"The ability to adapt and pick up new skills quickly is vital for success: workers must be able to use a range of tools to solve a problem. This is also known as "learnability", a sought-after skills among job candidates."
- Charlotte Edmond - based on The Global Achievement Gap by Dr. Tony Wagner
Week three and four of the externship experience were all about agility and adaptability. From being invited to join multiple teams and projects, each with a different team lead, different project outcomes, and different tasks, to being invited to provide real-time support for new courses that were rolling out to making sub components of projects to weighing in on long term strategies for content creation and management, everything over the last two weeks was a study in adaptability. Communication with people occurred across different platforms, different time zones, in synchronous and asynchronous formats, and with different teams with different levels of access. Tasks to be completed ranged across the same kind of diverse expectation with some tasks taking place through writing, some through hands on development, some through self-study, and some through interactive development. To accomplish anything was a study in agility and adaptability.
While onboarding a new employee is never easy, week three was especially challenging for this process because many members of the host company team were in transit from events and to events. In fact, this transit led to the need for the author to step into the shoes of one of the employees and present content on behalf of the company. In addition to standing in place of the employee in question, there were changes to both the content and the format of that presentation, leading to multiple rewrites of content, the creation/modification of a slide deck, and the paired requirements to serve as both employee voice and practitioner voice for work done inside and outside of the company. The presentation requirements changed three times in three days, and while ultimately successful, the constant adjustments in both persona and format led to challenges for content creation. The rest of the week contained a lot of self-directed work, and the need to find places where the author could be a value add to the department and company.
In week four, after the fourth of July holiday, everyone returned and suddenly there was a flurry of activity across multiple teams. The onboarding experience quickly scaled up in terms of both connections to other and workforce tasks. In addition to being added to multiple teams, there was also a ramp up for types of tasks to be completed. Tasks this week ranged from quality assurance to technical content creation to technical writing to presentation facilitation to social media moderation to long term strategic planning. Each of those pivots required a different type of approach, a different skill set, and a different state of mind. In essence, it was like having multiple substantially different jobs; in many ways, it was just like teaching.
In some ways, the experience reinforced some perceptions the author had about the need for agility and adaptability in the workplace, and in others it reinforced some of the findings of recent research on the topic. For example, in their paper "Adaptability and Workplace Subjective Well-Being: The Effects of Meaning and Purpose on Young Workers in The Workplace," Nejad, Nejad, and Farahani (2021) found that, "Consequently, it seems that some people are innately better equipped with adaptability resources than others, " and that, "It will be beneficial to practitioners to understand people’s personality profile when they design adaptability interventions." Given the many demands of teaching, especially in a technical field that is always changing and with a course load that requires a huge variety of skills on a daily basis, the author was prepared for a workplace experience that required many pivots and a breadth of skills; however, when considering many students who are less able to handle changing environments and thrive on routine, it is clear that a more significant onboarding process and much more time would need be devoted for students to successfully navigate the change from a structured environment like school to the more demanding and varied environment of work.
Creating experiences in school that require a broader breadth of skills across a wider set of tools is something that will take work to implement well. The constraints of the secondary system, including time to teach skills and tools, will require an insightful implementation plan in order to keep from overwhelming the students, especially students whose personality profiles might be less accepting of changing circumstances.
Works Cited
Nejad, H. G., Nejad, F. G., & Farahani, T. (2021). Adaptability and Workplace Subjective Well-Being: The Effects of Meaning and Purpose on Young Workers in The Workplace. Canadian Journal of Career Development, 20(2).