Finished at Fifty: Is This The Future Abyss That We Are All Looking At?

Hello.

My name is Peter Pilgrim and I am writing for Mastery Quest. This is a semi-joint blog entry from my original post on xenonique. This entry is about Ageism in our IT profession and why we should find it. Let us begin with a couple of Twitter messages.

@peter_pilgrim: Ow! I watched panorama via the iplayer finished at fifty http://tinyurl.com/3dm2yzn and the future prospects were bleak

@imccaffery: @peter_pilgrim i know the future is bleak i was on the programme

British Television viewers are probably very familiar with Panorama, the investigative journal program on the terrestrial BBC ONE TV. I watched this program using the iPlayer [sadly only available to the UK - This is the UK link to watch the episode on BBC iPlayer site]. The episode was called Finished at Fifty, and followed four individuals who were aged 50 or over as they attempted to find employment. The 30 minute programme included Lord Digby Jones, a former business leader, who volunteered his advice for free to the four individuals. Some of the advice was about changing career, other advice was to refresh the approach to job hunting, the other bits were uncompromising.

I found this report, Finished at Fifty, to be one of the most alarming looks into UK job market. I found it difficult to understand why people are labelled by business and society finished in their middle ages. I am not old enough yet to be in this upsetting age bracket, but I know plenty of people who are, and also the future prospects for all are being squeezed.

On the one hand, we have young graduates from university, who are struggling to find that very first job and with the other hand, industry is behaving in ageism way. Hence the twitter call in the first section of the article. I tweeted my feelings and empathy about prejudices against older people, and it was Ian McCaffery, one of the individuals from the Panorama report, a former bar manager, who lived in Salford, near Manchester, who got back with a response.

I know the future is bleak, I was on the programme - Ian McCaffery

How on earth is this entry tied with mastery quest?

• Without stating the obvious, our industry is about knowledge share. If we as a society and collection of business do not value wisdom or experience, then it makes innovative endeavours like Mastery Quest defunct.
• If we start to prejudice against younger and older workers, then ultimately we are hurting the future prospects of out industry. We should not allow business leader to select on band of the population for their exploitation or making a profit.
  
• Mastery quest is about taking control back from middle persons, recruitment agencies, human resources and puts the knowledge share back in the minds and hearts of engineers, designers and developers.
• You have to give respect in order to earn respect. I will observe for you that in many professional sports, there is always the incredible talent, the person who is the upstart, the usurper, the new king or queen in waiting to be next champion of whatever. Often you find that the new talent in order to become a great talent has to follow a unique destiny, a path apppointed and found by the sudent themselves, it usually is student who finds the master.
• Ageism, the horrid principle of, the disenfranchisment of the old and wise generations, in at odds with the relative youth of our information technology profession. In much older professions such as engineering, science, law and medicine they have long-valued wisdom, experience and skills obtained from long-term practice
• Ageism seems to be a business model 2.0 of a silver bullet / a short-term fix or gain to avoid or escape what is surely must-be long-term peril. Today, the new story is about the over-fifties, should tomorrow be the over-forties? This is morally wrong.
  

Mastery Quest is a very nice idea in that it aims to bridge inexperience with experience is some form as yet unknown. It could be start of a real change and thinking. I hope so.

This is slight difference to my original blog entry, which you can read here.

Learning and Networking

I love the Mastery Quest idea, but I have little experience with World of Warcraft or other online games. My teammates play Quake every day, but I've only watched and listened to their girlish screams and giggles.

So I was interested to read an article in today's New York Times about couples who met playing WoW. The article says that WoW is not only a game where monsters are meant to be vanquished, it is also "a social networking experience." Players "meet and gab via the game's instant message feature, or through voice communication software."

This got me thinking. One of my most important sources of learning is my professional network. If I'm getting an error I can't figure out from some tool, or need to learn a particular new skill, I often ask one of the user groups I'm in or ping my tweeps. I've gotten a huge amount of help this way over the years. It's also how I find out about important blog posts, articles or books. Conversely, I try to pay this forward and help others learn.

Could Mastery Quest provide a professional network opportunity as well as a way to build and measure skills?

The lightning keynote from ACCU2011

I recruited a fellow in the audience to record my lightning keynote with my Flip camera.  Here are the results.  I expect the more professional version to be up somewhere soon, too.

Peer recognition

One of the questions that I'm struggling with is this: "What does peer recognition look like in Mastery Quest?"

We all know that we can recognize when someone does and does not know something, or have a particular skill, once we get a chance to work with them. Some people leave us breathless with admiration, while others leave us astounded with disbelief.

"How did this person get through the screening?" we ask.  "How could we have let someone who so clearly does not have the skills we need get this far?"

I suspect that all of us have had this experience at one time or another. Someone has a great resume, writes a great cover letter, interviews beautifully, and answers every challenging question well. In the software developer realm, we may have asked them to do a code kata, and they wrote clean, elegant code and explained it well.

Then, we get them on the job, and discover that they're just not that good. Is it the process? Are we so easily hoodwinked?

One of the visions I have for Mastery Quest is that this kind of thing doesn't happen any more, because of a combination of experience points, reputation points, and peer recognition.  Those three are all interrelated, of course.

It's not enough to have the time spent doing something, although that counts.

It's not enough to have a knack for it, a talent for it, although that counts.

There are a number of important factors that will help both employers and professionals. One way to identify whether someone really has both the experience and the skill is through peer recognition. If I say I've done 10,000 hours of skill X, you have to take my word for it. On the other hand, if my colleagues are willing to put their names to my experience, then it has more credibility.

That means that when a manager wants someone who knows skill X, rather than testing the candidates or questioning the candidates, I want to see a system that makes it clear as to whether that individual has skill X or not.

What about those of us who have been around for a long time?  We'll need some method of grandfathering us in. I don't know what that looks like yet. I don't pretend to know how to get all of this done. That's why I've invited others to do this with me, and am delighted with the latest post from Shawn Thomas.

Coming up soon: gaming the system.

Games and stereotype threat

A young girls sits alone, silently crying on a dimly lit staircase in her home, a small piece of paper hanging loosely from one hand. She knew this was going to happen, she knew that she was not good at taking standardized tests. And she knew that girls were not good at math. She knows this the same way that ‘everyone’ knows it; it’s just common knowledge.

She has an older brother who sailed through the same test and received outstanding scores, and who did half of the homework she did on a regular basis. How could she have thought that all the work would pay off and that she would do just as well or better than her less than studious brother? As soon as the exam proctor at the head of the room said ‘Go!’ on test day she knew that she had been wrong, and now her fears were confirmed. She is just not good at math. Or is she? According to Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson her scores were biased by something they call 'stereotype threat.'

Stereotype threat is the anxiety creating risk of confirming a stereotype about a group with which one self identifies. It is the x factor that leads many potentially great performers to choke in the moment. It is the x factor that led our heroine to underperform on her college entrance examination and to subsequently limit her postsecondary options. It is certainly not the only factor influencing performance, but it is one that has absolutely nothing to do with the knowledge or ability being measured. As such it is a bias that should be removed if we are serious about understanding an individual's level of development.

According to ReduceStereotypeThreat.org, one method for reducing stereotype threat is to ‘reframe the task.’ As a measure of performance or mastery, gaming may provide a great opportunity to do this reframing and reduce the bias of stereotype threat. It would be a bit extreme to say that this alone provides reason to create games for the purpose of education or measurement, but I believe it should be listed as an advantage of the method. As we move toward the creation of a system that facilitates and tracks progress toward mastery, it should be one factor that is seriously considered when design decisions are made.

Community ownership

Most education is provided by some organization or institution that, with the best of intentions, attempts to decide what we should know, or what skills we should have. This is not a bad thing, as many of these efforts are led by people just like you and me. They've been practitioners, or they've seen a gap in offerings, or they've seen a need in the market, so they step up to it to do something.

The problem is that most of these forms of learning are one-size-fits-all.  Each of us has different learning preferences, speeds, and focuses. You may be interested in Java, I may be interested in C#. Should the learning provider create versions of classes in both languages, and invite people to one or the other, or should they create one class that teaches concepts and techniques, and assume that the language doesn't matter?

When you are the provider, you are forced to make specific decisions about investment and potential return on investment each time you consider these options.

Community ownership will offer a very different set of options. There is no cost (at least, beyond that of some individuals or groups who donate their time). There is, therefore, no consideration of return on investment.

Let's say that I see a challenge that addresses a particular technique in Java. "Oh, that's cool! But most of my friends don't speak Java - they speak C#. Hmm." At that point, if the challenge moves you to take action, you can create an alternate version of the challenge (the "quest") in C#, share it with some other C# folks in the community to get their agreement, and make it available to the general Mastery Quest community.

Of course, key to this is my idea that all quests serve three purposes:

1. Learning
2. Gaining real, useful experience
3. Fun

There's no doubt that some quests will not quite meet #2.  

For example, at the end of the ACCU2011 conference in Oxford there was a crypto challenge.  Solving the challenge required solving some quadratic equations (well outside my range of capability, btw). For those to whom this seemed like fun - whether because they like quadratic equations or because they can't resist a technical challenge or they love cryptanalysis - the activity certainly satisfied #1 and #3.  I'm not sure how useful it would be. Note that I'm not saying that it's NOT useful, just wondering.

And that's okay. Some learning is valuable, even if we can't see where or when or how we'd use it. Like learning Algebra for most of us, right? 

The idea of community ownership, then, is about a community of practitioners coming together to define quests, learning, and achievements that they - the community of practitioners - believe contribute to real, useful, fun, meaningful learning. Ultimately, then, those who complete the quests, along with some real-world experience (10,000 hours types of experience), can be recognized for their experience and achievements.

No certification organizations for us, but a community of peers whose goal is to see that all the other members of the community have every opportunity to learn and achieve, and to gain recognition amongst their peers and their marketplace for that learning and achievement. I believe that this will "lift all the boats".

First public talk on Mastery Quest!

I was privileged to be invited to present on Facilitation Patterns at ACCU2011 in Oxford, England.

At some point, one of the organizers - Ewan Milne - invited me to deliver a "lightning keynote". At this conference, on the last day, they invited four of us to each deliver a 15 minute keynote.

This meant, of course, that I had to pick a topic, plan the talk, and put together some slides. I decided to talk about this thing - this Mastery Quest concept and vision - for the first time to more than a small group of people. There were dozens - 100 - 200 - in the room, and I loved it!

Here are the slides.

Steven "Doc" List - Lightning Keynote at ACCU2011 - Life is a game

View more presentations from Steven List.

The video will be up within the next week.