👩👩👧👧 The power of Community in Job Searching and Reskilling, 🧊 Hidden Job Market,🧞 Career pivots
Bridging the gap between education and work can be hard; Roadmap is a startup trying to fix this
👋 Hello and welcome to this issue!
I recently met two fantastic female founders, taking different approaches to solve a similar problem: helping out people to get better careers.
Read below to check out the first, in which we will cover:
🤹 Key skills to work in tech - hard vs soft
👩👩👧👧 The power of community in job searching and reskilling
🧊 The hidden job market - how to capture more opportunities
🚩 Cultural barriers
🧞 Career pivots
🤹 Key Skills to work in tech - hard vs soft
Malinda, the founder of Roadmap - previously a teacher and then a serial founder in tech, has taken to heart the goal to help people get into tech, especially those who may not have a vertical experience in the field. Roadmap is a platform that helps people go through their job search process, trying to unlock their superpowers as well as figure out what people are looking for (values, mission, career paths). Big questions and tasks which are often not addressed elsewhere, briding a growing gap between the world of education and the world of work.
She argues that there are three main competencies that are behind working in the tech industry:
Learning Mindset
Problem Solving
Determination
Many candidates are completely overlooked because usually hiring overlooks these competencies and instead focuses on years of experience. Instead, it should be based on ‘jobs to be done’, understanding more deeply the ability to perform. This is much harder to assess, but can reveal huge untapped potential.
“Human powers are much more critical”
This has always been true (very well put in the book ‘Grit - The Power of Passion and Perseverance’) because attitude and ambition can trump specific hard skills. The more time goes by, the more these can be learnt quickly, and are fast to decay; the pace of change is brutal. Even more so with the rise of automation, it is the human skills and brain that is going to make a difference; not being able to do complicated excel formulas, hard math and so on. It’s the application layer that is going to be ‘human’. Malinda mentions for example, that a lot of profiles at big tech mention things like empathy, curiosity: these are harder to teach and harder to fake.
👩👩👧👧 The power of community in job searching and reskilling
Community is another key component of Roadmap. Everyone has different learning preferences, but sharing with other people the process and the pains of job searching, especially for early stage careers, has a huge value. This fills again a big hole when students move from university, a peer-based experience, into their first jobs - alone. I’ve always been taught that ‘finding a job, is a job itself’, and discussed in one of my early articles how ‘interviewing is more of a speed date than a science’ since it’s much less rational and scientific than we’d like to think, and many cultural elements also come into play.
Roadmap currently has a 7,000 job seekers community on Slack who share their experiences, ask for help and most of all - build relationships.
🧊 The hidden job market - how to capture more opportunities
“The way to land a job, is not to apply - it’s to talk to people”
I think this is a powerful quote, which bring me back always to this diagram:
More than 75% of the job market, is beneath the surface, and you can get to it only if you build relationships. The real question, should be ‘how many people did you talk to, and tell your story?” versus ‘how many applications did you send?’. This way you can aim to get referrals, advice, and so on.
To capture this opportunity, you need two things:
Know that this is how the world works - If you focus on that 25% only, you’re obviously missing out
Develop skills that can help you capture that 75% - Applying through a form is easy. Talking to people, connecting, is a lot harder, and there are more interpersonal skills that need to be learned.
Malinda mentions a story of a person who joined Roadmap that saw this second step as ‘learning a new language’, given that she found a lot of barriers on her path:
Cultural
Communication
Psychological
🧞 Career Pivots
COVID definitely made a lot of people rethink their lives and jobs. Some people asked themseleves this question which Malinda argues to be the key driver to make change:
Do you know that there are other opportunities that you could qualify for, that could help you do more?
However, she says that the main challenge is not getting people to think differently.
The bigger change is to get companies to think differently, to change their hiring.
She mentions a recent example of a company called Cambridge Global Telematics that hired someone in just four weeks with no prior tech experience, because they went beyond the surface of not seeing immediatly on paper those skills they were looking for. Another person was a teacher for ten years, and in ten weeks became a remote worker for a tech startup in Silicon Valley.
If leaders over time see that this is a possibility, it will become the new norm. It’s the classic ‘four minute mile’ problem, where new boundaries and paradigm shifts will happen through some virtuous examples.
I love also Malinda’s final note:
‘If you think you’re meant for something else, it means you are’.
Go checkout Roadmap also to see some useful tools that they’ve built (these are just some examples):
