Following the Yellow Brick Road.
Week 3 of Building in Public.
In case you missed it, please check out my first and second posts on building in public.
Well, my third week of the OnDeck fellowship is in the books. This week had a little more focus, fewer zoom meetings, and a chance to spend more time on idea validation. I devoted the better part of the week to pitching the Where the f**k do I start? problem to my OnDeck fellow peers, who took the opportunity to poke holes in my hypothesis.
I took those conversations, continued research, and some unanticipated signals, as a message to keep focused on the top-of-the-funnel problem.
Leaning In.
I connected with a fellow who’s working on this same macro problem. She shared useful information from user interviews she'd done with people who were looking to get into tech. She discovered a mix of people with a range of motivations for wanting to skill build for a new job. Some wanted to make a move because they'd been fired due to COVID. Others were still employed but realized over the last year they desired jobs with better perks (i.e. those where you can WFH). Universally, everyone that she interviewed said they didn’t know where to start. They didn’t know how to create the pathway to go from their A to B.
As part of an idea jam, the need for self-assessment in the context of the “Where do I start?” process became even more crystallized. As a potential upskiller, getting clarity on the existing skills and functions that you have, articulating what sectors interest you, and better understanding the current demand for skills from employers is at the heart of demystifying where to start.
Unknown to each other, I had two friends reach out for career advice this past week. I’ll skip the exact details of the conversation, but both, who are accomplished and educated in their own right, shared with me they were looking for something different, something new, something more fulfilling with their careers. They just “didn’t know where to start.”
A timely tweet from Rachel Carlson, CEO of Guild Education. Guild has raised $225+ million to help (large) businesses morph their standard tuition reimbursement from a non-strategic cost center into a data-driven benefit and talent strategy. Although Rachel comes at the problem slightly differently than I do, her tweet illuminates that the “Where do I start?” question is a real and urgent problem for today's workers worthy of our attention.
Don’t Make an Ass Out of You and Me.
Needless to say, everything I learned this week gave me the push I needed to move forward with the initial research survey. I’ve designed the survey to evaluate the following assumptions:
The reason people don’t upskill is they don’t know where to start.
The reason people don’t upskill is they don’t know what skills are important to learn.
The reason people don’t upskill is fear of failure / don’t think they are capable of acquiring new skills.
The reason people don’t upskill is they think they are safe in their job.
It’s great to have a survey, but now what? I’m going to use this next week to zero in on the initial group I will target. Under consideration:
Knowledge workers who are currently unemployed;
Minimum wage workers;
Working adults whose industry and/or specific functions are fast becoming obsolete;
Adults who want to re-enter the workforce after several years away.
I’d like to survey all of these groups eventually but will look to start with one.
Please reach out if you have a good hack to access one or all of these cohorts.
Before I sign off this week, I want to take a moment to say how much I appreciate you following me as I build in public, even though it requires getting used to a new format for this newsletter! I look forward to the day I can combine what I am learning and building with interviews of the top builders, academics, and VCs in the Future of Learning space.
And off we go with week 4...