📥 Your Weekly Career Digest #7

Hello and welcome to this week’s edition!

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🎮 The Metaverse is already in the workplace

Japan’s second-largest brokerage, Daiwa Securities, welcomed employees to a newly created moon-landing metaverse. As one of the firm’s HR directors, Chiharu Mori, told Bloomberg, the goal is both to teach staff about out-of-this-world tech and promote bonding.

Accenture, meanwhile, created in collaboration with Microsoft a virtual workspace called “Nth floor,” while Hyundai launched an employee training program in immersive social media platform Zepeto. And as companies have increasingly embraced remote-work arrangements, startups such as NextMeet and PixelMax have set out to help organizations create immersive experiences for their employees.

Just a few examples of what they do:

• “Bump into” experiences: PixelMax’s immersive technology allows you to see your colleagues’ avatars in real-time, making it easier to stop them for a chat when you bump into them in the virtual workplace

• Well-being spaces: These are dedicated areas for users of the world to take a break and experience something different.

• Delivery to your physical space: Clients can add features such as the ability to order take-out food or books and other merchandise within the virtual environment and have these delivered to your physical location (e.g., home).

• Live status tracking: Just as in the physical workplace, you can walk around and get that panoramic sweep of the office floor, see where colleagues are located and who’s free, drop in for a quick chat, etc.

🧼️ Career Building on ‘Dirty Work’

What if the best way to grow your career and to differentiate yourself in the workplace was to do ‘dirty work’?

This article poses as an interesting guide to find out, and provide some examples.

• The more unsexy the work is, the less likely it is that a lot of really great people have taken a crack at solving it. In short, there’s likely to be low hanging fruit (examples: tech debt, secondary products, documentation, on-call, researching competition..)

• The more you learn to navigate the messy, human, frustrating problems that everyone else avoids, the more you see the forest for the trees, the more that ability shines a light on a whole host of issues that seem totally broken and wildly tractable.

I would add that this is the perfect space for automation to take place, and you can do that through the tons of great no-code tools that are out-there.

📉 State of Tech-Hiring 2022

Hired posted their ‘State of Tech-Hiring 2022’ report. Here are some of the key takeaways:

• Tech salaries continue to rise, and here are some of the top movers:

• Despite overall tech salary increases in 2022, employees still feel their pay does not reflect increased costs of living. Relocation could remain an attractive option as average tech salary does not equate to the same earning power across different markets

  • More people are open to quit - If denied an expected pay raise within the next six months, 89.9% of tech workers surveyed in the US, UK, and Canada say they’d immediately start job searching.

• Remote-first employers might have an edge, with candidates showing a marked preference for remote-only roles. In January 2022, 18% of active jobseekers indicated that they were open to “Only Remote” roles. By May 2022, it had climbed to 31% of all active job seekers on Hired’s platform

• It might still be a jobseeker’s market in 2022, as candidates have more IVRs (interview requests) on average to choose from versus the number of candidates vying for a position:

• The most compelling benefits for candidates in 2021 to 2022 were the same: flexible work schedules/models ranked first

• Hiring Remote is on average 40% faster to fill open roles for companies (and it’s increasing each year)

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👻 As many as 50% of Job Postings could be ‘Ghost Jobs’

Seems like companies are more and more often using job postings as ‘evergreen’ according to this article.

A recent survey of roughly 1,000 hiring managers, 40% of managers have had a job posting open for over two to three months; one in five managers said they don't plan to fill their current open job positions until 2023; and half of managers said they keep job postings up because they're "always open to new people," even if they're not actively recruiting.