For information architects and designers — The content model helps information architects and designers make sure that the page designs accommodate all the content types for the site and provides guidance on the bits of text and media that will be available for the page. At the same time, the content model needs to support the content, layout, and functionality portrayed in the designs. If captions are included in the layout, that must be captured in the model for an Image. If events must be sorted by date on a calendar, then Date has to be captured in a separate field and it has to be sortable data, not just text. Depending on the complexity of the site, a high-to-medium level of detail is usually sufficient for designers.

No-more Shopify theme editorNo “plug-and-play" install of Shopify appsDependency on developers or development agency

Here are some of the major benefits associated with headless: Speed. Rolling out any new changes, new features, UI changes, business logic changes, promotions, cosmetic changes, is faster with headless. With a traditional architecture, small adjustments and minor tweaks to anything require testing major parts of the back-end to make sure everything is working properly. More customization and personalization. Headless grants maximum customization freedom across the board, which allows the freedom to create industry-leading, personalized brand experiences.The front-end is more accessible. Since front-end updates don’t have to be optimized for the back-end, they take less time to build and are cheaper to implement. Accessing, using, and updating the front-end no longer requires any advanced IT skills, so it’s easier to find people to do the job. You also no longer have to write JSPs to make cosmetic edits. You still can, but you can also use React and several other systems that are not usable under a traditional eCommerce model. Integration of non-web channels. Through the focused use of APIs, brands can create a coordinated, seamless, and personalized brand experience across all channels. Future platform changes are easy as well. If Google Glass takes off, or Tik Tok comes out with a shopping feature, a shopping experience can be quickly created and implemented without changing the back end. Just plug it into an API and start selling.  Saved time and money across IT. Front-end changes no longer require significant IT support, so you save developers time on cosmetic adjustments. Commerce apps can be created and implemented faster than monolithic eCommerce platforms. Quick changes to be made to the front or back-end, without disturbing your taking resources away from the other side. Room for experimentation. A headless structure allows your system to become much more open to experimentation. Marketers can test new designs without affecting the back-end. Developers can make changes and tests while customers are still making purchases. Brands can phase in innovations and prevent front-end errors in production environments.Performance. When you control the front-end, you control performance. Shopify not loading fast enough? Tough cookies. They own the front-end and the servers. Your headless React code not loading fast enough? Just write better code and boost server performance.Time to market. Businesses can swiftly introduce any and all front-end experiences with no back-end development required. Whether it’s reacting to a new trend, entering into a new device or channel, or adjusting to events like COVID-19, headless makes it as easy as possible. 

The Cons of Headless Commerce While diversity and flexibility are great, there are a few cons to consider with headless commerce as well: Complexity: With headless, you’ll be responsible for more infrastructure, so it will be more complex. This isn’t quite like it used to be in the pre-Shopify era when you needed a large team to build and maintain the website. But it is not as simple as setting things up on one platform. That means you’ll need strong partners or a larger in-house tech team. Cost: A headless site will cost more to build, manage, and maintain. You will have multiple platforms playing different roles for the store. This increases platform costs as well as the effort to build and manage it. Growing Pains: Since this is a new development in the ecommerce world, there will naturally be growing pains attached to jumping into this type of solution. Integrations: Integrations are required for platforms to play nicely together on a headless site. As more tech platforms adopt this concept, this will become less of an issue. But for now, you will be limited to the platforms that currently support headless sites.

The Elements of the North Star Framework

he idea of managing by a North Star is not new. Many methodologies promote focus with a small set of related metrics and a compelling “True North.” In the early 2010s, Sean Ellis and the growth hacking movement helped popularize the structure of the North Star that inspired this book. We use the framework ourselves in product development at Amplitude.The North Star workshop helped Tia break through the frustrations she’d been experiencing. As she learned more about the framework, Tia realized that her team had been speaking three languages: the language of the customer (needs, goals, experiences, delight); the language of the product (features, workflows, releases); and the language of the business (vision, differentiation, revenue, growth).“There was nothing to really tie those things together,” she observed. “And I think this is why we were going in circles. That seems to be the key benefit of North Star: connecting those different perspectives.”

Her company seemed caught in a perpetual cycle of shiny objects, success theater, false starts, and vague pivots-by-PowerPoint. Just when they hit their stride, something would change. It felt like they were always talking past each othe

Make Use of Frames FacebookLinkedInTwitterPinterestEmailPrint Using frames or templates is a great way to scaffold instruction and build learners’ confidence in writing, particularly in writing tasks and genres with which they have little prior experience. A writing frame consists of a skeleton outline given to learners to scaffold their writing. By providing a few sentence starters and some rhetorical phrases common to the task or genre, frames give learners a structure that allows them to focus on expressing their thoughts

Let’s start out by quickly revisiting the core principles that have made the architecture prove popular.

Fast forward to 2020, Jamstack hit the mainstream, and we saw millions of developers and major brands like Unilever, Nike, and PayPal embrace the architecture. Vital initiatives like the Covid Tracking Project were able to scale from 0 to 2 million API requests on the Jamstack. Frameworks like Nuxt became commercial businesses, and we celebrated large public companies like Microsoft and Cloudflare as they launched early Jamstack offerings.

An additional way to see ROI for your automated testing is with parallel testing. Rather than running individual tests one after the other, parallel testing enables you to run multiple automated tests at the same time. This dramatically cuts down on the time it takes you to execute your automated tests. 

The time spent on the highly repeatable tasks a manual tester would go through is instead spent focusing on larger, more important issues involving the software you’re developing. 

Interactive storiesStorybook enables you to capture various states of a component in a structured format called a story. Each story simulates a particular UI state by rendering the component in isolation and supplying props and mock data.However, some UI states can only be reached via user interaction—click, drag, tap, type, etc. These were previously impossible to model in Storybook. To address this, we've added a new construct in Storybook 6.4 called the play function. That enables you to run scripted interactions after a story is rendered.Consider this play function that fills out a form to trigger a validation:

Onboarding is one of our only chances to make a great first impression on employees. Training plays a large role in that experience. If someone’s just starting out at your company, and you don’t have an effective system that supports them in learning how to do their new job, they'll likely turn right back around and leave. In fact, a strong onboarding experience can boost retention by 82%.

Critically thinking through problems can lead to more efficient solutions. Networked thinking can lead to more creative ideas. Being skeptical of your memories and intuitions can prevent painful mistakes.

Before we dive any further, let’s clarify first what we mean by a career ladder. Career laddering is typically a system used to show what expectations are at different levels of a role, a purpose of which is defining how one might be promoted. This can have different forms, but tends to be an internal document that states the expectations of a staff member at any given stage of their career.

Low actionability and low receptiveness

High actionability and low receptiveness

There are two ways for someone to be in this quadrant. The unhealthy way, as a people pleaser, with associated resentment and chaos. In a healthy way, everything feels very clear. It’s easy to fit feedback into their mental model, and adjustments feel natural and build on what they are currently working on. This comes from having a good idea themselves about what is happening and how they think they can improve.

It’s worth noting that we should be in different quadrants with different people. High-trust-high-respect relationships will be further up to the right, and low-trust-low-respect relationships will be down on the left.

Coachability is made up of two factors: someone’s receptiveness to feedback, and how highly actionable they are (what they do with it).

The more coachable someone is, the more they can grow, and the more quickly they can grow. Someone with low coachability can find it so hard to do anything outside of their expertise that it is understandable when managers focus their energy on the people they can help and grow instead.

How do your reports respond to feedback? As managers, it’s our job to grow the people we work with. This is how we build a bench, and scale ourselves and the organization. Of course, this is easy to say and hard to do, and we’ve all encountered a spectrum of people: those with whom it’s easy to accelerate and have a real and lasting impact on, and those where the lasting impact is the relief we feel once we no longer work with them.

4. Design of learning journeys Most corporate learning is delivered through a combination of digital-learning formats and in-person sessions. While our research indicates that immersive L&D experiences in the classroom still have immense value, leaders have told us that they are incredibly busy “from eight to late,” which does not give them a lot of time to sit in a classroom.

Employee roles are expected to continue evolving, and a large number of people will need to learn new skills to remain employable. Unsurprisingly, our research confirmed our initial hypothesis: corporate learning must undergo revolutionary changes over the next few years to keep pace with constant technological advances.

Empower managers to facilitate effective learning transfer As Fergal explains, managers have a key role to play in facilitating effective learning transfer. “Research shows that managers play the most critical role in learning transfer - especially in the post-training environment. Every learner needs a manager who understands them, and how they want to learn and grow. They need to have the right coaching style, and they need the right resources.”In most organizations, instructional design focuses on the needs of the learner. But as Fergal explains, focusing on the needs of your managers can pay dividends. “Ideally, you’d have the manager attend the same training as the learner. The problem is, managers are always stretched. So, what you can do instead is develop specific guidance for your managers.” Provide a script for managers to support their team’s learning

Effective self-directed learning requires a careful blend of employee autonomy and manager support. Employees want to learn to be better at their jobs, advance their skills, and further their careers, but they often don’t know where to start. More than half of employees report they would happily spend more time training if their managers offered specific guidance and recommendations. Encourage employees to set their own learning goals under the supervision of their managers.

In contrast, a proactive L&D team will work to identify potential learning needs before they become a significant issue for the company. They’ll source potential needs from employee suggestions and prioritize those needs based on business impact. Sourcing training needs from employees is more accurate and helps you uncover training gaps before they grow.

Conversely, a proactive training environment is more democratic. Learning is typically bottom-up, with employees playing an active role in identifying potential learning needs, setting their own learning paths, and even contributing to course materials.

Reactionary training is an expense

First of all, most workforces have moved, and will continue to move, to a decentralized model. The companies that adhere to a traditional labor structure, with a workforce limited to a small geographic area, are likely to operate at a disadvantage. Collaboration and innovation are now possible regardless of the geographic location of the employee. L&D practitioners, leaders and vendors should consider how they can leverage this new take on employer/employee relationships, labor structures, geographic proximity and employment options to capitalize on a global pool of talent.

According to Bersin Deloitte, successful organizations use a combination of observations, interviews and data to understand employees’ needs at a deeper level. It is important to really get out there and meet with employees and not rely on surveys and process schedules. From Design Thinking, we can also use “Personas” and “Journey Maps” to describe the workflow, activities, frustrations and opportunities

Differentiated instruction can be looked at as an instructor’s response to learner differences by adapting curriculum and instruction on six dimensions, including how the instructor approaches the (1) content (the what of the lesson), (2) process (the how of the lesson), and (3) expected product (the learner-produced result), and takes into consideration the learner’s (4) interest, (5) profile (learning strengths, weaknesses, and gaps), and (6) readiness. These adaptations can be planned to happen simultaneously, in sequence, or as needed depending on the circumstance and goals of instruction. Teaching small groups of learners, grouped based on instructional approach and learner profile, is a cornerstone of differentiated instruction.

Treat performance management as a continuous conversation, fueled by social recognition, peer-to-peer feedback, and growth

Your employee experience action plan Delivering a more positive experience for employees begins with diagnosis – listening to the voice of your employees frequently and consistently through the power of tools such as pulse surveys. It continues by identifying the culturally relevant workplace practices that you can build on and improve. Once that’s done, it’s time to take action:  Enable managers to design experiences consistent with your organization’s core values

How can organizations create an ideal employee experience? Creating a better employee experience comes down to two key factors: leadership and workplace practices

What are the benefits of a positive employee experience?  The study identifies five dimensions of the Index. When employees have a positive experience in the workplace, they demonstrate a greater sense of:  Belonging – feeling part of a team, group, or organization   Purpose – understanding why one’s work matters  Achievement – a sense of accomplishment in the work that is done  Happiness – the pleasant feeling arising in and around work  Vigor – the presence of energy, enthusiasm, and excitement at work 

RecruitingToday, the majority of job seekers look for information about a company on job search websites like Glassdoor. The rise in company review sites like Glassdoor indicates the desire of employees to understand what their experience will be like at an organization. This is why having a strong employee experience is critical. Without one, your negative reviews may chase away potential talent for your organization. 

Why is employee experience important?Designing a powerful employee experience isn’t simply a box to check for the HR team – it can also have a significant impact on many aspects of an organization. Company leaders recognize this influence, which is why nearly 80 percent of executives rate employee experience as very important or important. Below is an overview of areas that are affected by employee experience. 

Step 4: Review. Help learners build a habit of reviewing whether or not their summary is short, accurate, and written in their own words. Learn an easy-to-remember strategy to help learners master these steps in the TEAL Center Fact Sheet on Self-Regulated Strategy Development, called RAP: Read a paragraph or passage. Ask questions: What is the topic? What is the most important thing it tells me about the topic? What are the important details? Paraphrase: Put the information into your own words.

Step 3: When learners can identify the topic of a paragraph, recognize explicit main idea statements, and construct implicit main idea statements when needed. Show them how to apply these steps to a text with multiple paragraphs. Insist that learners write summaries in their own words. There are many ways to write something! Have peers work together or share drafts.

Step 2: When learners can identify the topic of a paragraph, they need to know how to find main ideas. You can define the main idea as the most important point an author makes about a topic. If you have not already done so, you will need to show learners how authors often put their main idea in the first sentence in a paragraph. Provide practice. Repeat the same procedure with paragraphs in which the main idea is in the last sentence and with paragraphs in which the main idea is embedded in the middle. Then, teach learners how to construct a main idea when one is not clearly stated. Model for learners how to construct implicit main idea statements for paragraphs, and provide them with numerous opportunities to practice.

Following are strategies for facilitating SDL. The teacher can help the learner to Conduct a self-assessment of skill levels and needs to determine appropriate learning objectives. Identify the starting point for a learning project. Match appropriate resources (books, articles, content experts) and methods (Internet searches, lectures, electronic discussion groups) to the learning goal. Negotiate a learning contract that sets learning goals, strategies, and evaluation criteria. Acquire strategies for decision-making and self-evaluation of work. Develop positive attitudes and independence relative to self-directed learning. Reflect on what he/she is learning.

SDL can be difficult for adults with low-level literacy skills who may lack independence, confidence, internal motivation, or resources.

During the evaluation phase, learners can ask, How well did I do? What did I learn? Did I get the results I expected? What could I have done differently? Can I apply this way of thinking to other problems or situations? Is there anything I don’t understand—any gaps in my knowledge? Do I need to go back through the task to fill in any gaps in understanding? How might I apply this line of thinking to other problems?

During the monitoring phase, learners can ask, How am I doing? Am I on the right track? How should I proceed? What information is important to remember? Should I move in a different direction? Should I adjust the pace because of the difficulty? What can I do if I do not understand?

Recommended Instructional Strategies Instructors can encourage ABE learners to become more strategic thinkers by helping them focus on the ways they process information. Self-questioning, reflective journal writing, and discussing their thought processes with other learners are among the ways that teachers can encourage learners to examine and develop their metacognitive processes. Fogarty (1994) suggests that Metacognition is a process that spans three distinct phases, and that, to be successful thinkers, students must do the following: Develop a plan before approaching a learning task, such as reading for comprehension or solving a math problem. Monitor their understanding; use “fix-up” strategies when meaning breaks down. Evaluate their thinking after completing the task.

Some instructional programs encourage students to engage in “metacognitive conversations” with themselves so that they can “talk” with themselves about their learning, the challenges they encounter, and the ways in which they can self-correct and continue learning.

Learners “construct knowledge” using cognitive strategies, and they guide, regulate, and evaluate their learning using metacognitive strategies

Flavell (1979) further divides metacognitive knowledge into three categories: Person variables: What one recognizes about his or her strengths and weaknesses in learning and processing information. Task variables: What one knows or can figure out about the nature of a task and the processing demands required to complete the task—for example, knowledge that it will take more time to read, comprehend, and remember a technical article than it will a similar-length passage from a novel. Strategy variables: The strategies a person has “at the ready” to apply in a flexible way to successfully accomplish a task; for example, knowing how to activate prior knowledge before reading a technical article, using a glossary to look up unfamiliar words, or recognizing that sometimes one has to reread a paragraph several times before it makes sense.

Elements of Metacognition Researchers distinguish between metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive regulation (Flavell, 1979, 1987; Schraw & Dennison, 1994).

presentation, which is typically characterized by a “sage on the stage” delivering content to an audience, facilitation usually involves a “guide on the side” who asks questions, moderates discussions, introduces activities, and helps participants learn

What Are the Differences Between Facilitation, Presentation, and Training? Trainers help others improve their performance by teaching, instructing, or facilitating learning. As such, facilitation and presentation are both tools in a trainer’s toolkit. In most cases, effective and engaging trainers will spend less time presenting content through lectures or lecturettes and more time facilitating learning around that content. Presentation vs. Facilitation

2. Give your manager homeworkIf you’ve asked the questions above and your manager cannot give you an answer to those questions yet, give them homework. 

Whether you like to call it job hopping or you hate the term—and whether we like it or not—job hopping is on the rise. The majority of workers—64% favor job hopping, according to a new survey by staffing firm Robert Half. That’s up 22% from a similar survey four years ago. Of course, Millennial workers felt the most favorably about changing jobs often, with 75% of employees under 34 surveyed agreeing that job hopping could benefit their careers. 

Scale your learning processes through the entire organizationLearning isn’t something you contain in one department. A Learning Organization should foster learning and growth across the entire company (otherwise, it’s just a Learning Department).

Identify and leverage internal experts early onThe first step toward becoming a Learning Organization is to turn to your internal experts. This process is a must, as it allows you to get allies early on who can help you speed up the Learning Organization transformation process.

How to become a Learning Organization

Learning Organizations provide clear paths for growthAs a Learning Organization, learning is a core part of your company and team growth. A Learning Organization will work with employees to set concrete goals around learning and create paths for professional growth.

The accessibility and convenience of learning in the Learning Organization model are crucial, as a majority of employees cite a lack of time as their reason for not learning more at work. When you put employees in control of finding time to chat with a mentor or take a self-guided course, you’re allowing learning to adapt to their schedule, not the other way around.

Learning Organizations make learning more convenientIn a traditional learning model, learning happens at a pre-determined time—quarterly training or mandatory meetings. This translates to disruptions for your team, as a blanket time will rarely fit everyone’s schedule.

Learning Organizations maintain institutional knowledgeInstitutional knowledge is proprietary information within your company—how to do a specific task or ways to communicate with your clients, etc. Without any kind of institutional knowledge retention in place, this knowledge walks out your door when someone leaves the company.

3. Keep it interactiveScience tells us that passive learning—dull lectures, pages of written text—don’t work nearly as well as when learners interact in one way or another with the learning material or instructor. You should use opportunities to build interaction into your in-person, online, synchronous, and asynchronous courses:

2. Don’t just copy-paste in-person training to an online environmentHowever, it isn’t just as easy as hitting control C on an hour-long in-person lecture and pasting it as notes for your Zoom-based training. You need to have a virtual classroom strategy. Here are a few ideas to get you started:A full day of training ≠ a full day of synchronous training online‘Read the room’ with polls Identify and fix issues quickly with post-classroom surveys Align content with expectations using pre-classroom surveysHow social do you want this experience to be? Webcam, microphone, chat, moderators...Include alternative voices, even in the instructor-led sessionsEncourage people to use the chat so that they put what they learn into writing ⌨️ Make sure everyone speaks at least once, even if it’s just for a brief intro 🗣️Encourage participants to become facilitators themselves to change the power distribution of the call 👩👵🏽👨

Now, since managers are scrambling to figure out seating arrangements and schedules that can accommodate a hybrid workforce—Samantha comes in on Mondays and Fridays, Tim only one week out of the month, and Arjuna leaves by 5pm—throwing in-person training in the mix is doubly difficult

1. It’s not about physical vs. digital, but synchronous vs asynchronousIn L&D teams’ minds, the big split used to be between training that happened in-person and training that happened online. 

Having explicit techniques in the workflow not only improves the problem solving process, but also creates a KCS article as a by-product of the problem solving process. The structured problem solving process in KCS includes two simple, yet powerful, concepts: Seek to understand before we seek to solve (a Core Concept) Search early, search often (a Solve Loop technique)

Knowledge translation encompasses all of the activities that aim to close the gap between research and implementation.

Sometimes, though, you might want to have an object be garbage collected even sooner. For example, we might want to have a cache that we want to have the garbage collector clear out more frequently, just in case that cache fills up with big objects that consume all of the browser’s memory. For that, we use a WeakRef. We can create a WeakRef with its constructor, which takes an object of some kind. // This is a regular Object const blogPostCache = {}; // This is a WeakRef Object. const weakBlogPostCache = new WeakRef({});

Just last year we were introduced to Promise.allSettled, which runs all of the promises, regardless of whether any of them fulfill or reject. Once all of them are resolved one way or the other, it returns an array describing the results of each promise.

Promise.any()

. Brett Wolfson-Stofko, a research associate at the National Development and Research Institutes who is currently researching public drug injection, tells Inverse that blue lights may only deter people from injecting into certain veins, like those in the arms.“It won’t stop other types of injection, such as groin injections, where it’s all done by feel, as well as jugular injections in the neck,” he says. “Neck and groin injections can be much more risky.”

The idea behind this approach, which involves switching out normal light bulbs for blue-tinted ones, is that the blue light makes it hard to see a vein and inject into it. But there are some huge problems with this approach. Research has shown that drug users will still try to inject drugs in a blue-lit bathroom, even if it means they could accidentally miss their vein, which increases the risk of infection or soft tissue damage.

Tweet Post Share Save Get PDF Buy Copies Print Idea in Brief The Situation The fast-changing nature of business today means that employees’ continual learning is vital for organizational success. The Response Chief learning officers are assuming a more expansive role, aiming not only to train employees but also to transform their organizations’ capabilities and make learning an integral part of the company’s strategic agenda. The Specifics Extensive interviews at 19 large companies revealed that “transformer CLOs”—those who are embracing this expanded role—are driving changes in their enterprises’ learning goals, learning methods, and learning departments. In today’s dynamic business environment, workplace learning has become a key lever for success. And with that shift, the traditional role of the chief learning officer is changing. No longer are CLOs responsible just for training—making skills-based and compliance-oriented courses available to employees and perhaps running leadership-development programs. Instead, they’re embracing a more powerful role in which they reshape capabilities and organizational culture. We call this new type of leader the transformer CLO. Transformer CLOs are strong senior managers whose mission is to help their companies and their employees thrive, even as technologies, business practices, and whole industries undergo rapid change. The transformer CLO role is not reserved for the lucky few whose CEOs see learning and development as essential; any CLO can take steps to fundamentally change the nature of learning in an organization. We recently conducted extensive interviews with 21 senior learning officers at 19 large companies to find out how they conceive of their roles and organizations. This research, which builds on our prior work on digital leadership and culture, revealed that transformer CLOs are driving three principal types of change in their enterprises. They’re transforming their organizations’ learning goals, shifting the focus from the development of skills to the development of mindsets and capabilities that will help workers perform well now and adapt smoothly in the future. They’re transforming their organizations’ learning methods, making them more experiential and immediate, and atomizing content for delivery when and where it’s needed. And they’re transforming their organizations’ learning departments, making them leaner, more agile, and more strategic. Transforming Learning Goals The need for organizations to become more adaptable means changing the goals of corporate learning. Instead of narrowly focusing on job- or compliance-related training for all but their high-potential leaders, organizations should cultivate every employee’s ability to explore, learn, and grow. The objective is not only to train people but also to position the company for success. To achieve this, CLOs should strive to do the following: Reshape leadership development. Creating a true learning organization starts at the top, with preparing executives to lead in new ways. One company that has done this well recently is Standard Chartered, a multinational financial-services company. Three years ago, under a new CEO, Standard Chartered launched a strategy that fundamentally changed the way it does business—and required its leaders to build new strengths. “We’d been doing executive development for years,” said Ewan Clark, the company’s global head of leadership effectiveness and organizational development. “But a lot of it had been about either pure self-actualization or aspects of coaching. This time we’ve put the organizational agenda right in the center of executive development, and we’ve said that leadership is about developing the skills, capabilities, and value behaviors to lead this agenda.” As part of that effort, the company began teaching leaders to augment their experience and intuition with investigation, experimentation, and data-driven analysis when making decisions about their parts of the organization. Their instructions, according to Clark, were straightforward: “Articulate a hypothesis. Go out and experiment. And if it doesn’t work, then why not? What did you learn? Add to it. Capture your learning. Share it with other people.” This new approach required changes in the leaders’ mindsets, not just their skills and procedures. Organizations should cultivate every employee’s ability to learn and grow. It’s not enough, though, to improve leadership capabilities at the very top of the organization. To effect widespread change, organizations need strong leadership to cascade down. Cargill, a privately held food and agriculture business, achieved this by democratizing learning. As Julie Dervin, the company’s global head of corporate learning and development, told us, “We really only had the capacity to reach about 10% to 15% of the total relevant population in a given year when delivering a particular learning program. Unintentionally, we were creating a learning culture where only a select few got access to high-quality training.” Dervin and her team resolved to fix that problem. “We’ve been fundamentally changing how we design, deliver, and shape those learning experiences to be able to reach exponentially more learners with high-impact learning,” she said. Concentrate on capabilities, not competence. In their change programs, transformer CLOs focus less on teaching currently needed skills and more on developing mindsets and behaviors that can enable employees to perform well in tasks that may not yet be defined. This shift may also mean moving away from comprehensive skills inventories and competency maps, which can lead people to check boxes rather than build capabilities. “We don’t really know enough about what the world will look like in the next couple of years to be able to predict exactly what skills we will need,” said Amelie Villeneuve, the head of the corporate university at UBS, the multinational financial-services firm. “If you focus on building individual microskills, you may be missing the bigger picture.” Emphasize digital thinking. The transformer CLOs we interviewed have sought to develop digital awareness and aptitude in their employees. Singapore-based DBS Bank, for example, created a learning curriculum that aims to build seven priority skills for digital-business success. “While not everyone needs to be an expert at each of these,” said David Gledhill, who served as the company’s chief information officer until August 2019, “we want them to know enough so that they understand the transformation we’re driving and contribute great ideas.” Vital Skills for a Digital World To equip its employees for success in today’s digital business environment, DBS Bank focuses on imparting skills ... One priority, for instance, is to get people more comfortable using data in decision-making. Data-driven thinking is key for almost everyone in an organization, but in different ways. Frontline sales and service reps need to be aware of information about customer preferences and behaviors. Executives must learn to trust and value data even when it contradicts their past experiences and gut feelings. Leaders often don’t know what to do with all the data that digital innovations are making available to them, said Nancy Robert, who, as the executive vice president of the American Nurses Association, led the design and delivery of training for millions of the organization’s members. As Robert put it, nurses don’t necessarily have the “digital-data competency” to answer the questions that confront them. “How am I going to interpret that data and integrate it into the rest of the care?” she said. “That takes a very different cognitive skill.” Cultivate curiosity and a growth mindset. CLOs can amplify their teams’ energies and capabilities by fostering a “pull” model of learning, in which employees set their own agendas for gaining knowledge and skills. Doing that, however, requires an environment that sparks employees’ curiosity and ignites in them the desire to learn and grow. Villeneuve has worked on this at UBS and previously at Google, where, she said, she learned how it is possible to “accelerate wisdom more effectively by providing a series of contexts where people can play and learn at the same time.” Leaders at DBS Bank launched a number of programs to find out what would inspire curiosity among their employees. One notable success is GANDALF Scholars, in which employees can apply to receive grants of $1,000 toward training on any work-related topic, as long as they agree to teach what they learn to at least 10 other people. When you engage employees in teaching, as DBS is doing, you expand and deepen learning. Rahul Varma, the senior managing director for talent at Accenture, calls this a “leaders teaching leaders” philosophy. “You learn the most,” he said, “when you actually have to teach somebody what you learn.” This approach turns the natural curiosity and energy of any single employee into learning opportunities for many others. It certainly seems to be working at DBS: As of early 2019, 120 grant recipients had gone on to train more than 13,500 people—4,000 in person and the rest through digital channels. According to Gledhill, many GANDALF Scholars report that the teaching component of the program is their favorite part. “What they enjoyed most,” he said, “was the empowerment.” Transformer CLOs are personalizing, digitizing, and atomizing learning. UBS, DBS, Accenture, and other companies that have embraced a growth mindset subscribe to two beliefs: that everyone’s abilities can and must be developed if the organization is to thrive in a fast-moving environment, and that innate talent is just the starting point. But for a growth mindset to become part of the company’s culture, all employees must internalize those beliefs. That won’t happen unless learning is pervasive, available to everybody who might benefit from it. And that requires rethinking the way learning is delivered. Transforming Learning Methods Until recently, providing learning to all employees was too expensive, and there weren’t enough trainers. Employees almost always had to be physically present at training sessions, which often meant traveling and missing time at work. That naturally limited the number of participants, making learning an exclusive rather than a democratic opportunity. Now things have changed. Peer teaching greatly expands the number of trainers and expert content developers. And digital instruction expands the reach of learning opportunities to more employees without the company’s having to worry about enrollment numbers, scheduling conflicts, or travel costs. Employees can access learning when and where they need it, often from colleagues who live the topic every day. Transformer CLOs are taking advantage of all these developments. Perhaps most visibly, they are moving away from traditional classroom training in which people are exposed to the same content for the same amount of time regardless of their particular needs and levels of understanding. Instead, these CLOs are personalizing, digitizing, and atomizing learning. They are shifting their attention from specific courses to the whole learning experience. To accommodate the different preferences employees have for how they consume and absorb information, a growing number of companies now make training available through a variety of media—text, audio, video, and more. Transformer CLOs go even further. They’re introducing innovations such as programs that set aside learning time on people’s calendars, and mobile apps that pose leadership questions to managers during their day. They’re offering games and simulations and encouraging the company’s own subject-matter experts to produce YouTube-type instructional videos. They’re even exploring the use of artificial intelligence to develop recommendation engines that, guided by individual and peer behavior, will suggest tailored learning activities to employees. In short, transformer CLOs do everything possible to create engaging and effective experiences that meet employees wherever they happen to be, geographically, temporally, or intellectually. Optimize the inventory of learning resources. CLOs need to be selective about what learning materials to stock and how to supply them. At GE Digital, Heather Whiteman, the company’s former head of learning, used analytics with her team to study hundreds of courses taken by thousands of employees—and then systematically rooted out those found lacking, not just in terms of usage and ratings but in their effects on employee growth. “If a course didn’t move the dial for capabilities that lead to performance,” she told us, “we would drop it in favor of one that did.” Similarly, Villeneuve and her team at UBS used analytics to optimize the learning inventory. The bank had a wealth of training materials online, but analysis showed that many employees who searched for those materials gave up before finding what they needed. Armed with that knowledge, Villeneuve and her team focused on developing a core of fewer but better resources. Then, applying principles of behavioral science, they designed a user interface that put no more than six items on a page, with no more than three clicks needed to get to any item. The results have been remarkable: Ten times more employees now engage with the materials on the company’s core learning shelf. Balance face-to-face and digital learning. CLOs should experiment to get the right mix of face-to-face and digital learning. Cargill, which until recently allocated 80% of its budget to in-person training and only 20% to digital training, is in the process of flipping that ratio around. Dervin and her team have redesigned the company’s leadership-development programs to put some of the coursework online. Senior leaders initially had reservations about the effectiveness of digital instruction and worried about losing opportunities to network and build relationships. But those misgivings were short-lived. The first three cohorts who tried the online learning ended up enjoying the experience so much that they engaged in more training than was required. “What we’re seeing,” Dervin said, “is that this goes hand in glove with the pace and the rhythms of their day-to-day, and they’re loving the flexibility it provides.” Deutsche Telekom, for its part, has developed a matrix to help determine whether a given offering might be better handled with face-to-face instruction, a purely digital approach, or a blend of the two. The matrix helps leaders weigh multiple factors: the type of content, the target audience, and development and delivery considerations. Digital or Face-to-Face Training? Deutsche Telekom considers a number of factors when deciding how best to present specific learning programs. FORMAT CONTENT TARGET AUDIENCE DEVELOPMENT AND DELIVERY CONSIDERATIONS Purely digital formats Best suited for: Hard skills Mandatory training Simple topics Durable, reusable material Larger groups Geographically dispersed or mobile employees, such as those in sales and field service More time required to produce nonstandard material Higher up-front cost to produce nonstandard material Lower cost to deliver per user No need for trainers or videoconferencing facilities at the location Face-to-face or blended formats Best suited for: Soft skills Ad hoc training Complex topics Material that changes frequently Smaller groups Geographically concentrated employees Employees being onboarded Less time required to produce nonstandard material Lower up-front cost for course preparation Potential higher cost to deliver, but possibility of using existing staff as trainers Need for training rooms or videoconferencing at the location   Source: Adapted from company documents © HBR.org Rethink face-to-face learning. As engaging and effective as digital learning experiences can be, face-to-face learning is still important—although it may take new forms. Accenture employs some very sophisticated digital learning platforms and tools and has a vast library of online content, but Varma’s experience is that digital learning goes only so far. “What we’ve found,” he said, “is that there is no substitute for getting people together in cohorts that are cross-cultural and cross-functional.” To achieve that without requiring employees to be in the same physical space, Accenture has created more than 90 “connected classrooms” around the world. These enable the company to offer all employees some types of training—classes in design thinking, for example—that are taught by in-house experts in several different locations. “One facilitator could be in Bangalore, another could be in Manila, and another in Dalian, China,” Varma told us. People are still learning from people, but thanks to videoconferencing and other interactive technologies, along with more-collaborative approaches to learning, traditional geographic constraints no longer apply. Teams all over the world now coach one another and solve problems together. “That is how we do learning, every single day,” Varma said. Some companies have pursued another approach for their face-to-face learning: They’ve created hands-on simulations in which participants must solve real-life problems. At UBS, employees take part in “three-dimensional case studies” in order to develop key capabilities, such as the ability to influence stakeholders or rethink a company product. The interactive case studies test not only their knowledge and intellectual skills but also how they engage with others and react as the situation unfolds. As Villeneuve told us, “They have to do it all together, and they get feedback on everything at the same time.” Face-to-face learning is still important—although it may take new forms. Similarly, operational professionals at DBS spend three days in a simulation exercise that involves transforming a hypothetical old-school bank into a full-fledged digital bank. They work with trainers and colleagues from other parts of the business to tackle staffing and resourcing issues and handle crisis situations unique to the digital world. An element of competition heightens the intensity and engagement. Go beyond instruction. Transformer CLOs believe that instruction alone is not sufficient for meaningful learning. Accenture’s Varma anchors his approach in what he calls the three I’s: instruction, introspection, and immersion. Instruction comes first, of course. But then trainees need to engage in reflection—the introspection part of Varma’s three I’s. This might involve giving employees time to privately mull over what they’ve learned, having them talk it over with a fellow trainee on a walk, or providing a formal opportunity during class to discuss it with a whole cohort.

At the second Wall Street action, "over a hundred people got arrested," Barr says. Many of them were people who had never contemplated civil disobedience before. "It was such a terrific feeling to be arrested with my yoga teacher," Petrelis recalls with a chuckle. And it was profoundly affirming. "All those men and women screaming at the top of their lungs — I felt they were taking my anger and putting it out there to the world."

But as central as anger was to ACT UP's success, it would also prove a force for division. "It was a war zone" All this was unimaginable to Petrelis back in 1985. As furious as he was with the government, he was just as indignant that so few other gay men around him seemed to echo his rage. "I just thought because I was so angry that there should have been more angry people," he recalls.

Talk Abstract:Your job title says "software engineer", but you seem to spend most of your time in meetings. You'd like to have time to code, but nobody else is onboarding the junior engineers, updating the roadmap, talking to the users, noticing the things that got dropped, asking questions on design documents, and making sure that everyone's going roughly in the same direction. If you stop doing those things, the team won't be as successful. But now someone's suggesting that you might be happier in a less technical role. If this describes you, congratulations: you're the glue. If it's not, have you thought about who is filling this role on your team?Every senior person in an organisation should be aware of the less glamorous - and often less-promotable - work that needs to happen to make a team successful. Managed deliberately, glue work demonstrates and builds strong technical leadership skills. Left unconscious, it can be career limiting. It can push people into less technical roles and even out of the industry.Let's talk about how to allocate glue work deliberately, frame it usefully and make sure that everyone is choosing a career path they actually want to be on.

Some examples of deficiencies: new employees being unable to navigate in the organization, or unaware of protocols or company guidelines. A good onboarding process can reduce “Team Debt” and ensure that new employees are additive rather than subtractive.

It’s the idea that when employees aren’t properly trained, integrated, or managed, they are operating at less than optimal efficiency and “team debt” is accrued. Each new employee that is added without being sufficiently trained and integrated increases that debt. If unchecked, team debt can reach a point where expansion must be halted in order to address the deficiencies of the existing system.

Purpose for the Mentor:Develop leadership skills‍Being put in the position of a role model can help mentors become better leaders and instill confidence in their leadership ability. The responsibility of helping guide someone’s career and goals requires the senior employee to teach, to motivate and to offer honest feedback in difficult conversations. All these skills are at the top of the required list for a leader.

Being recognized as an advisor‍After a good mentoring session, mentees are likely to mention it to others in the organization. In little time, people will come to you for advice and doors will open for you to be inserted into leadership positions or projects. 

An important point to note is that there's a difference between coaching and mentoring. A coach's job is to improve a particular skill, but a mentor plays a more holistic role in helping a mentee improve

Collaborative exams allow students the opportunities to learn from and teach each other. Open-book and self-graded exams are not as good at sorting or ranking students, but they are often just as good (if not better) tools for learning.

I know quite a few STEM folks who ungrade in various ways. Some specific stuff I’ve seen work in STEM classes: project-based learning with self-assessment, process notebooks (like a lab notebook but with an emphasis on metacognition), and collaborative exams.

I haven’t seen a college mission statement with any of these:• Pit students and teachers against one another• Rank students competitively• Reduce the humanity of students to a single low-resolution standardized metric• Frustrate learning with approaches that discourage intrinsic motivation• Reinforce bias against marginalized students• Fail to trust students’ knowledge of their own learningMost assessment mechanisms in higher education simply do not assess what we say we value most.

Learning is not linear, and meaningful learning resists being quantified. Our assessment approaches should create space for learning not arbitrarily delimit it.

I'm increasingly struck by the degree to which we approach grades and grading as inevitable. If we can’t “imagine the world as though it might be otherwise,” as Maxine Greene would say, we are stuck with the bizarre customs and habits our institutions have adopted.

The best course of action is to be intentional and systematic from the get-go. That is, rather than seeing the development, communication, and management of knowledge as “nice-to-haves” within your organization, start building these processes into your organization’s standard routine: Include knowledge management in your project descriptions and timelines. Set a “shelf life” for your knowledge documents (the maximum amount of time that can pass before revisiting said documents in some way). Perform scheduled maintenance to your knowledge documentation on a monthly, quarterly, and yearly basis.

The knowledge coursing through your organization today can—and often will—become outdated, and even obsolete, as time goes on. This can happen for a variety of reasons: The development and release of a new product A shift within your organization’s processes A change in overall trends throughout your industry That being the case, you’ll want to remain absolutely vigilant in terms of keeping your knowledge as robust and up-to-date as possible.

One of the first issues you’re likely to face when spearheading a new (or improving your current) knowledge-management initiative is that some of your employees may not be so open to the change. In some cases, you’ll have employees who can’t see why they need to teach other people in the organization how to do their job. In other cases, you’ll have people who don’t understand why they need to learn how to do other people’s jobs. And, of course, you’ll have some employees who fit into both categories.

Executive summary The fast-changing and unpredictable challenges of work may seem unsurmountable. But the learning behaviors of thousands of international businesses on the Udemy for Business platform and a survey of over 500 global professionals offer a glimpse of the bright future that lies ahead. In this report, you'll learn: Why your organization needs to think beyond job-related skills How your workforce can “crack the code on collaboration” Why data science isn't just for data scientists anymore What skills will reshape software engineering and IT roles

But decentralized learning goes farther than that: in a decentralized, Collaborative Learning environment, each team member participates in the learning process. They can identify their learning needs, request courses, give feedback on existing courses, and create courses themselves. We call this a bottom-up approach

1. Embrace decentralized learningCentralized learning flows out from a single point: instructors teach and employees learn. But many businesses are shifting towards a more decentralized approach, making this system obsolete. More employees are working remotely and asynchronously, and they need to break learning into small chunks that fit into their daily work schedule. The first step in decentralizing learning is to shift to online classes that can be completed in micro-sessions throughout the week.

Here are the economics: The cost of recruiting a midcareer software engineer (who earns $150,000- 200,000 per year) can be $30,000 or more including recruitment fees, advertising, and recruiting technology. This new hire also requires onboarding and has a potential turnover of two to three times higher than an internal recruit. By contrast, the cost to train and reskill an internal employee may be $20,000 or less, saving as much as $116,000 per person over three years.  The net savings: it can cost as much as 6-times more to hire from the outside than to build from within.

Leaders from Accenture and DBS Bank told Harvard Business Review that encouraging employees to teach newly-acquired skills to their colleagues expanded and deepened learning for all. The training of a single employee results in learning opportunities for dozens of others. Collaborative approaches to training ripple through an organization, where ideas and methodologies cross-pollinate from one part of the business to another

Losing highly skilled employees can be a significant drain on company resources. Gallup estimatesa 100-person company with average attrition rates spends between $660,000-$2.6 million per year on turnover and replacement

To transform L&D into a key strategic partner, it’s not enough to simply oversee learning operations; you need to integrate them with the organization’s goals.

Many companies view L&D as a service provider for employees instead of a strategic partner for growth

You can’t force learners to participate in your training courses (and if you can, they are likely rebelling internally), but you can help them see the benefits of the learning experience you are providing by sharing the big-picture vision and purposes driving the need for the training. When you strategically align your training and techniques to the company goals and core values, you reinforce the purpose and culture of the company while transferring the knowledge that employees need to be successful.

I’m not saying that SMART goals are wrong; I just want to help you think bigger and dig deeper into your vision of what you’re building. Look at your goals again. Which mindset do they fit into? Is there a variation of your goals that better explains why you want to achieve them? Document not only the goals that you want to achieve but the reasons you want to achieve them.

Learning Organization Learning organizations invest in and facilitate the ongoing growth of their employees

Any organization can begin the journey to a continuous learning culture by focusing its transformation along three critical dimensions, as shown in Figure 1.

Enable Continuous Learning Employees at every level are lifelong learners. Changes in technology, as well as changes to method and practice, are routine; opportunities for continuing education, however, are far less frequent. Also, the initial move to Lean-Agile requires many new techniques and skills, including: Feature and Story writing Building in quality Automated testing Collective ownership Agile Architecture Continuous Integration Pair work Mastering Product Owner and Scrum Master roles Team building

Organizing a Community of Practice CoPs are highly organic, and like most living organisms they have a natural life cycle, beginning with an idea for a new community and ending when the community members feel the group has achieved its objectives or is no longer providing value. Figure 4 shows the typical life cycle of a CoP.

That is what drives craftsmanship and continuous learning (see the Continuous Learning Culture competency article), facilitating the adoption of new methods and techniques

Types of communities of practice Today, communities of practices are increasingly being used to improve knowledge management and connect people within business, government, education, and other organizations.

trying to get there before the 6pm start to establish ourselves in our preferred place in the hall means leaving ours around 5:20pm… it should not take half an hour to travel 6.5 miles, but it does and it just takes any energy I had out of me. You know The Spoon Theory? Let’s say by 5pm I have about 3 spoons left for the day; 30 minutes of rush hour traffic can easily take away all 3 of those spoons, leaving me susceptible to meltdown.

Another area of regression is going shopping at the grocery store or being out in town. It’s not like I particularly enjoy either of these things, but I could certainly just about cope for enough time to get done what I need to and then leave without incident. Now, I will actively wait to go grocery shopping until a guaranteed quiet time (usually around 7pm Friday or Saturday and either 10am or 2pm on a Sunday) and sometimes have had to resort to putting in my earplugs or headphones in order to minimise sensory overload (noisy kids or the rickety stock trolleys staff drag along with squeaking wheels and rattling metal!). The only time we go into town now is when we get haircuts. Whereas before we would wander amongst the shops and look around for a while, our routine now is to go for an early lunch at Jane’s Pantry, maybe nip into Boots first to pick up a few items, then go home.

physically shutting down, including the loss of speech.  

had access to computers for almost as long as I can remember. When my parents got an IBM Aptiva when I was in grade school, they

Five basic principles

Books and videos rarely deliver here: Mass mediums are typically bad at helping people translate ideas to practice.

Their self-evaluations (which I sometimes call “process letters”), and my responses to them, become a space of dialogue,

In his review in 2014, his manager said that the company had already bumped him up 14 percent, and “with bonuses, company-paid health insurance and other perks the total compensation package easily puts Angelo well on the way, if not already in excess of, his $80K/year long term goal.” He refused to further increase Ragin’s pay. Ragin was then chided for advocating for himself.

One of the key metrics on the IT team was how many tickets agents solved. Mailchimp employees would write in with technical issues, and it was up to the team to resolve them as quickly as possible.

“The support team was treated like the custodians,” a former staffer says. “Everyone loves and respects the custodian. They’re a friendly face when you walk in the door. But no one has any interest in promoting the custodian.” “It feels like you’re the lowest rung on the ladder,” a current employee adds. “When you see people of color, women, LGBTQ people in this department it feels really shitty. We’re hidden away.”

In response to this allegation, Mailchimp said no formal HR complaints have been filed against the manager in question.

Dale remembers that once, a manager shushed her when she responded to a question she’d been asked directly during a meeting with him and another male colleague. He then asked her male counterpart to answer the question. She says that when she went to HR to tell them about the behavior, nothing seemed to change. “Leadership at Mailchimp clearly knows about this and doesn’t do anything about it,” she says.

Group chats and Slack groups filled with former Mailchimp employees were set ablaze by the news. Workers began discussing their own experiences with alleged discrimination and unequal pay, wondering whether what they viewed as the open secret of Mailchimp’s company culture would finally be brought into the open. “They’re going to have to acknowledge the problems that are being raised, and respond with something other than, ‘we have investigated ourselves and found we did nothing wrong,’” one said in an alumni Slack. “I wish more people would speak out but I wont for the same reasons (NDA, fear of retaliation),” another responded.

Mailchimp told employees that it had investigated Ellis’ claims and found them to be unsubstantiated. But CEO Ben Chestnut also said that he knew the company needed to do better. “I’m hearing loud and clear that we have work to do, including needing greater transparency around pay equity and an intentional focus on inclusion,” he wrote in a letter to staffers, which was first reported in Business Insider. “I want to address these issues head-on, and I know we’ll be stronger for it. I’m asking our leadership team to prioritize these issues and work with me to fix them. What we do needs to match what we say.”

In a statement emailed to The Verge, a Mailchimp spokesperson said: “We’ve always wanted Mailchimp to be a place where everyone feels included, respected, and empowered to do their best work. But that hasn’t been the experience for all of our employees. Over the past four years we’ve doubled in size, and while we worked hard to foster an inclusive culture as we grew, we fell short in some important areas.” The company declined to comment on The Verge’s questions about individual personnel matters.

Employees say the company’s position as one of the premier startups in Atlanta allows it to view workers as disposable, as there are fewer tech jobs to choose from than if the company were located in San Francisco or New York City. They also say that because the organization is private and has never taken on outside investment, executives can operate without the specter of more public accountability. Many feel they’ve exhausted every option internally and are only speaking to the press as a last resort.

After they returned to Atlanta, Oliver sent her a message saying he’d thought they were going to hook up on the trip. Luaces responded that she didn’t think it was a good idea. Shortly after, the offer to move to his team seemingly evaporated. Luaces’ role was being eliminated in the reorg, and she was told she could either take a lower-level position or leave the company.

AlejandraAlejandra Luaces had only worked at Mailchimp for four months when she got a surprising anonymous email. “Oliver* is in an open marriage and is fair game,” the message read, referring to a senior engineering manager. “Serena* also knows so you can ask her to confirm.”

The teacher was the Brazilian educator and thinker Paulo Freire. As Raff Carmen, a scholar and practitioner of adult education, would write decades later in an obituary of Freire, the confrontation “stood out as the cathartic moment shaping Freire’s thinking about progressive education: even when one must speak to people, one must convert the ‘to’ into a ‘with’ the people.” The moment captured something vital about knowledge: it comes from lived experience

All hallmarks of a disability frequently written off as over-exaggeration or attention-seeking

The greatest insistence that I can somehow power through my disability comes from the people that claim that my brain would simply work if capitalism was eradicated.CW/TW: Ableist language, eugenicsI don’t know who decided that “Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder” was an accurate or effective description of what ADHD does to a person, but I think they should be stripped of all medical credentials, even if it’s posthumously. It is a woefully insufficient title, incapable of fully describing the laundry list of physical, emotional, and mental symptoms that come with some quirk of brain chemistry. Issues with attention span and regulation of one’s limbs are certainly on that list, but there’s so much more.

Microsoft’s LinkedIn said it avoids gendered pronouns in its year-old predictive messaging tool, Smart Replies, to ward off potential blunders.

Agolo, a New York startup that has received investment from Thomson Reuters, uses AI to summarize business documents.

A system shown billions of human sentences becomes adept at completing common phrases but is limited by generalities. Men have long dominated fields such as finance and science, for example, so the technology would conclude from the data that an investor or engineer is “he” or “him.” The issue trips up nearly every major tech company.

Your ability to change your Environment variables is dependent on where you sit in the org. If you are a manager, you have a higher ability to change things like resources and team culture.But if you are an individual contributor, you have less ability to change these things. Your manager is typically the one in control. That is why when all else is equal, you should always choose a situation with the best manager.

Making a decision isn't just about where the variable is today, but what you are able to do about it. Your ability to change each variable is not evenly distributed. Some are harder to change than others.Your Ability To Change Environment Variables

These variables work in concert with each other so you need to dig to the root cause.

Evaluating The Manager Variable

Major Amplifier = A manager that is a major amplifier is a sponsor for you. They have a fundamental belief in you and are actively investing in getting you to the next level. They seek out opportunities for you internally and externally,

Slightly Hurting = Your manager is creating some light friction to getting your work done. They may be sharing context, light feedback, but not helping unblock constraints.

Hurting A Lot = ****Your manager might be doing one of the thing (context, feedback, tradeoffs, unblocking constraints) but none of the others.

Major Bottleneck = Your manager isn't sharing the proper context you need to do your best work. They also aren't recognizing tradeoffs, and just keep piling work on. Not helping to unblock constraints. No useful feedback or conditions of satisfaction. You don't feel like they believe in you or are actively investing in your success.

What is happening with this variable?Which ones are in flux?Where are there weaknesses?Which ones are most important?

Step by Step On How To Use The FrameworkLets walk through a step-by-step of how to use the framework. We'll go through 6 steps:Spell Out Your VariablesGive Each Variable A ScoreIdentify What Matters MostEvaluate Your Ability To Change The VariableUnderstand The Time Horizon Of ChangeMap Your Variables to Decisions and Areas of Development

Strategic Thinking - Strategic thinking is your ability to see the forest through the trees. As an IC you learn to do the work. As you grow in your career, you need to learn how you anticipate the work. You need to understand the bigger system, the needs of the system, and where you and your team align with that system.

Influence/Leadership - As an IC, you are responsible for influencing your peers on your direct team. As you become a manager, you need to influence the people you directly manage, but also indirectly influence people you don't manage. Then as you move up in management, you do less direct downward influencing and more indirect influencing across the company. Influence is the hardest skill, because it depends on the characters around you. You can be great at it, but perhaps the people around you aren't.

Communication - In any function, a key part of progression is your ability to get better at what you convey, how you convey it, and whom you convey it to.

The exact skills will vary from function to function and role to role. But there tend to be four common areas of skills:

Skills are the things that are within your direct control that enable your success.

Company Culture - The culture of the company needs to align with your beliefs and working style. Things like work-life balance are included in culture. The more misaligned the working culture is, the less motivated or enthusiastic you will be about the work.

Scope - Your scope is the runway you have to do your best work. You need to evaluate how your scope aligns to what the company needs and what you are capable of handling. You want scope that is a little bigger than what you are currently capable of, but not so big that you have a hard time executing. You want to look for situations where the immediate scope is clear, with more on the horizon.

Manager - Your manager isn't just someone you report to. It is the person responsible for growing your career and shaping your output. This person should be invested in helping you do your best work. This variable can only be evaluated by talking to the people they currently and formerly managed.

What I'd like to do for the rest of this post is break down the following:The variables in the frameworkWhy the variables are importantStep-by-step on how to evaluate each variableCommon scenarios and situations

It's Not About A Spreadsheet of InputsThe goal of the framework is not to try and boil a decision like this down to a set of spreadsheet inputs that spits out a "right" answer. Instead, the goal of the framework is to:Be able to name the individual variables that are inputs into the decision.Evaluate each individual variable in a structured way.Understand the relationship between each variable.Narrow the decision down to the true problem (or most important variable) so that you can focus your energy on grappling with that piece.

The framework I’ve used is Impact = Environment x Skills. What this means is: We need to solve for is Impact. Impact is the product of our Environment and our Skills. If our skills are great, but the environment is wrong (or vice versa), then we aren't set up for success.

“After a few years of working on the Ads & Pages team at Facebook, I had the opportunity to interview with other teams as I looked for a new role. The best advice I received was to think about the kind of environment I wanted to work in - who I wanted to work with, what I wanted to work on, and what I wanted to learn from that experience. It helped me realize that the skills I wanted to learn would be a lot harder to cultivate in that environment because the teams were so large that I needed to play a specific role, one that only accounted for a fraction of what I wanted to learn. Ultimately, it helped me realize that the best thing for me was to leave Facebook and join a company that had a better environment for what I was looking for at the time.” - Behzod Sirjani (Reforge Partner, ex-Slack, FB)

Leaving this out of the equation when making career decisions leads to navigating yourself to very frustrating situations where you feel like you are getting better but that isn't translating to impact and career progression. Remember, the variables of your environment are just as important as the variables of you.

A second trap is thinking that you just need to work on yourself in order to grow your career. For example, "To progress, I just need to get better at [insert skill.]" But you are only one part of the equation.There is a whole other part of the equation, which is your environment. Your environment either limits or amplifies your own ability to get better at a skill.

Evaluating impact isn't easy. It is complicated by a few factors:Impact is the result of multiple other variables.Those variables are interrelated and have confounding factors.Impact can be subjective to the individual.A lot of times you aren't even aware of what is holding you back, or what to evaluate on.

When thinking through these situations, people often solve for the wrong things. Most often, people think about career advancement as increases in compensation. Compensation and career advancement are correlated, but not the same.

Impact Powers Career Progression

"Should I leave my current role?""How do I compare or choose between two or more opportunities?""What is preventing me from moving forward?"

At the end of their rotation, I would always initiate the same conversation:"How are you going to choose your next rotation?""How are you thinking about full-time placement after you finish your rotations?"After a number of these conversations, I realized that many struggled with the decision. But it is a key one to understand how to make. We all face this type of decision multiple times throughout our careers.

During my time at Facebook, I was fortunate to manage a lot of Rotational Product Managers (RPMs). RPMs would do multiple 6-month stints in different parts of the org, then at the end of the rotation, they would choose a full-time placement.

Lead Time includes analysis and design phases, whose duration can vary a lot based on the breadth of the initiative.

Cycle Time hits the sweet spot by covering Coding, Review and Deploy.Cycle Time is defined as the time that goes from the first commit to the release in production.

The time that goes from Design to Deploy is called Lead Time.Agile's main teaching, with respect to Waterfall, is to keep Lead Time short.Lead Time, however, is an all-in-one metric — it includes everything. It's not easily actionable, because it's the sum of very different steps.

Over the last couple of years, several analytics tools rose to support a data-driven approach to Software Engineering.You may (or may not) know a few of them: LinearB, Code Climate, Waydev, Flow.

Last week we explored software delivery metrics and how they predict overall engineering efficiency.This week I follow up, with a broader scope, to discuss my favorite metric of all: Cycle Time.

Interviewer training: There are scenarios specific to hiring within each set. Pick those out to review with your interview panel prior to your recruitment process. This can help you accomplish a more equitable hiring process.

When hiring managers believed a woman had children because “Parent-Teacher Association coordinator appeared on her resume, she was 79% less likely to be hired. If she was hired, she would be offered an average of $11,000 less in salary.

When a woman’s name was replaced with a man’s name on a resume, evaluators were 60% more likely to say they would hire the applicant. 

A woman of color will often experience more discrimination in the workplace than a white woman.

A colleague asks a woman to pick up food for an office gathering, even though that’s not her job. Suggest a solution that distributes the work more fairly, like a potluck or a team rotation.

Your hiring committee rules out a woman of color because she’s not a good culture fit. Ask them to be more specific, and point out that “different” can be a culture add.

Someone from another department incorrectly assumes that the man on your team is the leader. Gently correct the assumption and underscore your leader’s accomplishments. For example, “[Name] is our team lead. She heads all our biggest sales efforts.”

“Gender bias holds women back from being hired and advancing in their careers. It’s important to be aware of how that manifests,” says Raena Saddler from Lean In. That’s why Lean In created an activity that helps you combat gender bias at work. It’s called 50 Ways to Fight Bias, and the digital versions are free. Raena explains, “This activity is an engaging way to think through your own biases and call out and navigate bias when you see it in the wild.”

Each of these incorrect answers is a plausible distractor with diagnostic power. A distractor is a wrong or less-than-best answer; “plausible” means that it looks like it could be right, while “diagnostic power” means that each of the distractors helps the teacher figure out what to explain next to that particular learner.

In practice it was not uncommon to see import chains dozens of files long, with thousands of nodes rendered, but with options like exclude, focus, and doNotFollow you can prune the tree into something legible. An unexpected benefit of this exercise was trimming the size of our JS bundles (particularly the preload, which runs on every page navigation) by relocating unexpected code or removing unused code.

Breaking the Chain In making the move to sandbox, the first area we stumbled on was the organization of our code. Although we weren’t often referencing Node in our renderer bundles, we had a common folder of utilities that, theoretically, could be shared across main and renderer processes. Over the years, that folder had accumulated all kinds of methods: not just ones that were genuinely reusable. They were often grouped into overly large and ambiguous files: e.g., a logging-helpers file with both (reusable) string utilities and (non-reusable) fs utilities. Renderer code might import one of those files to get at a string utility and take a dependency on fs as a side effect. Untangling this web of dependencies was no small feat, but one tool that made it more manageable was dependency-cruiser.⁷ It let us visualize import chains to see how code was getting pulled in, and, once rearranged, prevented similar imports with validation rules: like a linter for code organization.

But if a bad actor has control of the webpage, via something like a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability, its Node powers can be co-opted for evil: // Example of XSS in a naïve notifications window window.store.dispatch({ type: 'NEW_NOTIFICATION', payload: { content: `<img src=x onerror="${getPayload()}" />` } }); // Since nodeIntegration is enabled, this escalates any XSS // to remote code execution (RCE)! function getPayload() { return `require('child_process').exec(${ 'open /Applications/Calculator.app' })`; }

Try to only break items into components where it makes sense rather than creating a lot of smaller components.

This allows us to provide context for our selectors so they aren’t impacted by JS/CSS changes

To make it easier to read, write, and maintain our end-to-end tests, we created a number of Slack-specific methods and bundled them up in a library.

But where there is a problem, there is always an opportunity! The QE team decided to look for a better way to solve some of the pain points we were having within cypress. Our solution is a variation of the Page Object Model: We created a layer of abstraction between user interface and the actual test. We time-boxed the effort to one month and worked on using the proof of concept on a set of tests.

Since there were no guardrails on how to add these tests, the framework ended up with a lot of duplicate code and flaky tests. This led to random test failures and longer triage shifts.

The Quality Engineering team is focused on creating a culture of testing, increasing test coverage, and helping the company ship high-quality features faster. We encourage all our developers to write and own end-to-end (E2E) tests. In turn, Quality Engineering (QE) is responsible for the frameworks used and provides best practices for writing reusable, scalable, and maintainable tests.

If you want to create a healthy learning ecosystem, you need to facilitate a continuous, autonomous flow of learning. Otherwise, you won’t have a learning ecosystem at all, but a regular, L&D-dependent structure. How do you achieve that flow of learning? Peer-driven tools, which give employees the power to learn from one another.

The major responsibility of employees in a learning ecosystem is to learn. But they can’t just aimlessly surf through learning content; they must pursue measurable learning goals that align with personal and business OKRs. And they must pay attention to gaps in their learning content and communicate them to managers and L&D — this kind of communication helps L&D perpetually assess and fulfill training needs.

Creating harmony and balance in workplace learning takes an organized, concerted effort. In order to achieve the learning ecosystem vision, you must build, implement, and maintain it.

To do this, you’ll need to introduce new technology and learning methods that help the L&D department work more efficiently. For example, adopting Collaborative Learning can help you decentralize the learning process by allowing employees to use their unique institutional knowledge to create training courses.

As CLO, you’ll need to develop a method for rapidly assessing gaps in employee knowledge and a mechanism for quickly providing employees with the content they need to improve their performance and build new skills.

Most L&D teams operate reactively. They respond to training needs as they arise, but they don’t proactively plan strategic learning initiatives. Emerald Works’ study shows that fewer than 50% of L&Ds believe their team’s goals align with larger company business objectives

L&D teams that don’t tie their departmental goals to large company initiatives and strategies will find it almost impossible to obtain the C-suite buy-in they need to grow.

For too long, Learning and Development teams have been seen as extraneous. Nice to have, but not vital. Many companies view L&D as a service provider for employees instead of a strategic partner for growth.

Microaggressions strain those insecurities, and contribute to a culture where not everyone feels included.

Microaggressions—subtle, indirect, and sometimes unintentional acts of prejudice

“A senior partner asked to ‘touch my hair’ in order to confirm it was ‘all mine.’”“An older male colleague interrupted me in a meeting and said, ‘now young lady…’ and then told me how I was incorrect in his opinion.”“My hearing disability was described in a written evaluation by the board of trustees as ‘making communication difficult for my co-workers.’”

Good intentions are important, but the impacts of people’s actions are the true measure of goodness. By channeling intentions into learning about biases and the ways that they manifest into microaggressions, work relationships can be strengthened and harm to marginalized groups can be reduced.

If someone holds a bias that a given population is not articulate, they might “compliment” a person for being well spoken.

Marginalized people already know that we’re supposed to “assume good intent” in others. We are told every day that we’re “paranoid,” “overreacting,” or just plain “crazy” if we don’t feel good about being treated badly. This process is called ‘gaslighting,’ and it’s a way of making marginalized people distrust our own perceptions so we won’t object to being mistreated.

Two-way Computed Property Admittedly, the above is quite a bit more verbose than v-model + local state, and we lose some of the useful features from v-model as well. An alternative approach is using a two-way computed property with a setter: <input v-model="message"> // ... computed: { message: { get () { return this.$store.state.obj.message }, set (value) { this.$store.commit('updateMessage', value) } } }

Components Can Still Have Local State Using Vuex doesn't mean you should put all the state in Vuex. Although putting more state into Vuex makes your state mutations more explicit and debuggable, sometimes it could also make the code more verbose and indirect. If a piece of state strictly belongs to a single component, it could be just fine leaving it as local state. You should weigh the trade-offs and make decisions that fit the development needs of your app.

As we advocate in our Agile Product Management overview, the more involved that a product manager is with the development team, the better. That involvement should be along the lines of a product owner who champions customer needs, the "why" of the product. When the involvement blurs into tasking, the "how" for a team, then there is a problem. Even with the best of intentions, this kind of utilization mindset tends to hide problems: defects, hand-offs, and unknowns. Interleaving scope and process tends toward locking scope, schedule, and quality. That's a recipe for failure.