📥 Your Weekly Career Digest - #2

Here is the second edition - as always please subscribe/share to support me! 🙏

🤹 Career Hoarding is on the rise - but what’s the cost?

It’s funny that just this week I had a conversation with a team member who was asking about potentially engaging in a gig for another (not-competing of course) company, and I came about an article saying that ‘career hoarding’ (i.e. doing more than one job at the same time) is on the rise, with a whopping 69% of surveyed remote workers taking on some kind of side-job.

Key reasons why this trend is increasing:

• 👔Status Symbol - in many cases, also senior roles like CEOs are board members in other companies, and use this as a reason to show-off their involvement at their current firms or for future opportunities.

• 🧑‍🏫Learning and Innovation - sometimes the only way to achieve faster/better learning of new skills is to do it somewhere else; this is why an increasing amount of companies are encouraging this - they know there’s going to be a benefit for them. At the same time, this is a way for employees to future-proof their careers and CVs by being on top of new trends.

• 💸 Extra-Income - again, it seems this is not the main reason (but the study looks a little superficial, yet) though it surely can be one; in times of inflaton-highs and so much uncertainty (massive tech layoffs are becoming more frequent).

So what?

The truth it’s still too early to tell, and will be difficult to measure considering how many things are at play.

Productivity - 69% of respondents said they felt more productive and 31% said equally productive on their main jobs.

Burn out is a risk - even though I believe there are many positive sides to it, the key question is: can it be sustainable for long term, especially for mental health?

👻 Employees Ghosting employers are on the rise too

Honestly, this seems like a completely new trend: according to Indeed, employees are starting to ghost employees - 83% say they have been ghosted at least once, and it’s something that has started in the last two years.

Seems like the talent market is getting more and more complicated, and one reason I attribute to this trend is that more information and opportunities are becoming available for employees - hence turning the tables when it comes to hiring. Here you can check out the full study.

This brings to mind a clever ad run by an Italian coding bootcamp called Epicode, who portrayed the developer doing the examination and ending with the classic phrase ‘I’ll be in touch’ - leaving the recruiter stranded.

📹 Microsoft found what makes workers most happy

😨Did you know that Microsoft has a “Director of Employee Listening Systems and Culture Measurement”?

Not sure if I was more surprised by this, or their main findings of a recent study, obtained by “By combining sentiment data with de-identified calendar and email metadata”:

⏳By combining sentiment data with de-identified calendar and email metadata, we found that those with the best of both worlds had five fewer hours in their workweek span, five fewer collaboration hours, three more focus hours, and 17 fewer employees in their internal network size."

Less collaboration (i.e. long and unproductive meetings) ? More focused work? Companies should be less obsessed about collecting data for its own sake, and getting to the root of the problems, and understanding what solutions could be. How do you really measure output/quality of work - as mentioned in previous issues - should be the real focus.

🕶 Gen-Z are stalking future bosses to decide whether they are the right fit

More than half (54%) of young workers research individual managers on social media when prepping for interviews, a new survey by recruiting software firm iCIMS found. Of the 1,000 recent grads it polled, 70% also admitted to looking at employers’ sites when prepping for interviews.

I think both things are a great idea, but are a strong signal that again the hiring process is broken.

What if the manager doesn’t have a social media account? What if, they portray their ‘best’ side as we are all accustomed to do on social media?

Do company websites really offer truthful and good information?

Future of Work is becoming 🔥

According to this study, mentions of the future of work within the filings of companies in the power industry rose 16% between the final quarter of 2021 and the first quarter of 2022.

📚Other things I’ve been reading:

A Byte of Coding - speaking of career hoarding (I actually don’t like that term, it has a negative connotation, which is not always the case) in the last couple of years I have taken up a goal to learn programming basics (mostly Python, to do some simple data science and machine learning for marketing) and especially if you are more advanced / do this for a living, recommend checking out A Byte of Coding - some pretty in-depth guides on both front/back-end as well as SQL written in a digestible manner.

WTF Crypto - a newsletter that teaches you about crypto and NFTs in a way that actually makes sense

DeveloPassion - Sébastien writes about personal knowledge management, software development, productivity and Indie Hacking

Opportunity Overload - a newsletter about entreprenurial opportunities (analysis, sites for sale) which I find inspiring to stay on top of different trends and ideas.

Modern Teams - Both a directory and newsletter highlighting companies/teams that are showing best practices, showcase their culture, benefits and jobs. Lists of remote-first companies and much more!