On Purpose - Careers and Training

What’s your heart’s desire? What gets you totally juiced up, so much so that you think you could be happy doing it every day? -Michael Michalowicz

The answer is developing employees, and sending them to compete and win. I decided to turn what would have been a singular Labor Day post into a series about cultivating talent and talent development. 

To date, I have signed up for numerous formal and informal mentoring programs. Sharing knowledge and insight is the activity that moves me to action. I love each mentorship opportunity I am given. Whether by partners, clients, employees, or community members, a personal goal is to give each customer the advantage they need to realize our shared goals. 

Most professional careers are a series of mentorship and sponsorship programs that help new entrants establish necessary relationships, skills, and experiences, in exchange for creating market value for a given business. In the 5thish AI Industrial Revolution, I have seen that model threatened by a reliance on AI for operational purposes. We are focused on preparing our engineers, and future leaders for the demands of future engineering for humanity endeavors. We use AI and machine learning models in development and the following example of a job request gives us pause:

Engineering Manager Requirements: 
5+ years of software engineering experience
2+ years in engineering or technical leadership roles
Skills:
Writing production code
Leading engineering teams 
Shipping complex features from concept to deployment
Modern Web Technologies
Cloud Infrastructure
Distributed Systems
Tool Profiency: 

• Languages: Python, JavaScript, HTML, C, Swift
• Backend: NestJS, Node.js, TypeScript, GraphQL, REST APIs
• Frontend: Angular, React 
• Databases: PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB
• DevOps: Docker, Kubernetes, GitHub Actions
• Cloud: GCP, Azure, AWS
• Messaging/Eventing: RabbitMQ, Kafka, Redis Streams
• AI and ML: Pytorch, Sagemaker, Vertex AI

At CLR, we are preparing our employees for future leadership. Based on this job description, today, we need each new machine learning engineer to learn every major platform released in the past 15 years, and to have them adopt/have awareness of any major language release on any of the above platforms, and start using them today. On top of that, they need to have an innate knowledge of our physical and chemical processes, as well as the fundamental sciences that support them. Challenge accepted.

I see this though our CLR Ethic of Hospitality. The most transformation personal learnings and breakthroughs I have had, typically occured when I was able to reflect on past challenges, in an environment where resources were plenty. Conversely, these learnings were created by the latent challenges in environments where resources were low. We use the boom and bust cycles of business to foster a workplace of discrete innovation, acknowledging the down moments with reflection, and intense moments with focus, all while knowing that leadership and the employee community will be hospitable. 

Classroom, Laboratory and Library Scenes - Chemistry Laboratory. 1928. https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog/12395343.