Reflection on South Summit
Last week, IE offered us the opportunity to go to the South Summit. As a final year student, I was especially interested in attending the EnlightED conferences which concerned how technology has changed (and is changing), what recruiters are looking for, and what they expect to find in competitive candidates.
Lee Newman, our Dean of the School of Human Sciences and Technology, stated categorically how we all need to have native digital skills. By this, he wasn’t referring to the abilities those of us who grew up with mobile devices have - just knowing how to use them better than other generations. He meant that we need to have tangible capacities to think and work in digital and analytics, and illustrated his point using the Marketing department of any company, where to access a post, indifferent of its seniority, a candidate is required to have the native digital skills he was mentioning.
As someone working part-time in our university’s Talent Management department I know his words have solid foundations. The job descriptions I have been assigned to post related to Marketing are filled with digital technicities and programs candidates are expected to master: such as SEO and SEM, Google Adwords, Hubspot or Dynamics.
By the time the conference was over, I was regretting to a great extent not having tried to pursue a career in IT engineering or coding, even if I had other preferences at the age of eighteen. However, following on, there was a panel in which an intervention brightened me up.
An entrepreneur commented how he thought people were misguided nowadays. He stated we should focus on remaining human, as this was where our added value lies, and raised how he found crazy the fact that while we focus on becoming more digital, we are at the same time attempting to create robots which mimic our behavior.
This comment made me ponder. My first thought was just that I suddenly remembered articles from Semana and Digiday which appeared in February this year, about companies using robots for journalistic purposes, and how I had found frighteningly odd the fact the robot-made articles resembled human-made ones so closely. My second thought was more of a reflection of what the entrepreneur meant by his insistence on focusing our efforts on remaining human.
Although I do believe Lee Newman is right in that we should keep up with the technological advancements, I see how interpersonal skills are eroding due to our own digitalization and connectedness, and I find these to be significantly more important than staying digitally up to date for every-day-life and to find a job in the future.
I must admit, there are afternoons in the week where I’d rather stay at home and speak to my friends through Whatsapp than actually meeting up with them. I know this happens to many people my age. One only needs to look at Instagram account @sarcasmonly, for instance, and the number of likes and comments identifying with posts regarding staying at home on social media instead of going out. The fact this is happening paints a grim picture for our interpersonal skills, which are mostly acquired through face-to-face interaction, as spending afternoons texting makes us lose spontaneity in our communication, lessening our capability of coming up with good comebacks in real life unpredictable conversations.
With all of this in mind, and the lessons I extracted from EnlightED, I have written three tasks in my To-Do-List.
1) Sign up to online coding courses in Coursera.
2) Learn how to use more digital programs, like Google Adwords and Google Analytics.
3) Go outside and meet with people more often than you do so now. Relax, take it easy, be human.
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