Daily Endeavor Blog

We’re hiring.

If you’d like to help build a massively user-generated platform, we’d like to talk. Alongside a product lead and a designer, the bulk of the work for this contractor role is back-end, though in-browser interaction is also part of the picture.

Should be comfortable with:

• remote collaboration
• agile lifecycle (stories, short iterations, retrospectives)
• test-driven development
• jQuery
• git
• Haml & Sass
• deployment on Linux

Extra points for: - MySQL - SQLite - make - Apache configuration - light sysadmin skills - experience w pivotal tracker

Daily Endeavor is the job guide written by real people. We’re working to make it disruptively simple for everyone to answer the question “What do I want to do next?”

More about DE: Fact Sheet | Backgrounder | Techcrunch

Contact: jobs at dailyendeavor.com

• Teach Design: The Importance of Failure by Rob Stokes — Failing better, or as Kevin Jones calls it, part of worst practices training. (GOOD)

• The Workforce: Where Will the New Jobs Come From? by Barbara Kiviat — A top-down snapshot. (Time)

• Making Lemonade: It’s Never Too Late to Create a Life You Love by Joshua Rosenthal — “Too many people don’t understand their ability to walk away from a job and start a new one.” (Huffington Post)

• Thrivability: A Collaborative Sketch by Jean Russell — A collection of over 60 essays and images on thriving. (Thrivable and Slideshare)

For a few years the Institute for the Future has been tracking how the demands of work (mostly of the knowledge-worker sort) are changing, then forecasting which skills will be valued as a result.

Here are a few from their most recent list of 10:

• Ping Quotient Excellent responsiveness to other people’s requests for engagement; strong propensity and ability to reach out to others in a network

• Longbroading Seeing a much bigger picture; thinking in terms of higher level systems, bigger networks, longer cycles

• Open Authorship Creating content for public modification; the ability to work with massively multiple contributors

• Cooperation Radar The ability to sense, almost intuitively, who would make the best collaborators on a particular task or mission

• Influency Knowing how to be persuasive and tell compelling stories in multiple social media spaces (each space requires a different persuasive strategy and technique)

• Signal/Noise Management Filtering meaningful info, patterns, and commonalities from the massively-multiple streams of data and advice

It’s always interesting to see lists like this because each of the items is a pixel in a bigger picture about how work is changing.

Open, Social & Improvisational

Part of the picture I see is three trends becoming more pronounced: open, social and improvisational. They’ve been happening on the edges, where trends like these start, for the better part of 10 years. But now they’re not just in Palo Alto and NYC, but also in Pittsburgh and Bloomington.

In the context of work life, open, social and improvisational are each distinct, but highly related. Social is involving more people, sometimes at least one more, sometimes radically more. Open is loosening the confines of who sees (and can do something with) the work. Improvisational is working more transparently in real-time — in other words, showing every draft.

Not only do open, social and improvisational overlap with each other, as a group they tend to reinforce each other. They can mutually improve the conditions for all three to occur. Let’s consider an example that we use at Endeavor Prep. In some quarters, like software development, here’s how the progression of work has been changing:

When work is completed more improvisationally with others, there’s more space to chase down flaws and polish up what the customer enjoys most. Instead of being a monolithic task, the work becomes more bite-sized, with significantly more opportunities for feedback. Feedback drives learning. From learning comes whatever you’re looking for.

Most often these trends are applied to workplace skills, as IFTF has. They’re equally valuable to designing the work life you want, or finding your next job.

I’m interested to hear if you see this happening in your workplace. Moreover, are you seeing examples of how people are being more open, social and improvisational in their job search — in setting up the next step in their (or your) work life.

• The Scariest Jobs Chart Ever by Henry Blodget — “It’s now official: The country has lost more jobs as a percentage of peak employment than any time since the Great Depression.” So doing the same exact work as has served in the past will probably not suffice this time. (Silicon Alley Insider)

• New Jobs For A New Decade by Marilyn Geewax — But where there’s destruction, there’s also creation. Not enough yet to be a net positive change, but some parts of the economy, like green and health jobs, are showing signs of growth. (NPR)

• Skills to Fix Failing Schools by Laura Pappano — “New education leadership jobs have emerged: running charter schools, directing turnarounds of troubled schools and founding nonprofits with creative answers to education challenges.” You can learn more about them at Daily Endeavor. (New York Times)

• Maybe You’re the Reason Your Job Is Boring by Susan Cramm — On autopilot? Consider stepping back and “mentally firing yourself”, and re-engaging. (HBR)

• The First Rule of UX by Joshua Brewer — “You cannot not communicate. Every behaviour is a kind of communication.” In career design and job search, as it is in user experience design, every behavior is a signal (OTOH, don’t get too precious about every move you make, experimenting is good). (52weeksofux)

How many times have you heard the question “What do you want to do?” More often than not the person asking wants to help. It seems a friendly enough question: it’s an expression of interest in the other person, it’s asking vs. assuming, it’s forward looking, it’s an invitation to talk more.

So why do so many people fill with dread when they’re asked? My opinion: it’s nearly impossible to answer. It’s not as impossible as the utopian “What do you see yourself doing in 20 years?” but it’s well on its way.

For many, the question they hear is: “What’s the one thing you want to do?” or “What do you want to do with your life?” You mean, the rest of my life? It’s an awkward position to be put in. You either need to skirt around the truth by stating there’s only one conceivable thing you want to do for the next 70 years which may put a big dent in your credibility, or if you don’t know, then you look shallow, unprepared, or even weak by not having a genuine answer to such an important personal question.

Awkward. It’s possible the person is trying to test you, but most often it’s someone trying to be friendly, someone who really wants to see you find it, whatever it is. In fact that someone may be you, asking yourself for the umpteenth time.

Ask a different question. The direction is right, but the framing is wrong. Instead of going for certainty, lower the bar a bit.

What do you think you want to do?

This seemingly small change acknowledges you’re a warm-blooded person with multiple (if not disparate and conflicting) interests, and gives you space to be intrigued by something, but not wed to it.

Then put the drop on the forever thing. Move the horizon to something much closer that you can actually picture and act on. Two years out is about as far as I can picture, and truthfully it’s already pretty blurry by that point. Continuing to re-frame, it looks like:

Over the next two years, what do you think you want to do?

For getting stuff done, two weeks is a much better period to have a clear line-of-sight. The problem with two weeks though is it’s hard to do anything that really stretches you; it’s a tactical block of time. If you’re thinking about a full-time role as the next step in your work life, a two year horizon gives you enough room to start to think big and has the benefit of being a period of time that hiring firms know how to speak.

Sometimes though, even this question is still too open-ended to be able to answer. The canvas can feel too blank. The implied question can still often be “What job do you want to do?” You and I both know life is so much bigger than a job. I find It’s easier to answer a question about an idea, an interest, a way of doing things, or a result. In other words, think about what else you’d like to include in your growing reputation.

Over the next two years, what do you want to be better known for?

Now that’s a question you can sink your teeth into. For example:

• I’d like to be better known for my real estate deal analysis prowess
• I’d like to be better known for my open source code
• I’d like to be better known for my growing microfinance expertise
• I’d like to be better known for closing big sales
• I’d like to be better known for describing our cleantech future
• I’d like to be better known for enabling local eyewitness reporting to flourish

This form of the question is not a 100% solution; it’s simply one step along the way. Nonetheless, I’ve found working with folks that it’s a good way to break the logjam of beginning to think about what next. What do you think?

In an interview with New Work City, Kaomi Goetz at WNYC makes the case this morning that “co-working” offers community to solo workers. I’d like to take the case even further. Coworking can be a literal life preserver, not just for entrepreneurs or freelance contractors, but also anyone actively conducting a job search.

As Dan Gilbert points out on This Emotional Life, one of the root requirements for happiness is connection with other people. We are not a solo species. And yet one of the dark spots shared by starting a company, working freelance and navigating a professional transition is the swift and surgical removal of a daily flow of social interaction.

Coworking offers an alternative to the social starvation. Like the barcamp movement, coworking recognizes that the expertise you seek is sometimes in the room around you. Coworking spaces allow individuals pursuing their own path to also fill their work life with people.

Free Agent Nation

Over 10 years ago, Daniel Pink wrote a seminal piece in Fast Company that chronicled more and more people beginning to work on their own terms and schedule. The widespread web enabled this shift to start to occur.

By the early 00’s, lightweight, inexpensive tools and web services (e.g. weblogs, wikis, skype) started to kick in to make working remotely even easier. Bootstrapping new companies began finding the best people wherever they lived and happily funded bandwidth instead of office space. For years at Socialtext well over 70% of the company, including myself, lived thousands of miles away from our High Street home in Palo Alto.

With the rise in remote working came the rise of solitude. When Brad Neuberg, Chris Messina and Tara Hunt began promoting coworking a few years back, they gave voice, and a beginning antidote, to working alone. Check out the video for more backstory.

Job Search is Social

One of the most difficult parts of making a professional transition is keeping your social game fresh. Conversation is at the heart of any job and any job search. When you’re working, there’s a constant stream of conversations every day. When you’re in between jobs, the stream can become a trickle.

Consider becoming a member at a coworking space to keep yourself out of the social cave. Most have lite plans where you can go once per week or a few hours per month. The routine of getting up, going to the office and working at a desk can help the search feel more like an explicit project you’re undertaking (which it is). Given how most opportunities come from other people’s networks, you’re likely to meet new people that can help, if not directly meet people who are hiring.

Most importantly, working somewhere consistently, even if on a limited basis, will give you the opportunity to have real conversations with people. This is the most valuable experience of all to keep active.

As Peter Chislett, Deputy Mayor of New Work City says, “it’s not the space, it’s the community. It’s the connection with other people.” I believe it.

Coworking resources

For other coworking spaces, check out:

• Coworking for a global listing

• New Work City

• HubSF

• Hub Berkeley

• The Network Hub in Vancouver

• Centre for Social Innovation in Toronto

• Affinity Lab in DC

• Conjunctured in Austin

• C3/Cambridge Coworking Center

• Pile On Mentors in Tough Times by Elizabeth Garone — Who’s in your network of mentors? (Wall Street Journal)

• Graduate School? How to Decide… by Michael Mitzenmacher — Good post and wealth of comments from folks interested in solving real real-world problems. (My Biased Coin, thanks to pointer from @lakhani, @neil_conway)

• How to Get a Job Without Experience by Larry Stybel — Creativity and humility, one quick story. (HBR Now)

• Need a job in IT? The cloud needs you by David Linthicum — There’s big demand now for cloud engineers and architects — but not many people able to fill them (InfoWorld)

Photo credit: King Cloud by akakumo

We’re on a mission to create the most comprehensive guide to jobs that’s ever been written, and to fill a basic information need for every person on the planet. We’re focusing first on social change areas, both because they’re crucially important, and because they’re actually hiring — K-12 education, microfinance and human rights. Ultimately, our goal is to profile 100,000 types of jobs over the next 3 years, and make them available to every person of working age, and every student researching their future.

Today we’re excited to invite you to join in!

As the largest professional migration in history is about to begin, with tens of millions beginning to head for their next job, they’re heading straight into a wall. This is a problem. Every single person thinking about what they want to do next will first ask the question “what are my options?”, then, repeatedly, “what’s that job really like?” Despite the 160,000+ types of job in the US alone, there is no resource to answer these with the information most people want.

There are menus and recipes that tell us about what we could eat. There are travel guides and maps that tell us about where we could visit. There’s the market to give us pricing information. Yet there is no comprehensive guide to learn about the types of jobs one could pursue.

Many sites offer quality information on the top 100 or so types of jobs. But what if you want to join the movement to revolutionize education, or play a role in extending credit to entrepreneurs around the world who are making change locally? What if you want to pursue a job that wasn’t invented 10 or even 5 years ago? You could look at Job listings, but they certainly don’t tell you all you want to know. In fact they barely scratch the surface.

Today, the best source to get the behind-the-scenes scoop on a job is through your network — to ask someone who truly knows about it. Unless you’re a Twitter all-star, or extremely well known in your field, chances are your network is likely to be limited, and especially, limited to the area you already know. So the informational meeting, while high bandwidth and highly valuable, is not a silver bullet. It lacks scale and discovery.

We want to change that.

We want to help people discover jobs they never knew existed, make informed decisions about whether it’s a good fit, and make even better use of the existing job search tools out there. In an ideal world, the scope of your “informational network” is global and you have direct access to the experience of people who have actually been in the jobs you want to learn about.

Fortunately, this is an information problem we can solve with the web. Endless expertise lives in the heads of millions of people. We firmly believe many of you want to share it. Not only because you’ll demonstrate your expertise, but also because you’ll be helping others out. This is a problem we can all solve together. In fact, we’ve built a free, simple way to make it possible.

Daily Endeavor is a project to build the most comprehensive guide to jobs that’s written by real people. It’s a place to describe highlights, lowlights and a day-in-the-life for a given type of job. We want to help you answer questions like “What’s it like to work as a manager at a charter school network?” and “How do I get a job in human rights advocacy?” and “Are there any real estate roles in microlending?” Like Wikipedia, it’s a place to start your research.

By design, there are a number of things we’re not doing. Daily Endeavor is not a job listings site. There are loads of good ones out there and we will partner with many of them. It also isn’t a place to review organizations. Experiences vary so much from person to person that we believe figuring out whether you want to work with a team or a manager is best handled by talking with that team or manager.

This is a massive project, and we’re just getting started. I personally look forward to hearing your thoughts on how to shape it. We’ll be making blocks of beta invitations available while we get the project on its feet. If you’d like one, you can sign up here.

Here’s to a work life worth living. For everyone.

• How David Beats Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell — Persistence is exhausting, but can have real results. And no one can take it away from you. (The New Yorker)

• Best Places to Launch a Career You into social change? They’re hiring. (Business Week)

• Composing a Career and Life — Linda Mason, Chair, Mercy Corps, talks about having an idea and being committed to implementing it (MIT World)

• An 18-Minute Plan for Managing Your Day by Peter Bregman — For those of you hungry for process (Harvardbusiness.org)

• Larry Page’s University of Michigan Commencement Speech — Short and sweet, on maintaining a healthy disregard for the impossible. I liked: “I think it is often easier to make progress on mega-ambitious dreams. I know that sounds completely nuts. But, since no one else is crazy enough to do it, you have little competition.”

• Thoughts on creating greater introspection amongst Gen-Y elites by Donnie Maclurcan — A post that raises the peer pressure to follow what the herd considers least risky, vs following your own path. (e-Festival of Ideas)

• The Interview That’ll Bag a Job by Sarah Needleman — Prep, then zen. (The Wall Street Journal)

• The difference between truly standing for something and a mission statement by Matt Linderman — Standing for something isn’t just about writing it down. (37signals)