Welcome to "The Technician's MBA"
Businesses don't train people enough.
It might be controversial, but I believe it to be true: Businesses don’t train people enough.
It’s a hard balance to strike between business growth and personal growth, but businesses (perhaps understandably) often prioritise the former and overlook the latter.
I hear some of the comments now “Our company has an L&D budget”, “I have access to Coursera/LinkedIn Learning/etc. through my company”; and whilst these are positive steps, often businesses are reluctant to invest too heavily in their staff. Why? It changes from business to business, but often it comes down to one of two things: cost or fear.
Cost is easy to understand; fear, maybe less so. Some businesses are reluctant to train because: “What happens if we train the person and they leave?”. Whereas the better question is: “What happens if we don’t train people and they stay?”. This fear means that when it comes to the skills that are not easily taught through online learning (i.e. soft skills), we expect people to either learn on the job, or gain the skills elsewhere.
On my personal career journey, I have the benefit of a really good “elsewhere”, with mentors and coaches who I often turn to for advice and reading recommendations. Not everyone has this and whilst I seek to mentor as many people as I can, I am not able to clone myself; and so this stack was created to be a source of “elsewhere” for others to incorporate as part of their career journey.
Why should you listen to anything I have to say?
First, let me get this out the way: I am a nerd. I have been coding for 20+ years, and I did both my undergraduate and Ph.D. in Statistics. However, I am a nerd that, through the training, advice, and guidance of mentors and coaches, learned to speak human/business.
This has undoubtedly helped me in my career, as it enables me to translate and convert technical concepts into understandable language; as well as being able to balance the wider needs of the business with their technical restraints.
If you want the braggadocious claims that litter the LinkedIn landscape nowadays here we go. I have built teams from 2 to 20+ many of whom I still mentor even after leaving; been the solo data person in start ups; helped start ups navigate to scale up; worked in multinational organisations where I helped steer their data roadmaps; advised investors, boards, directors, and multinational businesses on data and technology matters; built award winning data products as well as MVP products to take to market; and most importantly failed along the way.
That last one is the most important: I have failed, and I will again. I am not ashamed nor do I try and hide this fact. Through these failures I often learned more than my successes. Whilst we each learn through our own mistakes rather than the mistakes of others I believe by sharing our failures, and most importantly our learnings, we can help others try and avoid the same pitfalls.
Who is our content designed for?
All of the content that is posted here is designed to help technical practitioners understand business concepts and develop wider skills that will unlock opportunities as they want to climb the rungs of the corporate ladder.
Not every technical practitioner wants to be a team leader, or CTO and that’s fine; this content will still be useful as it can help develop an understanding of what goes on behind the curtain and is often hidden away from individual contributors deemed unsuited for the corridors of power.
Hard Skills vs. Soft Skills
We are predominantly going to talk about soft skills. That’s not to say the odd post about hard skills won’t appear, but they won’t be the main focus.
The reasoning is that there are plenty of resources for technical practitioners to develop their hard skills (Online Courses, Stack Overflow, Reddit, other Stacks, etc.) however the development of soft skills is painfully overlooked amongst technical practitioners.
If you are a self taught programmer, no course or resource will likely tell you the importance of these skills; their purpose is to teach you a technical skill. If you went to university, college, or another source of “traditional” education it is highly unlikely that soft skills were part of the curriculum; again their purpose is to teach you a technical skill.
This Stack’s purpose is to help you develop skills that have, most likely, been overlooked in your training to date or you want to learn more about and develop further.
Why develop soft skills?
These soft skills will make your job easier, from the Junior level all the way to C-Suite. It is sadly the case that many businesses have a gulf between technical and non-technical teams, because each think the other doesn’t speak their language or understand the challenges they face.
So, we find ourselves at an impasse. We don’t talk to them because they don’t talk to us. We need to start bridging that gap more.
Whilst there are plenty of resources to help non-technical people absorb technical concepts; the reverse is less true. Also these soft skills are more expensive to develop with the most expensive, highly valued, and difficult to obtain qualification being the MBA.
Hence “The Technician’s MBA”
This is “The Technician’s MBA”
We aren’t going to replace, or replicate the syllabus of, the MBA nor is that our intention. We want to help build and develop technical practitioner’s understanding of business concepts and soft skills; and if we build a community along the way even better.
An inspiration for this endeavour is “The Personal MBA” by Josh Kaufman; a book I was recommended, has been invaluable in my growth, and I also highly recommend.
Much like that book, each topic will be distilled to be as easy to absorb as possible and as the The Technician’s MBA grows I will link to other posts for ease of reference.
As Josh Kaufman says in his note to the reader “Knowing where to start in common business situations is extremely valuable”. We won’t cover everything you need to know, and you may not agree with everything, but we want to be a place to start, reference, and come back to as you navigate your professional growth journey.
I won’t publish “GenAI” articles, that means this might not be the most polished and grammatically perfect content; but it will be genuine.
I may from time to time use GenAI images - like the image for this article - which as we grow I will look to replace with commissioned artwork or licensed photos as and when I can afford to do so.
If there are sources I think are valuable, I will link to them and cite them accordingly.
I am an academic at heart, so sometimes you will see “we” instead of “I”; as we grow I hope to invite collaborators or guest writers but that’s for the future. (Note: See I did the “we” thing there, I was going to edit it but I thought it too perfect an illustration)
If you disagree with some of this content, great! We want to have that professional discussion as we can all grow from the free exchange of ideas - all we ask is that you challenge with respect.
To finish this off…
I hope you come along on this journey, and you find this content helpful. If you do please subscribe so you can be kept up to date as I post new content every Wednesday. Also consider sharing this Substack to others you think might find this valuable.
This is “The Technician’s MBA”, and as I sign off most online meetings:
Grand. Thanks for your time.