Linked – Four actions leaders can take to boost employee mental health
Psychological safety in your workplace environment cannot be achieved without training your managers on mental health.
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Linked – Are public speaking skills a cheat code for IT career success?
No matter how much technical skill you have, eventually, you will have to communicate your knowledge to someone who isn’t as skilled in the technology. If you can’t do that, your career will hit a ceiling. Even if you have no plans to get up in front of an audience, learning how to tell a story, influence others, educate others, etc., will serve you well when you have to explain a complex technical concept to someone.
You will have to explain what you know someday. Learn how to do it well.
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Sometimes it’s not a lack of training
Think of it this way: As a technology trainer, I can teach you everything there is to know about a specific technology, but it won’t solve anything if it’s not the proper technology for the job that needs to be done or if the job isn’t well-defined. That’s a different problem.
Have you been asked to provide training when the problem wasn’t a lack of employee knowledge before?
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Do You Know What Will Prevent Your Best Performers From Hopping?
As I mentioned, I’ve left some jobs for reasons that had nothing to do with more money. Whether it was relocation, a desire to travel, a need to travel less, or the desire to work remotely, the one thing those changes had in common was that they were specific to my situation and preferences.
The other thing they had in common was that the place I was leaving did not have the flexibility to offer me what I wanted. Could the role have centered on doing more online training so I could travel less? Could a little remote work availability have kept me there longer? Could a fully remote position have allowed me to continue working and relocate?
We’ll never know because that wasn’t offered. Thus, I’ve switched jobs a few times.
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Linked – Are employees getting enough mental health support in 2024?
However, what I want to talk about is the 46% of employees who are not “confident that employers care at least moderately about their mental health.”
That’s a lot of employees at risk of leaving. After all, why continue to work for an employer who doesn’t appear to care about you? Consider the wording of that survey; they only asked if you feel confident that your employer moderately cares. Not that they care deeply. Not that you feel important to them, just whether there is evidence that you moderately care about their mental health. How much effort does it take to show that you care just a little? Yet almost half of employees don’t see it from their employers.
That’s a shame. The improvement is nice, but there’s a long way to go on this
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If it’s public data – someone is using it to train an LLM
Bluesky is developing an open protocol, and Mastodon uses an open protocol (ActivityPub). The idea seems to be that we can create a social media platform without a walled garden where users don’t own the data, which is also completely protected from someone grabbing that public data to build an AI model.
That’s not going to happen. We are all going to have to make a choice.
Once again, I’m left with this question: Why are so many Bluesky users pro-AI yet so opposed to using their public posts to train it? Where do they think the data has been coming from?
