Talking Talent

Before you laugh, remember when CVs were once carefully compiled and presented in leather-bound folders? Then we moved on to the electronic resume and the old hard copy CV was left to collect dust on the shelf.

YouTube has become one of the world’s most popular Internet sites, providing young people with a medium to express and demonstrate their creativity - through music, movie making or even fashion design.

According to Wikipedia, in January 2008 alone, nearly 79 million users watched more than 3 billion videos. Google paid a staggering US $1.65 billion for YouTube in 2006. It saw the potential YouTube offered the world.

YouTube is challenging traditional forms of creativity and how it is expressed. Technology is providing avenues to access and promote creative talent faster and simpler than ever before. The Internet is turning us into a world of “content creators” rather than “content consumers”.

The New York Times has reported that major talent agencies are hiring dedicated staff to scour outlets of online creativity such as YouTube to find “the next big thing”.

YouTube is more than just fun. It may represent the future of how we identify and sign up new talent for the future.

“What do you want to do with your life?”

It’s a conundrum that most of us have wrestled with at some stage of our lives.

If you need some direction, 43 Things is a social networking website built on the principles of tagging.   Users create accounts and then list a number of goals; these goals are then connected to similar goals constructed by other people.

43 Things not only encourages people to write down their goals – an important factor in high achievement – but also provides a social networking space for people to meet other enthusiasts with the same (sometimes very obscure) goal, to share their progress and to learn from other people who already achieved that goal.

More than a 1.1 million people have joined the site and have set themselves goals such as ‘donate blood’, ‘learn sign language’, ‘travel on the Trans-Siberian Railway’, ‘grow my own vegetables’, ‘watch every Bette Davis movie ever made,’ ‘keep up with current web trends’ or ‘be happy even if the rest of the things on this list never happen’.

43 Things is very much like the ‘21 things to do in a lifetime’ concept that I’ve often talked about in motivational workshops, and written about in my book, SelfScape: Success through Balance.

My list includes ‘write a novel’, ‘retrace the steps of a famous explorer’, ‘ learn something from a child’, and ’sail the seven seas’.

The first time I wrote my list of 21 things, it was the result of a session facilitated by my supervisor at the time.  He was a creative thinker and looked for different ways to develop better teamwork among his executive group.  Each of us wrote our list and then one by one we displayed them and discussed each point.

My manager was looking for common areas of interest where the team or a sub-set of it could undertake activities together on the basis that that the best relationships are developed through shared experiences.  It lead to some of the group sailing together through the Whitsunday Islands, some racing cars in serious races and some four wheel driving across the Simpson Desert.

That was in 1995.  I wonder if today we’d all sign up for 43 Things and then share our lists through the Internet?

Hello world and welcome to my new blog, Talking Talent.

The term ’skills shortage’ has dominated Australia’s business landscape for a number of years.  But what does it mean for Australia in the long term?  How can we capitalise on the pool of talent we already have?  And how can we overcome the labour constrictions we currently face to ensure our economic prosperity both now and into the future?

A skills shortage, in plain and simple terms, means that businesses are struggling to fill vacancies.  Skills shortages are occurring across Australia’s economy – both in the trades and the professions.  We simply don’t have enough architects, plumbers, engineers, nurses, computer programmers, teachers and electricians to go around.

In the latest report from the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations, the occupations showing the biggest increase in vacancies were medical and science technical officers (including radiologists, hospital pharmacists, sonographers and dental technicians), organisation and information professionals (such as project managers and specialists in Java, Internet Security and PeopleSoft) and accountants and auditors. But almost every industry is affected in some way, particularly in regional areas.

According to the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry’s Survey of Investor Confidence, skills shortages are the number one constraint on small and medium business investment.

In knowledge economies such as Australia, where skills are fundamental to competitiveness, skills shortages can reduce productivity and increase inflation.  As the pool of available workers dries up, salaries skyrocket and so do the prices of the associated products and services.

So, what’s the solution?  Over the next few months, Talking Talent will explore ideas and options to secure Australia’s talent base.  And I invite you to join the conversation.