Jobs of the Present
In my world, where online groups, communities and networks are the air we breathe, there is a buzz about Seth Godin's post Jobs of the future, #1: Online Community Organizer. It is easy to say yes, of course. But there are some other realities worth bringing into view.
First, this is not a job of the future, it is work of today. Yes, I said work, not job. Because community organizing is going to be part of MANY jobs. In fact, there will be few jobs that are just community organizers. It will be a skill, like the ability to write and communicate, that smart employers will be looking for.
A couple of years ago I started doing a talk called the "8 Competencies of Online Interaction." I was passionate about it because I truly believed - and believe now - that our ability to communicate, to nurture group formation and action using online tools is going to be an important 21st century skill. I bemoaned that the college my youngest son was going to had nothing even on their radar 2 years ago about these issues in their communications or business programs. (Hm, I wonder about today.)
The difficult thing is that organizations are still unlikely to invest in people to do community organizing, building, nurturing and facilitating beyond those businesses who are in the online community business.
Why?
I could venture a few guesses. "Community" is still a soft squishy word. Sometimes community is the WRONG word! Our ability to understand the tangible benefits of our groups and communities is spotty at best. But most of all, I think there is a continuing unrealistic expectation that if you put up interaction software, things will just happen in your organization. I think it is truer today that they DO happen outside of orgs, but inside we don't always value them enough that people can give them the time and attention it takes to create value, to make them fruitful.
I'm not sure what this means. I need a vacation and I'm about to go offline for a week and do just that, so I am not holding myself to completeness or clarity of thought in this post. But I didn't want to let the opportunity slip by.
See ya in a week.
posted by Nancy White at 5:03 PM
3 Comments:
I couldn't agree more - even a simple act like (with us) starting to use Facebook to reach students or moving towards integrating blogs into sites instead of static news pages or any number of other low entry bar/high potential impact activities tips potentially all our staff into the situation of being part-time community managers, with all the demands of new styles of communication that this implies. And like your son's college, we're woefully unprepared for it (I've previously blogged about the PR near-disaster of the 24 hours of our serious first Facebook experiment!)
Right on! This is gem quality:
"First, this is not a job of the future, it is work of today."
Enjoy your vacation from this work ;-)
...and when people are ready for a job of the present, tell them to check out my newly implemented Jobs Portal (for job openings and job seekers both).
:)
www.communityguy.com/jobs
Jake
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