I’m in a super inspiring Cajigo 100 Women in Tech Power Hour meeting right now and listening to the very inspiring Jeniffer Ramnath talk about her career journey to being a Technology and Transformation Executive. I’m especially struck by her account of learning ‘on the job’ in many roles; this resonates a LOT with me right now as I finally feel I’m unlocking my capacity to learn quickly in the context of tech. A training course you start in one month can be out of date, in many ways, by the next month, and you have to roll with it and keep reorienting yourself.
“Tech isn’t an engineering club,” Jeniffer says. “It’s a problem-solving club.”
Digital transformation never stops even for a minute, it seems, and this is a huge learning curve for me (learning about learning – pleasingly meta!) but, at the same time, familiar. I feel the same pleasant whiplash after a seminar on emerging tech, covering a dozen new AI tools I’d never heard of, as I used to feel as an academic after a conference on a topic I loved or a conversation with a student or an editor where we chanced upon a bunch of new insights about a literary movement.
In an unexpected way, I feel ‘back on track’, even though I switched tracks.
On that feeling of being ‘unlocked’, I attended a brilliant and energetic course by Outskill over the weekend and I got back to my work on Monday morning buzzing with energy, ready to polish off a take-home tech task for an interview process and transform a data analysis project I’ve been tinkering with for a while. Feeling unlocked is the polar opposite of feeling left behind, demoralised. It’s the feeling of being where I’m supposed to be. The learning happens quickly, the problems unravel. The transformation happens to people as much as the tools we use.
It’s nearly a year to the day since I left my academic job. I thought I was stepping off a path, but in reality, I was taking a different direction on that same path.
