While those in traditional fields may pursue study and qualifications in order to advance their careers and earning potential, and see PD as both a reward and a motivator, for those in working in technology and innovation, the pathways for — and value of — professional development aren’t so clear-cut.

And for team leaders seeking to attract and motivate truly innovative staff, the role of PD in employee motivation and satisfaction can be very fuzzy.

In a recent interview, I asked a mobile developer how he keeps his skills at the top of his field. He laughed and said, “Coming to work is a good start!” In this industry, at least, the progress is being made — and knowledge is most quickly gained — in startups and innovative businesses, not in universities.

That explains why younger players entering the industry today face such fierce competition. There are plenty of people already working in innovative technology roles on the strength of experience and talent, rather than qualifications. As the technology sector gains maturity, employers now have the luxury of valuing people with proven experience (with or without formal qualifications) over fresh graduates. And few employers will bother speaking to a candidate who hasn’t learned or created anything new since they finished formal study.

The freshly released Startup Genome Project report corroborates the value of non-school learning. The research found “Startups that have helpful mentors, track metrics effectively, and learn from startup thought leaders raise 7x more money and have 3.5x better user growth” than those that don’t. No mention is made of the value of formal qualifications as a basis for startup success.

Your potential team members don’t want to see professional development listed as an employment benefit in their contracts; they choose jobs on the basis of how much the roles themselves will let them learn. The risky thrill of experimenting to create world-first products and take them successfully to market is a core appeal for those who work in innovative technology.

For this reason, proven expertise is usually more respected than qualifications by peers and colleagues. In innovative development, team members expect their peers to be able to walk the talk — for the good of the team, the project itself, and the individual’s own on-the-job PD. That motivates team members to seek productive, challenging, high-profile projects with great teams that they can learn from, rather than formal qualifications. Similarly, successful team leaders know that the bottom line depends entirely on whether team members can deliver, so rewards and respect naturally flow from successful experimentation, not traditional education.

Not surprisingly, the terms on which these types of team members are engaged aren’t those that appeal to those opting to work in more staid, traditional fields. The innovators thrive on possibility, the thrill of pushing boundaries, and the chance to have an impact. Offer to foot the bill for an MBA, and you’ll likely get a lot of blank stares. Employers may expect staff to walk the talk, but team members, too, judge employer credibility in terms of on-the-job projects, tasks, and teams. They want:

• roles that effectively amount to paid experimentation, perhaps through the opportunity to participate in rapid prototyping projects where team members can focus on mastering a new skill or its application in a certain environment
• to attend industry events that combine seminars with networking events — providing access to the “thought leadership” and “mentoring” mentioned in the Startup Genome report
• the ability to contact and engage with other specialists outside the organization, on the organization’s time and, potentially, money.

Rather than being an after-hours, formal, institutionalized proposition, successful PD in innovative teams is holistic and always-on. Instead of tracking the team member’s achievement on the basis of grades, leaders are more likely to assess the ROI on what may be a guesstimated investment in PD by looking at individuals’ influences on company revenues and profits. And team leaders who understand these motivations can consistently attract and manage good innovators.

Image courtesy stock.xchng user madame_min.

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Who Do You Consider a Colleague?

Especially for freelance web workers, defining a “colleague” can be a complicated matter. Is your stakeholder a colleague? How about the project sponsor for the contract you’re working on? More likely, you consider people doing similar work in similar fields to you colleagues, over and above people that you work with directly, who are responsible for entirely different aspects of a given project.

Expanding your definition of who you count as a colleague is not just a petty semantics game. It will help shape the way you interact with people, and could lead to more meaningful relationships where none would otherwise exist. Treating a PR contact as a colleague, instead of passively receiving information from them, for instance, could get you priority access to advance information down the road.

You might also consider people who perform the same function as you in different industries colleagues if you don’t already, and try to reach out and connect with them. A business writer has a lot to learn from a technical writer, for instance, and vice-versa. Having colleagues in other industry spaces also has the advantage of giving you lots of “bench depth” in terms of recommending other contractors to clients with needs beyond your skill set.

Have Conversations Beyond Your Purview

Being the expert on something feels good. So good, in fact, that many will opt to maintain that feeling as long as possible rather than risk wading into unfamiliar territory, and possibly looking like a bit of a fool. But by sticking to familiar ground you’re only doing yourself a disservice in the end.

Take every advantage you can at trade conventions and other events (including purely social occasions like birthday parties) to pick the brain of professionals in various fields other than your own. As freelancers, we often focus so much on personal branding that we miss out on chances to pick up a little more knowledge of things beyond our walled garden.

Try Out Unusual Partnerships

If you happen to be successful at learning about things beyond your usual sphere, you may start to get ideas for strange and unusual projects that bridge disciplines or industries.

Resist the urge to dismiss these fantasies as unrealistic or unfeasible. In fact, try some of the more unrealistic ones out. It’s hard to embark on a project that doesn’t have a clearly defined value proposition, especially if you’re at a point at which you basically need to convert all of your working time into money. But as the old saying goes, nothing ventured, nothing gained. Accepting a little risk in exchange for the possibility of finding a partnership that could lead to new and exciting work is sometimes the only way to escape a work funk or a revenue plateau.

Pop the Bubble

At this point, with the technology available to us, there’s no excuse for having tunnel vision as a freelancer. Get out there, meet new people, and reevaluate your professional assumptions on a regular basis, and your business will reflect the positive change.

What steps have you taken to cultivate interdisciplinary relationships?

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Targeting your professional development, however, in a preemptive rather than reactive way, is not always easy. Usually freelancers and consultants just roll with the punches and learn what they have to depending on client requirements. A little forethought, though, can go a long way to making you the applicant of choice before any contracts are awarded.

Skill 1: Working Knowledge of HTML and CSS

This is an oldie but goodie, and it will become even more important as companies start to streamline their IT departments. It happened to traditional freelancers and consultants when they were expected to bring desktop publishing skills to the table along with their analytical abilities, and it will happen with online workers as well. For employers, it’s simple math: fine one who’ll do the job of two. Here’s a useful free resource to start with.

Skill 2: Transparent Reporting

When spending is the key deciding factor behind any and all business decisions, good reporting practices can make all the difference. Show your prospective client that you have a solid, consistent reporting process that’s simple, straightforward, and transparent, and they’ll thank you by awarding you more contracts. Things to think about are the level of detail you put into your activity logs, what increments you use to account for your time, how you list and back up your expense claims, etc.

Skill 3: Twitter Networking

You may be a networking whiz, with all the LinkedIn, Facebook, and MySpace contacts one person can handle, but that doesn’t translate into instant Twitter success. That’s because Twitter’s a different beast altogether. Case in point: the overwhelming majority of my Facebook contacts have never even heard of Twitter, yet it boasts among its members the most powerful and successful people working online today.

Succeeding here means learning to converse instead of broadcast, giving people a reason to follow you beyond your portfolio, and treading the thin line between self-promotion and spamming. Check out Darren Rowse’s Twitip for some help getting started, or refining your Tweet-Fu.

I’m sure that as the year progresses, many other valuable skill sets will emerge, but you can bet that these three, at least, will continue to be relevant well into the future.

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When I think about projects, I always separate them into two categories: revenue generating and non-revenue generating. A non-revenue generating project is almost always going to be a professional development activity, although revenue generating activities can be classified as professional development as well.

VirtualVocations: Paid Work

Finding revenue generating projects is probably the most difficult. My number one source is, unsurprisingly, the internet. Sites like Problogger.net provide great job boards where all of the work is done remotely, but it can feel a bit crowded there. I recently came across VirtualVocations, which features different kinds of job listings, and has a smaller user pool, meaning more chance to land any given job.

VirtualVocations features a lot of the more common teleworking positions, including marketing specialists, transcriptionists, writers, and programmers. As with many sites of this type, listings are a little hit-0r-miss, and sifting through them is mostly left to the job hunter’s discretion,

The nice thing about VirtualVocations is its community support. Possible scams are quickly flagged in the user forums, and members share job information and their experiences readily. There are also some handy resources available from the forums, like this rate sheet detailing how much you should charge for transcription services.

[places for writers]: Professional Growth

I’m not always out to get paid. Sometimes I want to hone my craft, which in my case means improving my writing. Places for writers offers me the opportunity to do so, and to contribute to the online literary community in the process.

Obviously, this one is a little skewed towards those of you working as writers, but there is no field of web work in which good writing skills will not pay off. The written word is still the primary means of internet communication, and in all cases, the better you are at communicating, the better you will be at your job.

Places for writers offers opportunities for those interested in all types of writing, from poetry to non-fiction. It features open calls for submissions from small press and literary publications, a few job listings (though these are not often updates), information on how to pursue writer’s grants, and resources for writers.

A lot of the content is Canada-focused, but in most cases, the information and resources are available and applicable to all those interested in improving their writing and adding to their clips.

I love having multiple things on the go, and sites like those I’ve listed here today help me achieve that. The only problem is avoiding a situation where I’ve taken on much more than I can handle, but that’s an entirely different article.

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