Do you remember your lucky break?

N.B. This content was originally delivered as a talk at BrightonSEO in September 2021.

Do you remember your first day at your first job and the sense of anticipation, trepidation, worry even, as you walked into a group of strangers with no idea what you were doing. 

It’s easy to forget how vulnerable people can feel early on in their careers, but everyone has to start somewhere. Even Steve Jobs had a first day on the job after all. 

I suspect most of us had colleagues who took us under their wing while we built up our skills and confidence, or mentors supported our growth and ambitions throughout our working lives. 

I certainly did and wouldn’t be doing what I did today without the support and guidance of a variety of people throughout my career.

The digital talent divide

The UK in particular is heading towards a digital skills disaster, as demand outstrips supply. Anecdotal evidence from my network seems to back this up. A number of my clients report that they are struggling to fill entry level, mid-weight and senior roles.

This skills shortage comes in sharp contrast with the employment landscape experienced by young people, who have been especially hard hit by shifting pandemic workforce patterns. 

This comes on top of entrenched systemic issues in hiring such as “needing experience to gain experience” and the unwillingness of some companies to invest in junior staff.

We have a duty as an industry to nurture the next generation of talent. Not just because we altruistically owe it to young people, but because it is the right commercial decision to make for companies chasing a limited talent pool.

In this article, I’m going to be doing a mixture of mythbusting and setting out some best practices that companies can use to maximise the potential of their junior staff and ensure their staff have the best possible start to their careers.

 Remote Working

A selection of industry myths

We worry juniors can’t learn on their own

Companies worry that unsupervised in a remote setting, junior staff will be twiddling their thumbs, sat behind screens in their houses.

This is interesting to me because when you think about the latest cohort of higher education leavers, these are people who have spent the last 18 months learning remotely. Most of them have performed exceptionally well in their exams under extremely challenging circumstances.

We simply aren’t giving our young people enough credit. If they're not the group best equipped with the ability to learn in a remote setting, who is at this point.

We worry we will harm the start of people’s career

Over the last year, I’ve overheard conversations with hiring managers who are putting off bringing onboard junior staff until the “situation becomes more stable and we can give them what they need.”

This is erroneous again, in my opinion, because our current pandemic situation is not going to get less unstable in the short to medium term. Yes, there are signs we may be leaving the worst of the restrictions behind, but can any of us accurately predict what will happen this winter and beyond? 

If the pandemic has taught us anything, it's that uncertainty is the certainty in life. All we can do is act as best we can with the current information we have. There’s no point waiting for a mythical day where everything will suddenly be set in stone to act.

We are damaging people’s careers by not giving them a chance to start one.

We worry about preserving our existing culture

While it is absolutely right to be concerned about whether people are actually happy at work, I do think that when companies talk about “preserving culture” they are often using it as a proxy to talk about being non-inclusive in a supposedly acceptable way.

If your culture can not handle the addition of multiple age ranges, I suggest the problem lies with your cultural expectations, not with your candidates.

The truth is, it wasn’t working before

In an office setting, it’s often expected that junior staff will learn through osmosis. I certainly had roles early on in my career where I was expected to learn the ropes by overhearing office conversations, but I should never ask questions or interrupt the “adults” while they were working.

I was lucky to get 5 minutes for a water cooler discussion, but that was the limit of my structured training. Needless to say, this was an extremely piecemeal and demoralising way to learn.

While I’m hopeful mine is an extreme example, we have relied on this type of ambient learning for far too long as an industry. While I am a big believer in the serendipity of the office and the importance of human connections in person, I don’t believe we should go back to the old ways, which are both unstructured and inefficient.

We can do better.

Remote Work Best Practices

So what does better look like? Here are some of my suggestions on how we can improve remote learning for everyone (not just juniors!)

We need to invest time into training and L&D

The fundamental thing is we need to do as an industry is invest clearly defined and designated time into training and ongoing L&D. It can’t be an afterthought.

A lot of businesses expect people to pick things up as they go, either on the job or slotted ad-hoc around client work (in-house generally is a bit better with allocating clear time to training I have found).

If you want people to dedicate time to training you have to reflect this in your team’s workloads and your overall utilisation rates.

We need to encourage everyone to take collective responsibility for training

Training is not just a manager’s responsibility, the whole team should be helping to train junior employees, including the junior employees themselves! After all, one of the best ways to verify if someone knows a topic is to have them explain it to someone else.

Not only does this spread the load, but it also helps to create a culture of shared knowledge and continuous development for everyone.

We need to treat people as individuals

A lot of companies now offer personal development plans (PDPs), but in some places, there is still a persistent tickbox attitude when it comes to training programmes, especially in larger corporates.

There are of course subjects that require universal/standardised training procedures (first aid, fire safety etc.), however, in a field like digital marketing where there are so many career paths and specialisms to follow, it’s important to tailor training programmes to your organisation’s needs, the career ambitions of your staff and your skills gaps.

We need to give regular, consistent feedback

Six month or yearly performance reviews just don’t cut it.

By the time they roll around it’s often either too late to give positive feedback or too late to resolve performance issues (nobody likes a surprise after all).

Managers should be providing feedback on a weekly basis, monthly at a minimum. This doesn’t have to be an onerous, time-intensive or formal process though.

I stole the following format from Scrum retrospectives and have been using it with my team ever since to run check-ins. I like to do these collaboratively, asking team members to reflect on each point themselves before I provide my feedback. It’s also a great framework for self-reflection and assessing your own performance and even though I now I run my business, I tend to run my own mini-retro on a Friday using the structure.

Start - what should they start doing

Stop - what could they stop doing

Continue - what is working well and should be continued

Increase - what they should increase the amount/velocity of

Decrease - what they should decrease the amount/velocity of

Building Sustainable Skills

Another selection of industry myths

We say that graduates don’t come out of education with “soft skills”

Again, much like discourse around “culture”, I believe soft skills (which will be referred to as core skills henceforth) is another example of how language is used in our sector to marginalise.

While core communication and people skills are undoubtedly important, often people are using the term as a synonym for extroversion. This is especially prevalent in client-facing roles where there is an expectation that people will adhere to a certain personality type.

As a cohort, graduates are not lacking communication skills, it’s just that the communication landscape has changed and diverse people communicate in different ways.

I’ve worked in organisations with introverts who aren’t necessarily the most vocal in meetings but will send a blinder of an email after that clearly articulates a fantastic idea provoked by the wider discussion. Their strength was in written communication, not verbal, but that didn’t make them any less valuable as a team member.

We say that higher education doesn’t teach the “right” digital skills

I’m going to push back on this one with the question of whether it’s even higher education’s responsibility to teach cutting-edge digital skills?

In an industry where technology and methodologies move at a lightning pace, can we realistically expect higher education to keep pace when we struggle to as practitioners on the front line.

I firmly believe that the role of higher education is to teach people how to learn. It’s up to us as companies to invest in the right training to ensure our people stay ahead of the curve.

We say that young people are “lazy” and “special snowflakes”

Firstly young people aren’t lazy, they are questioning the merits of 24/7 work culture and advocating for better work practices. This isn’t limited to younger generations either, I think the majority of us have realised during the pandemic that we don’t want to go back to cultures of overwork and presenteeism.

Secondly, the connotations special snowflake and the supposed fragility of young people is particularly galling when we think of the resilience and fortitude they have shown throughout the pandemic. It’s not that younger generations are weaker, they are simply more comfortable talking about their mental health. Which can only be a good thing.

(Just because your staff never talked about anxiety and depression in “the old days” doesn’t mean they weren’t affected by it.)

The power of mentoring

Alongside more formalised training programmes, I believe one of the most powerful ways of building skills and capabilities is through offering mentoring. Throughout my career, I have had several mentors, all of whom provided vital support in building my technical and core communication competencies. I genuinely wouldn’t be where I am without them.

The best thing is that companies of any size can set up mentoring programmes, even if it initially takes the form of informal 1-2-1 catch-ups. There are also wider industry programmes which are well worth investigating. I recently took part in the WTS Mentorship Programme as a mentor and found it an extremely reciprocal experience. My mentee Jasmine was incredibly generous with her knowledge and expertise - so the mentor/mentee relationship can definitely support people both ways.

In terms of practically building a mentoring programme in your organisation, I have a few tips:

Try and find mutually good fits

Arbitrarily assigning people to a mentor can lead to poor matches. It’s important to have a process that allows both mentors and mentees to feedback on what they are hoping to get out of sessions (WTS did this really well through an online application process).

It should also be made clear that any party can choose to end the mentoring arrangement at any time if it doesn’t work for them.

Remember mentors need mentoring

There is a real difference between managing someone and mentoring them. In mentoring, the mentee drives the agenda.

It’s therefore important to ensure your mentors understand their role and how it differs from management responsibilities. Ideally, mentors should have an induction process to provide them with the right information and on-going support through their time as a mentor.

Again this was something the WTS programme did really well, as they held weekly drop-in sessions for mentors throughout the programme’s duration.

Providing real progression

A final selection of industry myths

We argue  some people aren’t suited to becoming managers

It’s true, management really isn’t the best or most desirable path for everyone. Some people prefer building their careers as Individual Contributors (ICs), where they focus on becoming a technical expert.

The issue comes when management is the only track for progression. If your organisation only promotes people on the basis of taking on people management responsibilities, then you’re again marginalising people who don’t conform to a narrow standard of what career progression can look like.

Engineering departments have typically been leading the way in offering IC progression routes and have a number of formats and best practices that wider digital departments can borrow from. GitLab offer some excellent details on their Engineering Career Development process and even offer people ways of trying out the people management track before they commit long term.

We argue we’re a small company and that means there’s no room to progress

This is an argument often heard at agencies, who often solve the problem by giving out inflated titles in an attempt to keep staff, usually without the corresponding pay rise….

Offering progression opportunities doesn’t have to always mean offering pay rises or better titles (though my caveat is that people should be paid fairly for their expertise and skill level and that title changes without pay increases often feel VERY hollow).

Progression can also mean giving people opportunities to work on bigger accounts, or investing in training that will boost someone’s long term skills and career opportunities. Junior employees in particular can gain a huge amount of value from being exposed to multiple areas of the business - could you offer some kind of secondment programme that allows people to spend a day or two in different departments each month?

You also need to accept that if you can’t offer people meaningful progression, at some point they are going to leave.

How to develop an inclusive promotion process

How do we ensure we engage employees in progression opportunities in a fair and transparent manner? These are my top tips on building an inclusive promotion process.

1. The process should have defined, transparent and published timescales

The promotion process can be extremely stressful and obscure for employees in organisations where decisions are made behind closed doors, with little information on how and when people can progress.

As with salary information, a lack of transparency also particularly affects minorities who may be less likely to self-advocate or be affected by the unconscious (or conscious) bias of decision-makers.

It’s therefore vital that organisations have a standardised promotion process that includes clear policies, procedures and milestones which are transparently communicated throughout the entire workforce.

Typically this takes the form of an internal document that can live on your internal wiki or knowledge base. Some companies, like GitLab again, have made their promotions documentation public-facing, which can be a great tool for recruitment (and very informative for anyone looking to develop their own documentation!)

1. The process should include diverse decision-makers

This is really about removing single gatekeepers and lessening the opportunity for biases to influence the process. Developing a promotions panel is also a great opportunity to bring in the viewpoints of multiple departments into the promotions processes and ensures that decisions are made with an appropriate level of scrutiny.

1. Candidates should be assessed against consistent and relevant criteria

This is again about standardising things and ensuring a fair process.

(Also if it’s not in their job description, why are you assessing them on it?)

1. People should be able to self nominate for a progression opportunity

All employees should feel empowered to put themselves forward for internal opportunities (this should be made explicit when new job roles are posted).

However, it’s important to note that some groups are again less likely to self-advocate and put themselves forward. This is why it’s important that every employee is regularly reviewed and assessed so that amazing people aren’t overlooked simply because they don’t shout the loudest.

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