Instructional Designer Question?

A friend is looking to re-invent her career, and is taking classes at a tech college in Instructional Design. Aiming to be a Trainer of some sort, or rather a person driving and writing curriculum, aka Courseware for a company. The College cited that there was a 28 percent growth coming up in the industry. Anyway, here’s what I said back, but still thinking about it.. I took a look..
You know I’m a parade pisser..
http://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/?areaID=1&subAreaID=&query=instructional+design&catAbb=jjj yeah, there are some jobs on CList, not as many as I would have thought, some that are more educational/social worker type, others more technical, like those at:
http://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/?areaID=1&subAreaID=&query=instructional+design&catAbb=jjj on simply hired has almost 20 over the last couple weeks
I see a good number of tech writer jobs, but wow, if you can write? shoot, be a copywriter!!

http://www.simplyhired.com/a/jobs/list/q-copywriter/l-San+Jose%2C+CA/pn-3

they really like them in many companys, seems like a lot of openings.
I do think instructional design is cool, but I think that there are enough people both aging out of the current population of SME (Subject Matter Expert) type people moving over into this role (think sales person, marketing, project managers) that re-invent themselves, and when I consider that teachers are moving into the field (present company even?) I think I’d want to do a little more research before spending a lot of money on a program for this. It is interesting stuff, and there might be travel, but would need to focus on some sort of industry (aka vertical) in order to quickly transition into high earning potential.
I think training/design stuff is neat to think about, Copywriting is even cool.er to me. .I also like grantwriting, but think copywriting in a more fun company would be pretty neat, and could be done from just about anywhere once they get to trust you (so travel, just don’t spend a lot, and work from wherever). BUT sure, instructional designer?! I like the travel thought, but other than that? don’t see the growth, not as meteoric as the other jobs, but hey! go for it! Goldang I’m a parade pisser…

War on Talent!

War on Talent

I attended the War On Talent conference last week in SF, and it was full of great insights, tricks and tips for founders and mid-sized companys about the talent landscape in the bay. I talked about the panels over on my Tagged blog http://about.tagged.com/biz-at-tagged/war-for-talent/ but thought I’d share some of the good stuff on my blog. Some of the key areas covered:

Process, Process, Process, and for most  that doesn’t mean paperwork, that means a clearly defined process, process strategy and making damn sure I can get someone through a process with no hitches. Dan Arkind of Jobscore was name checked, and I am a huge proponent of his methods, and in my mind a hardcore technical interview can show off how smart your engineers really are, and attract talent very well.

Messaging, both of key market propositions (or better yet, validations) that can really sell a candidate on working at your company. This was pounded into the ground a few times, and made a ton of sense. Being authentic, transparent and passionate on a personal level really gets attention from any Rockstar.

Long term relationships, even if you don’t have the right spot for someone now, keeping tabs on possible hires in the future, whether through friendly emails, invites to launch parties or other means of keeping in touch were key to having strong candidates think of your company first when they do start looking.

Level set when taking requirements, knowing whether your talent is a pool, or a thimble is key, and evaluating this and discussing it with hiring managers can make a big difference. Honesty is important, and knowing the market well is even more important.

Other methods like having tech talks, identifying where the rockstar contributors came from, leveraging employee referrals, as well as having strong messaging on Twitter and Facebook were mentioned, and most panelist seem to agree that having a Rockstar Recruiter is important, even saying that the recruiter is one of the most important single contributors your company will hire, and getting this right is top priority. I couldn’t agree more..we are at war for the best and brightest, and having a strong recruiter with boots on the ground in key areas of the tech community (github, techtalks, etc) is a make or flounder proposition in particular for early stage start-ups.
War on Talent? Yep, it’s a battle, so make sure you are ready with the right weapons and soldiers at your disposal, so you can gain valuable minds to conquer whatever business challenges come your way.

Talent Tussle-finding engineering talent

Finding the right talent for your 2.0 company from Enterprise backgrounds.

So your start-up is funded, has an extra E or I in the name, and you have cool offices with free snacks and sodas, and your app is popular, what now? You need the people to take it to the next level?! Of course, lets just order up some PHP Gurus and Javascript wizards!..ok, lot easier said than done, because the talent war in 2012 is the toughest climate we have seen in the Bay Area since the crunch of 2000.

I work at Tagged.com, and we have a language agnostic approach to our engineering recruiting..IOW, we have even brought on Microsoft engineers, who are thriving, to work in our LAMP stack, PHP heavy environment. This enables recruiting to focus on the most important, simplest element in recruiting: Smart People. We test in areas such as logic by puzzle solving, look at code of all stripes (ok, Pascal might be stretching it a little) to check out how clean the code is, and also do lunch to make sure the engineer is someone we would enjoy working with. We still struggle even with this approach, but one key differentiator in our approach is we aren’t looking for someone to have the exact skill set that fits our opening, rather we look for someone (likely from a top tier school) who loves what they do, and is smart enough to do it well here at Tagged. Where do we find them? That is where it gets interesting.

Enterprise companies have long ruled Silicon Valley, and in some people’s minds, they still do. Behemoths like Cisco, Oracle, IBM, and new big boys like Salesforce.com and VMWARE have always attracted top talent to the valley, and should be targeted by any start-up looking for sr. level talent looking for a change.

These days recruiting in the Bay is a full on war, and if you only look to recruit from very similar start- ups, or the Facebooks of the world,  you are recruiting with a thimble, not a bucket. To truly build a strong pipeline you have to look at the companys whose developers are working in bureaucratic molasses, and offer them a lifeline to your dynamic company. Good luck in your talent tussles, and remember, to catch more fish, cast a bigger net!