strategies for how we might get ahead and progress our careers, (and earnings), in such a large organization where it was not always easy to get noticed for doing good work.Crisis? - Stay on the Line

Then as now, simply showing up on time, getting your job done quietly and efficiently, and not drawing attention to yourself might have been a little more welcome an approach to career management in the eyes of most of our managers, but to us, it never seemed like a strategy that would adequately separate you from the army of similar looking, sounding, and performing staffers that had the same aspirational ambitions as you did. Back then for sure, remaining anonymous would probably only guarantee you one thing, you'd definitely stay anonymous.

One guy in the group my colleagues eventually settled on a personal strategy to help differentiate himself, a little plan we ended up calling 'The Invented Crisis'. The details were fairly simple, for every problem you solved, for each even small process improvement you developed, and for any new idea to improve information quality or service levels, you first 'invented' and communicated a 'crisis', that your eventual solution, (one that you had already figured out), would be the salvation for.  As my friend saw things, there was not much value to solving problems if no one, especially some well-place managers and executives, did not have a sense of the nature and scale of the 'crisis', before he stepped in to save the day and deliver a solution. I think his strategy worked to some extent, over time he began to be seen as the kind of person that was a 'problem-solver', and occasionally would get assigned some interesting and challenging, (and higher profile), kinds of projects because of this reputation.

It is kind of common for some people to have a hard time taking credit for the good work that they do and to have their accomplishments duly noted and registered by those leaders in positions in power. By generating a sense of artificial tension and drama by virtue of the Invented Crisis, my friend never seemed to have that problem. Whatever good work he did, he made sure not only did the 'right' people know about it, but they also knew about the dire consequences and outcomes that had been avoided by his quick thinking, intelligence, and ability. He ended up moving up the hierarchy somewhat faster than the rest of his peers.

Was the Invented Crisis kind of phony, devious, and self-serving? Yep. 

Was it a pretty successful approach (for him), to competing in a tough and crowded organization? Yep.

What do you think - how do you make sure you get credit, recognition, and reward for the good work you do?

User Adoption and Following Orders, Sort of the Same Thing

I almost never talk or write about changes that are made to the myriad of free online services or social networking sites that for the most part have offered tremendous benefit, access to people and information, and have generally greatly improved the overall internet experience. Facebook changes the news feed? Get over it. Twitter starts pushing ads into the timeline? Log off if that offends you. These services, while occasional straddling the line that separates personal and fun from professional and critical to one's business and livelihood; are still free to adopt, to use, and to leave.Get in line.

No one has to be on Facebook, or Skype, or Dropbox, or any other service of their type. So if you decide you no longer like the rules of the game, due to some new or changed features, some additional loss of the illusion of online privacy many people still like to cling to, or perhaps a free service has decided that to actually continue to offer their service they have to generate some revenue and start charging for what had previously been free; then typically walking away, (or finding an alternate service), is your only option.

What started me down this line of thought was when last night I logged into what is still my favorite resource on the web - Google Reader, to find that -  Hurray!, I'd received the new and improved version of the venerable RSS Reader, with an improved layout, cleaner interface, and the removal of the limited 'social' features in Reader, (following people and sharing posts), with the now ubiquitous G+ sharing button. Checking my Google Reader - 'Items Shared by my Friends' list was usually the very first thing I'd do when checking Reader.  I'd been following about 75 or so people, mostly friends and colleagues from the HR industry, and do a quick scan and review of the few dozen or so posts these friends had shared in Reader that day often provided an excellent summary of the news and buzz from the day. It was my 'go-to' place online, and now of course it is gone. 

Again, I, (nor anyone else), is really allowed to whine and complain when free services change the rules of the game. I am free to find another RSS reader, convince all my 75 reader friends to share items there, set up some kind of G+ Circle to replicate the sharing function on Reader, (like that will ever happen), or do something else entirely if I feel like my online experience is irreparably harmed. It's Google's ball, their field, their rules.

Google, or any other large online service, knows that any changes they make will understandably tick off some subset of their users. They make the call on changes by balancing the ire of the (small) group of angry users with the larger business strategies they feel are important, and by (usually), offering more and better functionality and capability somewhere else. They try to do a good job of warning users about these changes, of communicating the benefits of the 'new thing' that is coming, and doing the best job they can of helping users manage through the change.

But what Google, and even those of us inside organizations that are charged with developing or deploying new technologies, (often at the expense of old technologies), sometimes forget is that even the oldest, most arcane, most underused piece of technology or functionality still likely has some incredibly active and passionate supporters. Google doesn't really have to care all that much about this, I can't convince them to re-activate sharing and following in Reader,  but inside organizations, the truth is user adoption, when 'forced', is often problematic and slow.

It is no secret that change is hard, and technology change can be even harder. Don't compound the problem by forgetting to empathize, at least a little, with those people whose worlds are having change thrust upon them.