Status Go: Ep. 232 – AI and the Future of Tech Careers | John Light

Summary

In the latest episode of “Status Go,” host Jeff Ton explores the fascinating world of AI and its impact on the future of tech careers. Joined by guest John Light, president of SBR2TH, a leading recruiting firm specializing in machine learning and data science talent, they delve into the potential opportunities and challenges that AI brings to the hiring process and the evolving tech talent market. Learn about the shifting dynamics between humans and AI, the importance of specialization and innovation, and how individuals can navigate the ever-changing landscape to thrive in their careers. Don’t miss this thought-provoking discussion that unveils the exciting possibilities AI holds for the future of tech careers.

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About John Light

After starting his career in Accounting, John has spent 20 years in every corner of the recruiting industry. His company, a tech-focused search firm called SBR2TH, helps organizations target and hire talent in Data Science, Analytics, Engineering, Machine Learning, AI, and Development.

John’s focus in tech allows him to connect with and share thoughts with some of the most cutting-edge experts, blazing the trails for these developments that are changing our lives.

Episode Highlights

[00:00:00]: Replace Tasks…Not Staff

[00:00:48]: Exploring the Impact of AI on Tech Jobs

[00:02:07]: John Light, SBR2TH, Drowning in the Tech Talent Pool

[00:09:55]: Using AI to Get a Jump

[00:11:29]: Tech Talent in 2023

[00:17:23]: Specialization in Your Vocation

[00:25:36]: Career Fusion

[00:31:27]: What Should a Tech Pro Do…Tomorrow?

[00:35:45]: Thank You and Close

Episode Transcript

John Light [00:00:00]:

I don’t think Generative AI is going to take over the world. Fortunately, Skynet is! Skynet’s the next after… you know…we’re pushing daisies and don’t have to worry about it. But what it has done, I think, is created a sense or a need in the marketplace for companies and organizations to think about the displacement and replacement of workers and maybe a better way of looking at It placement and replacement of tasks.

Voice Over – Ben Miller [00:00:31]:

Technology is transforming how we think, how we lead, and how we win. From InterVision, this is Status Go, the show helping IT leaders move beyond the status quo, master their craft, and propel their IT vision.

Jeff Ton [00:00:48]:

Here on Status Go, we’ve been talking about the impact of AI, specifically Generative AI, all year since the explosion of Chat GPT in January and February. But we’ve always looked at it from the perspective of how do you use this tool within your organization, how do you put the guardrails around it within your organization?

Today we’re going to look at it from a different perspective, and that is what’s the impact these tools are having on tech talent and what’s going to be the impact down the road in the future on tech talent? As you think about the use of AI and things like Copilot, Chat GPT. Bard, and how does that fit in?

Joining us today is John Light. John is the president of SBR2TH, a recruiting firm out of Houston that focuses on machine learning, data engineering, data science, and developer talent. If you go looking for it, think of SBR2TH like a license plate, SBR, the number two “th”, SBR2TH. It’s pretty cool. So if you’re trying to find it, that’s the way to find it. SBR2TH.com.

So, John, welcome to Status Go!

John Light [00:02:07]:

Thanks so much, Jeff. I’m excited to be here and hopefully get to share some of the nuggets of information and information we’ve been gleaning from our client network and our candidate network as we enter into this huge shift, right, this huge transition. As I read about an article in the Harvard Business Review where the author posited that we’re moving from a creator economy to something more of an editor economy, and man, the implications in that are fascinating.

Jeff Ton [00:02:38]:

They are. And as someone who considers himself a creator, an author, a writer, a speaker, I don’t know that I want to be an editor. But we’ll get into that. We’ll get into that.

I’d love for you to share a little bit about your background with our listeners. And also, you and I met through a mutual acquaintance, Jamie Lee. Jamie out of out of the Dallas Fort Worth area because he was on your podcast. So, I want you to tell us about your show as well. So, a little bit about your background, a little bit about your show.

John Light [00:03:12]:

Yeah, certainly. Thanks so much for that window of opportunity, Jeff, because Jamie and I had, I think, a great conversation that episode hasn’t dropped yet. It’ll drop in a few.

You know, I talked to a lot of CIOs. I talked to a lot of CPOs and CHROs and CTOs and go right down the list of all the…I guess I even interviewed someone recently whose title is literally CXO, even though she’s in charge of marketing and of human resources, but she’s the chief experience officer in this organization.

And I started off life a long time ago. We won’t go back to the exact year there were still people painting on cave walls, but besides the point, I started off life in the accounting world and grew through a series of positions, but figured out in about five years after college that I really wasn’t cut out to be an accountant. I enjoyed it when I wasn’t doing accounting. I enjoyed it when I was involved in we did a huge system migration, loved the project work. We did this expansion project, a lot of M & A activity and things which may be related to accounting, but they weren’t accounting.

And that’s what really got me, and then somehow accidentally stumbled into the recruitment business. I’ve been in it over 20 years now. And in that time, if you think of recruiting and the services offered as kind of a box, so you’ve got four corners. You’ve got in one corner, you’ve got your resource process outsourcing, or recruiting process outsourcing, your RPO. You’ve got another box that we call retail staffing where they’re selling temps, and they know people to do reconciliations or other projects. And those are contract. Typically. Most of my career, even though I’ve worked in both of those corners, has been spent in retained search and contingent search, which is all permanent placement and SBR2TH. And our podcast “Drowning in the Tech Talent Pool.”

Jeff Ton [00:05:16]:

I love the name of that. I love that.

John Light [00:05:18]:

It’s funny because when the graphic first came out for the trailer that we pushed out, there’s a desk and there’s coffee cups everywhere and it’s a mess, and there’s this hand grasping for help, but they decided to do the trailer. A production company with my head floating over the desk and then going back down in the thing. And my wife saw it, and she was like, are you sure you want that out there? And then my kids, who the oldest is 24, and the youngest is nine, right? Then my kids saw it. They’re like that’s the best. We love this. So had to go with it. We got overruled, right?

But all that came really from a synthesis of my experience and that the models being used in the marketplace today to acquire talent are the same models that people were using in the last century stuff. And when we surveyed the marketplace, talent acquisition execs, CHROs, CTOs and such. What we found is the biggest concerns people have are quality of hire, the time to fill, the lack of specific technical expertise on their internal recruitment teams, and the fact that they may not have the budget to go external to someone like SBR2TH. But what we did is we developed a model come to market that brings some of the best of all worlds together.

Contingent pricing, but retained service. And we’ve been very successful with it. We’ve had 100% fill rate since we launched it November a year ago and been averaging 35 days to fill from the time we get the retainer in, to the time that we get an accepted offer. So it’s been going great to change the market a little bit and to change the loyalty equation because we believe in being loyal to our client rather than the transaction. But it’s different.

And so along the way, we’ve developed also “Drowning in the Tech Talent Pool because we wanted not just to talk about SBR2TH per se, because it’s funny, I don’t know if I’ve said the name more than a half dozen times, recording, I think ten or twelve episodes already. Rather, we go in and focus on, well, tell us about your journey and the impact that your ability to acquire, retain, develop talent or not has had on your career and what you see it doing into the future, and specifically tech talent.

Because, you know, the marketplace probably overhired people in tech going into the lockdowns and all that stuff. And there’s a rebalancing going on. And with, can I say, the advent of generative AI. I don’t think generative AI is going to take over the world. Fortunately, Skynet is the next after…you know, we’re pushing daisies and don’t have to worry about it. But what it has done, I think, is created a sense or a need in the marketplace for companies and organizations to think about the displacement and replacement of workers and maybe a better way of looking at it, the displacement and replacement of tasks.

Jeff Ton [00:08:29]:

Right.

John Light [00:08:30]:

So, we mentioned earlier, you’ve got your creator economy, you’ve got your editor economy, and we’re shifting one from to the other. It’s not so much that workers won’t be needed, but workers with different skills for different tasks will be needed. And I don’t think that’s something that’s going to I think companies are waking up to something you touched on alluded to earlier. That doesn’t have to happen overnight.

In fact, with AI, I don’t know necessarily that you want to be the absolute first mover unless you’re one of the big companies like a Microsoft or a Google or somebody of that caliber. There’s a lot of risk involved, a lot of capital involved, but I do think it’s going to very rapidly find its way into your back pocket.

A great example of that, I think, is that if I develop an outreach campaign for candidates, I can push a button based on the job description. And we’ve got AI wrapped into our applicant tracking system that generates that for us. Now it’ll do 80% of it, I got to go in and do the rest. I got to make sure the syntax is right. No one is sounding too spammy, but I can produce in a couple of heartbeats a nine-step outreach program with emails, texts, social media, and phone activities built in. And I don’t have to sit down and do it myself. The building guts of it, I think.

Jeff Ton [00:09:55]:

That’s the real power in this thing, right? It doesn’t do all the work, but it definitely gives you a jump start on doing some of that work.

John Light [00:10:04]:

Well, what it should do, I think my personal opinion, and I’ve thought this from the jump, I think it should be applied in such a way as to allow us to be more of what we are. Right. So, you ever do one of those, like, Strength Finder tests? We’re doing a DiSC assessment, and you’re like, oh, was it Myers Briggs? Hello. You’re an ESTJ, or you’re this or this or that. You categorize people, and you hear somebody you used to hear people come up and say, well, you need to work on this area. This is a weakness for you.

My mindset has shifted over the years, and I’m like, phooey. I don’t want to work on the weakness except when I want to work on the weakness; it’s weak because I don’t like doing it in the first place, a la accounting. But if I could have something else handle that repetitive, tedious. I don’t want to do a task and turn my daily limited amount of energy into being more of what I am, being more of my strengths, being more of what I excel at.

Then I think there’s the opportunity for a huge win, not just for a solopreneur or a small organization, but all the way up to the great big organizations. Because, in theory, we should get more bang for our buck, for people doing what we want them to do rather than doing the stuff that just is filling because somebody’s got to do it.

Jeff Ton [00:11:29]:

Well, I can’t remember where I read this. It was either on your LinkedIn or it was on your website, but it had the tagline: the tech talent ecosystem is rapidly changing, and SBR2TH is evolving with it. First of all, I love words, and I love the word evolving rather than repeating changing. So, I think pointing that out was interesting.

So, when you think about the tech talent pool in 2023, how is it changing what things are happening that you’re seeing from your seat that are going to be impactful for our listeners in 2024?

John Light [00:12:15]:

Yeah, no, it’s a great line of questioning. And as a side note, when we first looked at SBR2TH, and you think, Smile, it on Fatalis. Okay, Saber Tooth Tiger is not around anymore. It’s bubbling somewhere in the depths of the Le Brea Tar. It is still wherever it might be, but it’s either going to change over time, which is the definition of evolution, or it’s not.

And I think we’re at a point in time insofar as the talent pool goes, tech talent specifically. But you can apply this in a lot of areas because when the big companies for the last year and a half were laying off hundreds of thousands of people, they weren’t going around laying off stacks of coders and developers. They were laying a lot of people that were administrative in nature. They were laying off a lot of recruiting staff, a lot of this and a lot of that.

So, it wasn’t just, hey, I don’t need twelve Python developers. I can live with two. Well, guess what? Now the market’s changed, and I can use generative AI to produce 80% of my code. And I don’t need ten developers. I need two who are going to go in and edit. These are going to be probably my more experienced and efficient people who are going to go in there and figure this stuff out. So, the ten who are let go or pushed to another direction.

I think companies need to come to the realization that they have an obligation when you have talent that’s done a good job for you to give them the opportunity to upskill to evolve themselves. One of the hardest things to do, in my opinion. I place a high premium when we do a search for a client. I like people who are resourceful, who are resilient, who align culturally in terms of how they go about what they do with the organization. But I also like somebody who’s demonstrated the ability to reinvent themselves. And by that we’re really saying somebody who has shown the ability to adapt to changes in a market, to evolve.

And I think companies have this massive pathway of opportunity that if I can go in and if the budget powers that be tell me I have to let go of ten of those people, I would push back with. Hey, I can upskill, help upskill, and repurpose these ten people into these six different categories that we know we have needs for going ahead. The challenge is identifying those needs and having the willingness to invest in people to upskill.

And I don’t want to tell people to, hey, you have to go listen to this or anything, but the very first episode we dropped on “Drowning in the Tech Talent Pool is with a guy who started off at Amazon. He was the first person I hired in India or the third person I hired in India, and a decade later, he’s a CTO at Sears, which wholly different environment. And instead of going out to attract talent, he had to adapt and develop the talent he had internally because they still operated on mainframes, and they had a grand total of one person in the building who understood how it all came together.

Well, you just can’t use and abuse that person, right? So, they developed a tailored upskill program and got him in a different direction in his career that helped him out tremendously. And I think a lot of that needs to happen as we figure out the applications for AI. The other thing that’s going in the marketplace, and I think this is from the company perspective as well as from the candidate perspective, there’s this massive rebalancing that is occurring, and by rebalancing, we’re determining what we really need or not. And so, there’s this glut of hiring three years ago. Then there’s this big wave of layoffs that is funny because it didn’t just hit one wave of layoffs. It kept going and going because I think companies didn’t have a target.

Jeff Ton [00:16:17]:

They didn’t have what they were trying to build in mind.

John Light [00:16:20]:

Yeah, and I think that’s where we’ve been over this summer, and spring here in ‘23 is everybody’s going, hey, so what are you doing today? Oh no, but hey, what are you doing today? And we try to figure out how all of this is going to come together. I think those are the big challenges going on in the marketplace today. And one of the reasons being very difficult for a lot of people to get squared away on their next step or for companies to determine their next steps as well.

Jeff Ton [00:16:48]:

Well, John, we’re going to pause right there for a word from InterVision Systems. InterVision is the publisher of the Status Go podcast.

Voice Over – Ben Miller [00:17:02]:

Unlock the Power of More. With InterVision Systems, we provide the cutting-edge technology and expert guidance you need to take your business to the next level. Don’t settle for less. Choose InterVision systems and discover what’s possible. Contact us now to learn more.

Jeff Ton [00:17:23]:

And if you do want to learn more, visit intervision.com. You’ll be able to find out information about the services offered and how they can help you transform your business through the evolutionary power of technology.

Today, we’re talking about attracting and retaining talent, but with a twist. We’ve been talking a lot about AI and the impact of AI on our businesses. Today, we’re talking with John Light of SBR2TH about the impact of AI on attracting and retaining talent on hiring. And before the break, John was talking about some of the trends that have impacted hiring here in 2023. We’re going to shift a little bit and talk more about the future and some of the things that we believe will start to happen in the tech talent market as a result of having access to these tools, like large language models, Generative AI, and conversational AI

so, John, when you and I met a couple of weeks ago, we talked about a phenomenon that you believe will start to happen in the marketplace. And that is, I think you used the phrase specialization in your vocation. Could you tell us a little bit about what you mean by that and what some of the impacts that will bring to the tech talent market?

John Light [00:18:52]:

Yeah, no, certainly, I think, Jeff, if you look back on the history and development of business and markets. A recurring theme is every time there’s a great leap, there’s a step forward. We go from an agricultural society to an industrial society. There are increases in efficiency, but there’s this opportunity for people to become more specialized. And you can go all the way back to caveman days, right? When people developed things like technology, the wheel, Archimedes, the screw, and all these other things…catapults, they had to invest time and energy into developing those things that they now could not develop their grocery list. They can’t go plant a crop because they have this.

We had to have the ability to give people time for leisure and to give people time and resources for innovation. AI presents one of those generational opportunities, I think, where now we can be more of what we are, what we focus on, our strengths, and we can become more specialized. And so I think there’s going to be a wave of entrepreneurialism. I think there’s going to be a wave of specialization. It’s been a big thing. And you can go on the web and find company after company that I’m your fractional CHRO, or your CMO, or your fractional this or that. We’re about to have a lot of fractionality. You think we had a lot before. We have the potential for a lot more.

I hung a shingle out it’s a little bit of a long story and built another firm in 2017, 2018 time frame. And I did most of the work building the website and everything like that, using things like Upwork and Fiverr, because I didn’t need a full-time webmaster. I didn’t need a full-time someone to design the logo and all that. But if I understood the overall business and how the pieces all came together, I could do it by bringing in very specialized fractional talent, theoretically at a fraction of the cost. And we know it doesn’t quite work out that way, but I think there’s going to be opportunities for people to be more of that.

But I also think there’s going to be opportunities for people to be more innovative. What AI doesn’t do, AI doesn’t know, people talk about generative AI. Well, it creates new content. Yeah, it does. But it’s more like it synthesizes. It is based on the data sets you’ve presented it and the adaptive algorithms that predict. Okay, this is what a picture will look like if I combine these elements. Not that if I create these elements, but if I combine from these data sets I’ve been fed.

There’s still a huge amount of room, and there will be for a long time, I believe, for the innovation of human beings. And if you’re an accountant, I can pick on that because I’m a member of AA. I’m recovering still. I have the bald head. That’s what I came out with. I didn’t get the rest of the good stuff, but if I kind of look at that. Well, how are you innovative in accounting? Well, it might not be in accounting. It might be you evolve, and you go into marketing, or you go into logistics and procurement, or you go into whatever else it might be.

And that’s where things are going to get really interesting, and very hard to predict is what are educational pathways and career pathways that will make sense five years from now versus what makes sense today. If you want to go run a company and you’re going into college, should you go get a degree in literature, or should you get a degree in finance or maybe an MBA in finance and an undergrad in engineering or whatever it might be?

There are strong options available for people because we understand those pathways and what they’ll be doing. But where is that five years from now? I mean, engineering is still going to be valuable. So are airline pilots. I’m not ready to trust my flights to a robot overlord at this juncture, but where is it going to go? Who’s going to direct the circus, so to speak? My fear is there’s a segment of the talent market that potentially could get left behind.

And I would encourage anyone in the talent market to consider that now is the time you need to be thinking forward, leaning into what tomorrow could look like. Right. I think that’s going to be a huge issue. But on the upside of it, I look at a mirror; my beard is white, but when I look in the mirror, I still see what it was when I was 25. Right. I’m glad I’m not the only one better. And then every time I look, and I’m seeing myself on the screen right now, I’m like, Man, Horrid, he’s old.

But this is a time, I think, where people who are Gen Xers, like I am, for example, you have this great opportunity to reinvent yourself. You don’t have to be married to the past in terms of relative to what the future could look like from a professional standpoint because there’s still runway in the Gen Xer’s career, and so why not? I don’t have to sit there. And I think you look at a system like an SAP or an Oracle.

Let me give this an example, and I know SAP. I read an article on it a while back. They’re investing an incredible amount of money in AI. I can imagine the day where SAP is simply a program, an application. They come into your company, they have somebody who helps come in and make sure all your data is structured a certain way. They drop this bad boy off and it self develops everything from that point forward based on the data that was already there. And wham, bam, you have a system. You don’t really need an implementer. You need somebody to light the fuse, get the data straight, light the fuse, get out the way, and you come in the next day and you have a whole new ERP sitting there across your whole company because it’s self-populated and generated because that’s what the adaptive algorithms do based on the information that’s been given, the parameters that put into it.

So, you have to ask yourself if I’m running around implementing SAP today, I’m a project manager or step down or whatever, what am I going to do tomorrow if that becomes the reality? And so, take the time now to start thinking, I would say, about what excites you, where are your passions? Because the frontier right now is right now.

Jeff Ton [00:25:36]:

Well, I think the other interesting thing I’ve been preaching for years about, I’ve called it the verticalization of IT roles. In other words, if you’re in IT for a retail company, you’re going to need to know so much about how retail operates that these days of jumping from one vertical to another are fast getting behind us. Healthcare. It is a perfect example, right? It’s really difficult for someone without healthcare IT in their background to get into healthcare IT because of the specialization of knowledge.

And I think one of the things that you talked about, John, was this, I’ll call it this combination meteorologist and data scientist. Yeah, the fusion. Talk to us a little bit about what you’re seeing there as people are thinking about their role in the future how they can fuse these things together.

John Light [00:26:43]:

Yeah, absolutely. I appreciate you bringing that up because I found years and years ago what I started calling fusion roles were because I started off doing finance and accounting placement work, right? And I would find somebody who’s an expert or would be relatively an expert in say, financial reporting for a large company, a Shell, a BP, whoever it might be. And they would have expertise as a power super user in a specific ERP.

But companies who are implementing and updating that specific ERP, maybe a competitor company or near competitor, they needed people who could bridge the gap between their financial reporting needs and their FP&A needs as well know their needs on the ERP side. So needed people who could fuse these things together. And so I had a lot of luck, had a great time placing CPAs and senior FP&A leaders that had specific ERP expertise to bridge that gap.

Fast forward to today. And I started going full bore to tech a few years ago and realizing that tech and IT have overlap and tech is dependent on IT, but they’re not specifically the same thing in total. But your idea is that, hey, specialization is critical in areas like healthcare and whatnot, absolutely. What I think is going to happen is people who have specific expertise are going to be asked to bring that expertise into machine learning and into AI.

And traditionally, that’s something that takes a lot of labor because you need a development team. You need this, and you need that. Well, imagine having a development team that knows your industry backward and forwards, and somebody comes in and knows a piece of it backward and forward.

So, I’ve been working with a number of clients this year, including trading entities and trading firms that need to understand and predict weather and weather anomalies. Okay, so think power trading and things of that nature. But you could apply that to oil trading, gas trading. You can apply that to fertilizer trading, whatever it might be, right?

But one of the roles that really intrigued me was finding an experienced meteorologist in forecasting who had exposure and understood they don’t have to be an expert by any stretch. But maybe in college, they worked in MATLAB, or they’ve developed models in Python, and they could communicate with a development team to bring their expertise in meteorology and forecasting into a machine learning model that then delivers analytics to drive their trading firm forward.

And take the flying by the seat of your pants in a trade out of the equation in as much as you can. Get rid of your own biases and go in there and be as straightforward as, like, okay, this trade is going to win X percent out of the time, and other times it’s not going to win. But on the whole, this works.

And so I think there’s great opportunity for this. It’s kind of like when I was in college, I thought about going to law school, and I took the LSAT, did real well, and then I looked at what it cost and kind of said, Well, I don’t think so, right? But I remember talking to some attorneys who told me, if you’re going to do that, the best advice I can give you, the best advice I could give you is, number one, don’t become what everybody told me, the second best advice. If you’re going to do that, get a level of technical expertise, chemical engineering, and go get your JD on top of that.

And now you have this fusion of law and the legal process and everything with this chemical engineering knowledge, and you think about what that opens up for you. That’s not open for the person who goes and gets a general studies degree or history or whatever, and they go get a JD on top of it. I remember I audited a class at the South Texas College of Law with my cousin, who was in law school at that point, and it was a tax class. It was the first one I was studying for the CPA exam at the time. And I sat back, I had the giggles the entire class. I mean, literally the giggles in my early 20s, sitting there watching people. What’s a debit? What’s a credit? What’s the difference between this defer? Defer what, jail? No, defer the tax liability. What’s a liability? And it was humorous because these are people, and some of them I’m sure there’s some that came out of that class who today are tax attorneys. Well, if you find one of them, I don’t know, maybe light a candle and sacrifice a bucket of Colonel Sander’s best chicken, I think that’s where we’re going.

Jeff Ton [00:31:27]:

Even using that law example, even learning some level of coding with blockchain and smart contracts, we now have coding embedded for contract attorneys being able to do that.

Well, John, we are out of time. This time has just flown by. I’ve loved the conversation here on Status Go. We love to leave our listeners with a pretty specific call to action. So, I want to ask you, what are one or two things that our listeners should go do tomorrow because they listened to our conversation today?

John Light [00:32:04]:

Well, I’ve probably got a handful of answers.

Jeff Ton [00:32:07]:

You got to pick the top two, man. You got to pick the top two.

John Light [00:32:10]:

Pick the top two.

Jeff Ton [00:32:11]:

Right?

John Light [00:32:12]:

Yeah. Well, they’ve already heard about hey; welcome to Chasemeetown@SBR2TH.com. But I will tell you this. I think the people who are learning and innovating in this new frontier that’s developing in front of us have a huge advantage. And so, while I don’t think a company needs to run out and start implementing AI willy-nilly tomorrow, okay, I do think the people who are going to drive that process need to make sure they’re educated up to speed, and they understand the pitfalls and the opportunities as clearly as they can. And that takes research. It takes diligence over time, investing in yourself, and learning.

And the other thing I would recommend people do as well is start giving some thought to the talent on your teams. As you start figuring out how we’re going to apply AI, start figuring out how can I apply this talent? And that may be something that requires a lot of conversation with individuals. I don’t think it would be prudent to go around scaring people like, hey, we’re going to make changes at the end of the year. But I do think it’s like, hey, what do you think about this and where it’s going? What are your thoughts on it? And start synthesizing a path forward for your talent and your organization and you as well, to evolve with the evolving marketplace, because if you don’t, it’s going to rise up and take you down, and you’re going to sink down to the bottom of the tar pits just like the old smilodon fatalis, which we are not.

Jeff Ton [00:33:57]:

I love that, John, especially when you think about identifying the skills that you’re going to need in the future and mapping your current set of human resources, your people, mapping them to those skills, and helping them see a path forward for themselves. I think, as leaders, that is a huge step for us to take with our teams.

John Light [00:34:27]:

Think about the loyalty absolutely. And the desire to think, wow, not only am I investing myself in this organization as an employee here, as a contributor. But now the leadership in this organization is investing in me in a very real, intangible, impactful way that could not just impact them at your company, but decades into the future.

Jeff Ton [00:34:55]:

Yes.

John Light [00:34:56]:

And I would make this one suggestion, this one caveat with it, and it depends, I think, to a degree on the investment made in each person. But when a company typically pays for someone to go get a master’s degree or whatever, they have a callback in there. When it comes to upskilling and helping people find a pathway forward, that’s likely related to where they are today, don’t Hold it over their heads.

If they decide to go elsewhere, they decide to take their career elsewhere, pat them on the back, say congratulations, and just remember that no matter what AI does in this world, and no matter how many people are in this world, this is a small world after all, and you got to treat people in a way that echoes and that reflects your character and your personality and, frankly, the culture of your organization.

Jeff Ton [00:35:45]:

Absolutely. Well, John, I got to thank you for being on the podcast today. Thank you for reaching out, and thanks to our buddy Jamie Lee for introducing us in the first place. This has been a great conversation. Thank you so much.

John Light [00:35:59]:

Thank you so much, Jeff, for the opportunity and the platform and putting up with some long-winded answers. We try to figure this figure this out.

Jeff Ton [00:36:08]:

To our listeners. If you have a question or want to learn more, visit intervision.com. The show notes will provide links and contact information, and we’ll be sure to provide a link to SBR2TH as well as to the podcast. And that way, you can go listen to that first episode that John mentioned earlier in our conversation.

This is Jeff Ton for John Light, thank you very much for listening.

Voice Over – Ben Miller [00:36:38]:

You’ve been listening to the Status Go podcast. You can subscribe on iTunes or get more information at intervision.com. If you’d like to contribute to the conversation, find InterVision on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter.