Post contributed by Adam Godson, Pinstripe Technology Enablement Lead. Follow me on Twitter @adamgodson, or connect with me on LinkedIn.
The traditional career path is deader than paper paychecks (sorry, BART workers!), as Millennials’ desire to rapidly move up the corporate ladder is transparent, unmistakable and unavoidable.
Gone are the days of patience, when employees simply wait for positions within the organization to become available, and workers are content with slowly climbing the corporate ladder. The reasons are many—cutting of corporate training programs, need for corporate agility, worker mobility, significantly shorter tenure, and generational preference for flexibility, to name a few—and they all contribute to the way the talent landscape has evolved.
The Dawn of Self-Service Career Development
Outside of the workplace, educational development has been disrupted by MOOCs (Massively Open Online Courses), which make it easier than ever before to access top-quality, free and inexpensive higher education. Offered by the two educational titans known as MIT and Harvard (edX), adapted by Stanford (Coursera) and today spun-off by many other educational organizations, there are countless courses available with the convenience of learning at any time and any place.
With workers hungry for career growth lacking in-house opportunities and the traditional 9:00-5:00 work day going the way of the dodo bird, we’re seeing the rise of what I’ve coined as the Self-Service Career Path. Lacking direction from employers, motivated workers are creating their own career pathway from a web of non-traditional resources—including online courses and MOOCs, work experience, in addition to web-based training and assessments.
A great example of this is Balloon, a one-stop shop tool for IT professionals to perform career path planning, participate in skill development, enroll in online courses, and track their progress—all outside of a traditional talent management system or company infrastructure. It’s a great career development platform, one that exists completely apart from a professional’s place of employment.
Another great example involvesthe recent teaming of Elance, SkilledUp and Smarterer, which has enabled users to find courses through SkilledUp, assess their current skills through Smarterer and find freelance work through Elance. It focuses more on freelance workers, but fact is more companies are looking for ways to use crowdsourcing and freelance (or temp-to-hire) labor to supplement their traditional workforce.
The Impact on Talent Acquisition and Talent Management
So, what does this mean for recruiters, as data on skills, courses and work begins to accumulate outside of talent management systems, university transcripts and certifications?
First, it means recruiters need to be there, too; simply stated, recruiters need to be where the talent is. I first wrote about sourcing from MOOCs more than a year ago (Online Learning Forums Offer Opportunities to Connect and Source Skilled Talent) when the major players had made only a handful of courses available; today, a handful has spawned into hundreds, even thousands of online courses. Recruiters should also be tapping into places where active and passive candidates go to assess their skills, and the platforms they are leveraging to manage their careers.
While career management has always been self-service to a degree, we’re seeing a collision of shifting market dynamics across the workplace, the educational world and technology platforms that are combining and empowering people to manage their careers independent from a particular employer. This provides an important competitive advantage opportunity for recruiters to find talent in new and untapped places—an opportunity savvy recruiters cannot afford to miss out on.
