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Build back better our food supply without meat? Hard pass.
2020-08-03 20:04:00| Beef
Food experts push to solve climate change by changing consumer habits and shifting menus to vegetarian-based meals.
Build a career path for your technical individual contributors heres how
2020-08-03 14:18:12| The Webmail Blog
Build a career path for your technical individual contributors heres how nellmarie.colman Mon, 08/03/2020 - 07:18 Not everyone wants to manage people, but many companies dont provide alternate pathways to progress a career in tech, leaving technical individual contributors (ICs) stuck. This is a dilemma if youve spent years building skills to become a tech expert, says Rackspace Technology Principal Architect Product Architecture Nicholas Garratt, who sits on the Rackspace Technology Technical Career Track (TCT) board. If your only option is to manage other resources, skills atrophy. You become less competitive through moving away from the skills that brought you to a company in the first place. You lack time to do what you once enjoyed. Garratt explains experts often want to mentor people, help companies transform and be public advocates what they see as the good parts of a leadership role but without being estranged from hands-on skills. This is why some large tech companies develop TCTs. These initiatives identify and nurture technical ICs, providing them with a path to a technical leadership role thats the equivalent of executive-level leadership within an organization. They drive the business forward, but dont have to manage people nor leave the technical work they love behind. Its about empowering and promoting them to help them become leaders without a move to management, says Garratt. But what benefits does this bring to your organization? And can this model work for companies with smaller, more specialized technical teams and less opportunity for growth? Why highly skilled, technical ICs are vital to every organization Rackspace Technology has over 6000 staff and yet only around 50 are TCT members. The program is fastidious in its selection process, choosing only the best technical people whove reached the pinnacle of their traditional tracks. These professionals have great technical skills and leadership potential, and a desire to do more. As Garratt notes, smaller organizations have a more limited pool of resources to draw from, and tend toward simpler organizational structures. Developing highly specialized technical IC roles is something thats not going to be as practically possible for them, he says, adding that its therefore hardly surprising TCTs are far less common in smaller companies. However, David Porter, Principal Engineer at Rackspace Technology and another TCT board member believes similar structures nonetheless have the potential to bring key benefits to smaller organizations. Retention is the most obvious, he says. If your company has fewer than 100 people, you might still have the original engineers. So youll want to keep them to train people up and share critical knowledge. For medium-sized businesses, Porter suggests fostering technical leaders is more about retaining talent to get maximum velocity for change and to involve them in mentoring and evangelism. In short, try to keep the people who represent the business. Garratt adds morale is a factor: When people leave, thats a poor signal. Oust a respected, trusted individual through a lack of care and attention and that can cause lasting damage to subsequent recruitment efforts. By contrast, technical ICs in leadership roles strengthen organizations by being seen as positions to aspire to that other tech resources look up to for leadership and guidance. How to identify technical leaders and help them thrive Creating a technical career track is easier said than done, though, and the specifics will vary depending on your organizations size and the composition and disposition of your teams. But four fundamental tips should help get you started. 1. Identify your top technical resources Spotting technical ICs with leadership potential might not come naturally if your company has centered on traditional promotion routes, or doesnt have a history of identifying such individuals. Garrett says they must be discovered organically. Within every tech team is that person others turn to, who can provide answers, opinion and thought-provoking conversation. Dont force anything. Their status must be organically earned. 2. Get buy-in According to Porter, its vital any program you pursue goes all the way to the top. He warns against delegating programs like the TCT, because relevant policy cant be made if peoples hands are tied. Also, get buy-in from the participants themselves. That might seem obvious, but some companies miss this step. Have a dialog with them, says Porter. Find out what they want to do, and dont force people into roles theyve no interest in. 3. Create a plan Porter says you must offer people more than a pay increase and a fancy title they might just use to get a job elsewhere: There needs to be a plan a set of roles that describe what your technical leaders need to do. Individuals can measure their efforts accordingly, and the company can monitor their progress and promote automatically based on key milestones. Ensure you have a clear path, to retain people and keep improving them until they reach the highest possible level, he adds. 4. Be flexible and balanced Garrett reasons many people who manage tech resources lack direct experience in managing the career paths of technical ICs, and so shifts in thinking might be required. An important one is to balance their schedule, leaving time to accommodate ad-hoc requests and investigate things. But he says its counter-productive to impose a rigid structure on how and when to engage, and that the technical ICs must be flexible, too, since theyll have many conversations that arent core to their role. Maximize value from people for success Whether you enact a full TCT program or put in a more modest system to define, develop and empower your technical ICs, the result will add value to your company. As Porter notes, too often the reasoning behind TCTs is about good people not wanting to be managers, but he asks: What if a company loses a persons value by making them a manager? What if someone would otherwise have been a more effective contributor at accomplishing the businesss goals? For medium-sized and smaller companies alike, this is critical. When resources are stretched, make optimum use of them. You want best-of-breed talent, and so must empower your technical leaders and ensure they dont get stuck in a rut or leave because you offer them no other choices. And as Garratt says: Just because someone doesnt go down a path to directorship that doesnt mean they lack valuable insight into improving an organization. Failure to appropriately engage with your distinguished technical ICs can lower morale and job satisfaction, potentially driving attrition in a challenging technical skills market. Engage and encourage your high performers who, as Porter says, manage nothing more than doing the best possible work for your customers, and youll move faster, transform your organization and have the best possible advocates for your business inside and out. Our TCT Rackers help us move fast and help our customers to move fast too. Check out our customer stories to hear how our top technical staff can make their expertise work for you. Build a career path for your technical individual contributors heres howOur experts explore why highly skilled, technical
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10 Tips To Build Trust With B2B Influencers & Buyers
2020-07-31 13:00:23| Marketing and Public Relations - M&O
How can marketers build trust with B2B influencers and buyers, and how can brands begin a pilot or expand an existing B2B influencer marketing program? Luckily, our CEO Lee Odden spent time with Dr. Ai Addyson-Zhang as a guest on her Social Media Marketing Live Streaming Show, exploring the increasingly-popular use of influencer marketing among B2B organizations. Together Lee and Ai came to a number of fascinating conclusions, and shared helpful take-aways for those looking to learn more about B2B influencer marketing. Lets jump right in with 10 insider tips to build trust with B2B influencers and buyers. 1 The Foundations Of B2B Influencer Marketing Influencer marketing is about the practice of activating people that are external to a brand, but also those internal to a brand who have active and engaged communities people who are publishing and who have communities of people listening to them. Its important to collaborate and co-create content with influencers in a way that creates mutual value for the influencer and the brand in a way that is measurable with a measurable outcome. 2 Micro-Influencers & The Voice Of The Customer Gone are the days of having to just go after true celebrities, inviting them to do something, and hoping for massive engagement instead, influence has been democratized, Lee noted. Everyone is influential at some level. We're all empowered to connect with like-minded individuals to create our own communities, and people are paying attention to what we have to say. We're publishing fairly regularly, and we are creating influence, which really is something that one can view holistically in 2020. Going for a little bit from a lot of different people thats the niche, the micro-influencer approach is increasingly more relevant as a way to create advocacy and co-create content in a way that's really close to the voice of the customer. Its definitely not some pre-packaged thing that a brand made and just copied and pasted and gave to a celebrity and said, Here, publish this. 3 The Nature Of Influence Is Changing And Evolving TopRank Marketing did a study with data-driven influencer marketing platform Traackr and Brian Solis at Altimeter Group a couple of years ago, and at that time only some 11 percent of B2B brands were actively engaged in influencer marketing. Now that number is more likely somewhere around 50 percent. One of the big changes in the last couple of years is the advent of the E.U.s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and in the U.S. the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), along with pending updates to FTC guidelines around influencers and working with them. This means that brands really need to take compliance seriously, with disclosure and that sort of thing it's not something to mess around with or leave to chance. Theres got to be some level of governance, especially when you're paying influencers. There are clever brands like Adidas that have started to use dark social social that can't be tracked publicly as a way to connect with influencers, using SMS and text messaging. They're creating things called Tango Squads (see How Adidas is using WhatsApp as a direct marketing channel) clusters of youth that are advocates around soccer, and around the world they share things with them. It's not public it's all through text messaging, or WhatsApp or similar apps. That's becoming more of a problem, as more brands are starting to understand that their audience isn't necessarily engaging in the same way publicly as they might through private messaging, Lee noted. 4 In Influencer Marketing Specificity Rises To The Top If someone wants to know about this one thing, they know they can get all of it from the right influencer. Today we have so many more options for engaging with people that already have influence. If you can find ways to create value for them, even if it's just giving them relevant kudos, giving them feedback on something that they wrote about, giving them a reaction, or inviting them to contribute. Ask a group of people just one question, and then create a round-up post. If you can create value for people in a relevant way, you're going to start to become more influential yourself. When you can help other people become influential as you rise in your career as an influencer if you help other people who are coming up in the world to become influential and give them exposure, that is even more powerful at creating influence for yourself. Most of the time brands will have a fixed budget, and go Look, this is how much money we have. Are you in or not? However compensation comes in different forms. 5 Identifying Influencers & Their Topic Of Influence Its important to identify your own topic of influence. What is it that you want to be influential about that your customers also care about? You can use search engine optimization (SEO), customer relationship management (CRM), and social data to get an understanding of what it is that people are thinking about relevant to the brand and customer connection. That intersection of topics can then be used to go find the right influencers. First its key to look at topical relevance. Next is resonance the degree to which that topic resonates with their audience. Once you've used data to identify a raw list of people that are candidates, you literally have to manually inspect their accounts to make sure that they are who they say they are, and that their publishing cadence is good, and not someone who hasnt tweeted in two years, for example. 6 What Are The Maturity Levels Of Influencer Marketing Programs? Its important to know where a company is in their maturity of working with influencers and influencer marketing, Lee urged. There's an argument to be made for beginning a pilot program. Get your feet wet in terms of understanding what it's like to work with influencers, and collaborating with them.
BMW Group to build new pilot plant to produce Li-ion cells
2020-07-30 10:55:39| Green Car Congress
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Google to build new undersea cable linking US, UK and Spain
2020-07-28 12:16:00| Telecompaper Headlines
(Telecompaper) Google has unveiled plans to build what will be its fourth wholly-owned cable and its second linking Europe and the US. The new Grace Hopper undersea cable between the US, UK and Spain with landing points in New York, Bude and Bilbao will be built by SubCom and is expected to be completed in 2022. It's named after the computer science pioneer whose work was critical in the development of the COBOL programming language.
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