Grapevine Consulting

I’ve always been aware that specialising in social media is not going to be special forever. But now Steve Rubel has spotted that Web 2.0 jobs are already declining and he says it’ll soon go the way of the blacksmith - once a big job area, now, not so much. (Although if all smithies looked like Russell Crowe I’m sure we’d find more use for them). But I’m personally not as freaked by this assertion as the first time I heard Charles Arthur say social media will kill off the PR.

The point where “everyone will be expected to know how to navigate the online landscape if they want to have a thriving career” as Rubel states,is some time off. There’s still a lot of digital education required and people needed to facilitate that learning, luckily for me. (BTW I also think PR will just evolve as comms specialists in the new digital landscape).

He’s right though in that the next generations of workers are naturally going to be more digitally focused.

I reckon the conventional education system is still behind in understanding this as they continue to treat technology as a specialist subject rather than something which will be applicable to all subject areas and the process of learning itself (Ewan McIntosh is a real visionary in this space). That’s why all the disappearing Medicine & Law grads Rubel mentions are off trying to become ”webillionaires” instead of digitally innovating within their own specialist area.

I’ve been thinking a lot about technology and learning recently. Bear with me while I get a bit sentimental but I’ve just found out my dad, in his 60s, has received a BA in Applied Management. I’m very pleased for him to finally achieve degree recognition for his career in the field of people with disabilities but I’ve also really admired him for the revolutionary ways in which he applied technology to education & curative therapy throughout his career.

In the late 80s, apart from the painful stuff he did with synthesisers (one headline called him “The Maestro of the Retarded”), he recognised the potential for these new-fangled computer things to transform early childhood education by collating and analysing the 1000s of steps every child progresses through to develop from baby to school-ready child.

He envisaged in the future home, where everyone would have a PC (and drive flying cars), that families could become teachers in this key stage of learning and not reliant on intermittent contact with child development specialists; that’s a god-send if your child has a disability, even more so if they haven’t yet been identified as having one and the programme spots it early. Later incarnations of his e-learning product led to looking at how the web could enable this to be distributed free, to the mass market.

It’s up and running in some form in China but still something key decision-makers he’s spoken to over the years are yet to really get behind it. Maybe there’s been an unconscious desire for specialists to protect themselves?

Anyway, I guess my point is that while increasing digital confidence by people may replace the old-style  ”online specialists”, new specialisms will crop up, but allowing more access to previously “specialised knowledge” isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

[Just to clarify the picture at the top is not me and my dad, it's from the Russell Crowe film. However, the picture below of the bearded man and boyish looking, pudgy baby girl is me and dad]