the next generation

You have 80,000 hours in your career: 40 hours per week, 50 weeks per year, for 40 years.

That’s a huge amount of time. And it means that your career is not only a major driver of your happiness — it’s probably also your biggest opportunity to have a positive impact on the world.

Clearly there are more people in the workforce then there are in the education system so maybe as humans we can naturally put more effort into making work better? All the knowledge that we gain and the passions we pursue or hear about contribute in making work a better place, we teach each other things, help each other and so much more.

Whereas at school at least back in the day we aren’t really taught to figure things out for our self or be creative or innovative we are just absorbing information and these tests and exams are just us spitting back information in one way shape or form so that we can prove to the teacher we understood that concept. If we don’t change now we are already seeing a trend where our education system is falling behind as tech especially continues to steam ahead like never before?

Hi everyone, my name is Dipesh and I’m here to tell you that work life is not like uni… absolute shocker!! I know right just a revelation Bet you weren’t expecting to hear that when you came in today. Enlightening….

Clearly this this kinda thing is catching on, otherwise we wouldn’t be here today focused on PBL and IBL…

This is the topic I was asked to talk about but what does it enable –rapid low-cost learning. So let me take you on our journey! Over the past 12 months I’ve worked with around 20 interns at Datacom. During this time, I’ve wondered why do people do internships? For some it might be work experience, for others they may be trying to meet new people, form relationships with professionals working in their respective field. There might be people in this room who are keen to network to do the exact same thing, right? So come have a chat after.

There are multiple studies out there stating that those who actually work in a job that they studied for at uni are actually the minority and sometimes I wonder why that is? Maybe when we are young, we don’t actually know what we want to do, or it’s not immediately obvious you know what you love from the get-go. And that’s perfectly normal

I was an intern not to long ago through the Microsoft student accelerator program, as you know at uni to graduate from certain degrees you need work experience hours and maybe that’s one way for the uni recognising the value of real-life experience. I can tell you from someone who did terribly in Exams and lacked the ability to dump information in a short amount of time, working on projects was a game changer not only did my grades shoot up at school and uni when I did projects, I later found out that the real world is based on projects so thank goodness for that! And thankfully collaboration and working together with people in the workplace is not called “Cheating” …oh the relief. Probably shouldn’t be saying this but a number of people have said they wouldn’t have got through uni without uhmm “help” from others. All I’ll say is there are some pro code refactorers out there. Yup creating new words on the go. Go you!

When I was doing my internship I had the pleasure of working with so many brilliant minds that I only dreamed of being like, now when I’m on the other end being able to help these people — “Relaunchers” these career changers these people who are looking to get into the tech industry who are really keen to just learn and absorb information I would love for them to say I have had a positive impact on their life even if that be in a small way. I think that if we have a culture of giving back and making sure that there are other people trying to get better do better things then we should you know praise these people we should enable and give everything to these people.

It’s always been hard because of the disconnect between the employers and the “relaunchers”. employers can view hiring people with a gap on their resume as a high-risk proposition and individuals on career break can have doubts about their abilities and imposter syndrome can kick in when trying to relaunch their careers especially if they’ve been out for a long time. this disconnect is the problem that we at Datacom are trying to help solve and now successful “relaunchers” are everywhere!

We have been doing projects for a really long time right? and as many of us have said that projects are limited in scope and duration. They’re a good way of working with content they have learnt. In PBL people learn through the project and we start with a problem and there is no single right answer.

So how do we do this at Datacom!

We get new interns every 12 or so weeks from a mixture of AWS restart, mission ready HQ, AUT, media design school and the University of Auckland and many more. The Mission ready and AWS restart initiatives are great because inherently PBL is engrained into the curriculum, so people remember the content more.

Students have voice and choice in PBL so they gain ownership of there learning and collaborate in a process of sustained inquiry. Lasting more than a few days in the case of project me and Midu run it’s around 10 weeks. We reflect on our discussions we have sprint plannings, and use an agile methodology to finish. The final product is shared with our wider team and other stakeholders who weren’t directly involved.

Research shows that rigorous PBL can result in higher engagement and deeper content knowledge. You can talk to some of the interns in the room today to see if they agree or not with this yourself.

The way we’ve chosen to tackle these internships is by creating something meaningful and relevant for the current times — as we’re all aware we’re not the same people that went home for work before the pandemic and the collective experience of the past two years has left an imprint on the world and on the role of work in our lives and hybrid work has become the norm, remote work is only a corner away so that’s what the question of what does the future of work hold and how can we prepare for the needs of our upcoming future, the shift in our style of working has left a ripple effect on workers and this is a huge problem because 43% of leaders say that relationship building is actually the greatest challenge when doing remote or hybrid work. People have fewer work friendships and many feel lonelier at work than before going hybrid or remote so currently employees are experiencing and feeling disconnectedness and loneliness which will only leave the business with the cost of less productivity and innovation within the workforce and effects happiness as I brought up at the start and more employee isolation and even silo so this is where we discovered the opportunity to create a long-term strategy for connectedness in this newly remote world.

We at Datacom have been creating a series of virtual world experiments and the purpose of this project was to reimagine the social capital for the future of sustainable social connectedness #togetherness and this project was looking into creating a virtual world experiment that would recreate that kind of social collisions and water cooler moments that we have at the office so this is our project. Danbee An is now in our team and in the crowd who worked on this with us.

The next project we have focused on is how do we make our people feel more connected with our workplace and we developed The Dataverse which is an augmented reality application that aims to incentivise employees to enter the office more often, by creating a positive experience where they can physically interact and engage with each other and the building. Sophia, Wafiq, Kafo and sylvia helped with this.

Currently we are looking into the wellbeing of our people and how you truly know someone is well when we predominantly live in a 2D world? Joel, Cory, Seri, Nichola and Klaris.

We live by a culture of convenience PBL forces us to systematically address the root of an issue instead of taking its surface value basing our ideas upon research and investigation. Through PBL students learn not to be sponges for facts but to look at an issue from a range of different perspectives.

Let’s not forget, that every time a “successful” person gives career advice, there is a selection bias in the background. Other people might have tried the very same thing and failed, but we will never hear about them, because they are not “successful”.

Your personal experience is the most reliable source of information, don’t follow any advice blindly. Try things, don’t be afraid of failure, and see what works for you.

The students I know that have done well in there career especially in the early years have done so because they worked in a good internship! There is proof that project-based learning can make a difference in reducing the skills shortage gap. If we just make this one little change to the mythical world of education not only, will unis benefit but humankind will as well.

View my TechTalk here: