Job Titles of the Future #7 - Professional eSports Player

Like lots of guys of a similar generation, I grew up playing sports, watching sports, talking about sports, etc. My Dad and my other adult male relatives were all big-time sports people as well - simply put, there was not a day of my youth through teenage years where sports in some fashion was not a part.

Fast forward about, well let's just say several years, and while sports are still a big part of many American kids lives, (certainly girls sports are a much, much bigger thing today than when I was a kid), there are lots more and different ways modern kids can choose to spend their time, energy, and as we will see in a second, to feed their appetite for competition.

And just like traditional sports like basketball and football have for many years offered at least the most talented and driven kids a pathway to fame and monetary gain, we are starting to see these newer forms of competition also present similar opportunities.  

What am I getting at?

Check an excerpt from a piece in the LA Times - Online game League of Legends star gets U.S. visa as pro athlete

International stars in sports such as baseball, hockey and basketball have long been afforded special immigration status to play on U.S. teams. Think David Beckham, the former Los Angeles Galaxy soccer player from Britain, or Dodgers rookie phenom Hyun-Jin Ryu, a pitcher from South Korea.

Now add Danny "Shiphtur" Le, of Edmonton, Canada, to the elite list.

Le, an online gamer, is one of the world's top players of League of Legends, a virtual capture-the-flag game in which two teams of fantasy characters compete for a glowing orb. Le is so deft at racing down the virtual field and opening up gaps for teammates that he recently became the first so-called eSports player to be granted a type of visa normally awarded to athletes featured daily on ESPN.

With a generation of children having grown up playing video games, the decision by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has been widely perceived as elevating America's newest professional sport to the same class as old-school stalwarts.

And in a worldwide competition in which the winning team can take home $1 million in prizes, the ability to sign the best players — whether from Canada or South Korea or Russia — was seen as a must-have for U.S squads.

Did you catch all that?

A professional video gamer from Canada was granted a special type of visa, (probably a P1A), to live and compete in the USA with the rest of his elite team of gamers.

I know you are thinking this is a kind of joke, or at least a once-in-a-blue-moon kind of occurrence. After all we are talking about video games, for gosh sakes. Not football, not baseball. Stupid video games.

Except that I bet video games in general, and specifically League of Legends, the game in which Le and his team competes in, are a much, much bigger deal than you realize.

How big?

More from the LA Times:

In the U.S. bracket of the championship series, eight teams compete against one another on Thursdays and Fridays at a West Los Angeles TV studio.

The games are broadcast online and draw more than 1.7 million unique viewers. A typical National Hockey League game on the NBC Sports Network last season drew a quarter of that audience.

Gaming industry analysts estimate that more than 32 million people worldwide play the game, about half of them in the U.S. The rest come from Europe and Asia. By those calculations, 1 in every 20 Americans plays League of Legends. That dwarfs baseball, from Little League to Major League Baseball.

Like I mentioned at the top, I grew up playing traditional sports under the watchful eye of my Dad who also grew up playing those same sports. It would have fulfilled both our dreams had I become an NBA star. But alas, short, slow, and unable to jump very high (mostly) did me in.

A new generation of kids is going to grow up playing games like League of Legends, under the watchful eyes of their Dads who also grew up playing League of Legends, (or World of Warcraft, or similar).

And if those stats are accurate, or even close to it, that 1 in 20 Americans are playing League of Legends then there are going to be lots of career opportunities that will spring up from that ecosystem. Sure just like baseball and football there will be the select few like Danny Le that will become elite-level professionals, but there may also be a need for more event organizers, promotions, marketing, expert analyses, training courses, and on and on.

Professional eSports Player, that has a pretty cool ring to it, and it makes the list as an official SFB 'Job Title of the Future.'

Job Titles of the Future #6 - The CEO Sober Companion

Whether it is a hard-charging, world-commanding, and impossibly tall and good-looking CEO, or the global head of marketing that never seems to sleep, hits every major city in her empire at least every quarter, while always being the smartest person in the room,  it seems like more and more the work of a big-time corporate executive is never done. 

Just like Knicks' legend Patrick Ewing once said about big shot corporate executives, (ok, he said something kind of like this, not actually this, but I needed a sports reference to try and get this post qualified for the 2013 Edition of The 8 Man Rotation E-book), "Sure, sometimes we party pretty hard, but we work hard and all the time too."  

Or if you don't dig the stretched to the breaking point Ewing take, how about this one from America's favorite (fake) CEO - Kenny Powers who put it more plainly - ' I'm the MF, CEO!'

The work demands, the inflated egos, the sense of entitlement, the feeling of invincibility that we often see possessed by people that have essentially been tremendously successful their entire lives - all these quite often combine with lots of money, opportunity, and some enabling behavior by friends and colleagues to drive CEOs and other execs into some bad, bad decisions regarding alcohol, drugs, and other inappropriate actions.

And having the CEO of a big, possibly publicly traded corporation running into scandal, trouble with the law, or even simple lack of attention to the requirements of his/her position caused by one too many whiskeys or painkillers is the kind of risk that more and more companies are deciding to attempt to mitigate. And one of the ways in which that risk is combated is with the 'Sober Companion'.

What does the 'Sober Companion' do? Check the details from this recent NY Post piece:

Trying to reason with his multimillionaire client while plying him with black coffee, Chuck Kanner ducked and narrowly missed a bottle of whiskey aimed at his head.

“He’d be sitting there [meeting] with people like Bill Clinton, Rudolph Giuliani and Mario Cuomo, spaced out, and I’d be saying: ‘Dude, this is not OK!’ ”

The unseemly row aboard the drunken CEO’s yacht in the Caribbean was all in a day’s work for Kanner, a so-called “sober companion” who makes his living keeping high-powered business executives on the straight and narrow.

He is part of an elite team of advisers and confidantes who work undercover, often 24/7, as personal assistants, bodyguards, researchers and potential investors, so the Masters of the Universe can get help for their addictions — while saving face as they rule the world.

So maybe personal assistants or even executive bodyguards are not all that new, and are certainly not 'Job titles of the future', but this new spin, or expansion of duties - for the assistant to pose as a consultant of some kind with the job of making sure the exec doesn't over imbibe on booze or drugs, well that seems like a brand new take on an old problem.

And I think it's also symbolic of the age that corporations and executives live in today. Don Draper could pretty plausibly get away with being drunk half the time and acting on pretty much every desire he wished. Sure, the times and expectations were a little different, but there were also no blogs, and no Twitter, and no Instagram to potentially capture and broadcast to the world all the monkey business he was up to, and that in today's age would be all over the web.

Sure the 'right' anser to this problem is to have CEOs and execs that know better. 

But until we are pretty sure that the million years or so of human tendency towards making bad decisions with booze and drugs is pretty much done, you might want to look into hiring one of these 'Sober Companions' for your exec team as well.

Today, it doesn't take much (maybe about five scotches and a bad decision), to destroy billions in company value.

Job Titles of the Future #4 - Cat Video Technologist

Quick reader poll, how long has it been since you've watched a cat video on the internet?

A very important POLL 

(NOTE - If you get re-directed, just click the browser BACK button to return to the post)

Liars, there is no way that you didn't watch one today. Or maybe it wasn't a cat video, it could have been an animated GIF of some bros cheering at a ball game, or a Tumblr filled of photoshopped pics of a random dude out on dates with super models.

Let's all just admit it, we are collectively wasting the best years of our lives on this nonsense.

But all that time translates to opportunity for others, and while marketing, advertising, and PR have all been around forever, the specific skills, attitude, and aptitude it takes to connect with consumers today - in our time crunched, multitasking, and multi-device lives are possibly quite a bit different.

Check out this piece from Business Insider, This PR Agency Wants to Hire a Cat Video Technologist, on PR firm Taylor Herring's quest for this kind of new talent to get a feel for what I mean.  The job ad (spoofed to look like an old-fashioned print ad) is below:

Sure, you could quibble with me in that the actual job, (and Taylor Herring assures it is real), is not different from any of the thousands of other 'social media marketer' jobs that are probably being advertised across the world right now. And you would be partly correct. The list of required skills has many familiar elements we'd recognize from similar and existing roles.

But what makes the Cat Video Technologist different are two things really. One, is that it points out directly the connection (to their business anyway), and importance of goofy internet memes like Ryan Gosling stuff and cat videos, and actual commerce. And two, the very way that Taylor Herring presented the job ad - the funny title, the internet job ad that looks like an old newspaper ad, the use of Twitter to market the opportunity, etc. all have a 'recruiting strategies of the future' feel to them as well.

The PR agency needs to find and attract some of the most creative, interesting, and social web aware people in the industry. One way to do that is to be creative, interesting, and to leverage the social web to try and make that happen. Everything about this seems smart to me, and forward-looking, so thus I bestow a Steve-approved 'Job title of the Future' to the 'Cat Video Technologist'.

Have a great week!

Job Titles of the Future #3 - Networking Wingman

First off you are probably asking just what exactly is a Networking Wingman?

The details you need can be found in this recent Fast Company piece, 'This Woman Wants To Be Your Networking Wingman' - a profile of Christine Hauer who as far as anyone can tell has invented a brand new category.  What does a Networking Wingman actually do?  Details from the Fast Company article:

For $28 you can take Christine Hauer for a walk in the park. For $165 you can bring her to a party and introduce her as your "assistant" or "friend" or "colleague"--"whatever you feel most comfortable with."

She isn’t offering what your dirty mind is imagining, though. She’s "confidence building" in the park and being a "networking sidekick" at the party. They’re micro-services that are usually small parts of the larger job of doing public relations, but now, thanks to the Internet, can be purchased as discrete components

"I’m like this personal legitimizer, that doesn’t do it awkwardly," she told me. "It’s like I’m a friend." She demonstrated how she would work the room, praising me effusively to other partygoers: "Ahhh! I love Stan! Oh my God, he’s crazy! Look at him! He’s like the best writer, and he’s here! You’ve got to meet him!”

'Networking Wingman' might not (yet) be a job in the classic sense, but as odd as it sounds it could be representative of how technology and crowdsourcing and crowdfunding concepts are combining to allow creative individuals to well, create brand new types of services and value.

But even more interesting than the technology, social networking, and micro-services platforms that are at play here, the networking wingman role and described services ask questions about the very nature of promotions, marketing, and PR.

Let's say an author has a new book to pitch - he or she might engage a PR firm to try and connect with press and bloggers to get the book reviewed and generate some buzz and interest. The PR person will send an email, typically describing what a smart or thought-provoking or leading-edge thinker the author is to try and pique the interest of the journalist or blogger.  And mostly, these PR pitches get ignored. We don't really care what a random PR person has to say about another random author.

But take that same pitch - what Ms. Hauer says is part of her bag of tricks as a networking wingman, and put it live, in person, and in a totally different context, then maybe, just maybe you will 'believe' that the author really is 'like the best writer', and 'You’ve got to meet him!'

When the networking wingman story first ran a week or so ago, I noticed several snarky and dismissive comments and tweets about the new 'job' that Ms. Hauer created. Many folks said it was the stupidest idea that they'd ever seen.

I don't think it's dumb at all. I think it is a genius mash-up of tech savvy, entrepreneurial thinking, and understanding of our incessant need to have other people talk about how fantastic we are. 

And it makes the Steve-approved 'Job Titles of the Future' list.

Job Titles of the Future #2 - Hacker in Residence

Over the weekend while cleaning out the files of 'Stuff I meant to blog about, but never got around to it', was this piece from Fast Company - 'How LinkedIn's "Hacker_In-Residence' Transformes an Ordinary Job Into a 'Dream Job'.

The piece is a brief interview with LinkedIn's Matthew Shoup, the afore-mentioned 'Hacker-in-Residence' for the professional networking leader. And yes, that it his real title - check out Mr. Shoup's LinkedIn (natch) profile here. The Fast Company piece is set up to take us through how his role at LinkedIn evolved over time, he was hired into the much more sedate and traditional title of 'Technical Marketer', and to give some insight into the unique ways he approaches his role as H-I-R, (his 'office; is a picnic table outside, he measures interactions with colleagues like a marketer would - impressions, clicks, and conversions, etc.).

But the individual employee evolution and the quirky new job title is only part of the appeal I think. What is more interesting and meaningful in a general sense is the idea of transformation that is inherent in the story - both as an individual (moving from 'Technical Marketer' to 'Hacker-In-Residence') and organizational, (a company that is wildly successfully and growing rapidly and like many before it, is certainly in real danger of losing the speed, agility, and innovation capability that is a strength of begin really small).

How does LinkedIn manage this?  Shoup attributes this to the idea of transformation:

LinkedIn gives employees the ability to transform their careers in order to do things they’re super passionate about. There’s a culture of transformation and innovation at LinkedIn, and that's one of those things that keeps employees engaged.

When you think about it, it seems incredibly simple for organizations to describe, but for some reason(s), harder to execute. And usually when founders, early employees, or other 'stars' leave growing companies it gets chalked up to 'Well, the same skills that are needed to start a company are not the same ones needed to help run an established company.' Mix in the ever-present growth the bureacracy and administration and rules, (about job titles, pay grades, office locations, PTO, and on and on), and for truly innovative types (and hackers), life as a corporate drone seems pretty unappealing.

But even established companies like LinkedIn still need these kind of people, maybe more than ever. And chances are your company needs some of them too.

How to make a start? How about crafting your own Hacker-In-Residence role, or re-writing the job description of the most creative person you have and include something like this:

'The common thread between all of the hats you will wear is that you will get to traverse multiple disciplines to solve business problems with creativity, and bring innovative ideas to life.'

Sounds like a cool job to me, and one that the people you never seem to be able to find (or keep), would be a perfect fit for.

Happy Hacking out there.