Last month, my family and I finally took the great leap into the 21st century and signed up for an unlimited home broadband contract. While the main difference has been an increased willingness to always use the HD option on iPlayer, it’s also meant that working from home is now near-identical to working from the office. I must admit that when I first thought of the idea of working from home I did scoff a tad: how exactly would I replicate my work PC there, let alone get access to the Spark servers and the massive amounts of information I need to send and receive every day. However, with a laptop, a mobile ‘phone contract with sufficient minutes, a Skype account for when I need to ring abroad and a broadband contract that means I’m not paranoid about going over my allowance every time I open a load of images from the server, it couldn’t be simpler. I’m not about to start living in hotels or anything, but for the moment it does provide a good occasional respite from the office.
After all, that’s what working from home tends to be for me: an occasional change from the office. It’s not like there are less distractions: indeed, with postmen, milkmen, other deliveries, children, confused neighbours, next door’s kids’ football and chimney sweeps it can be a wonder anything happens at all. However, it does provide a valuable element of flexibility. Whilst we’ve all heard of the freedom that the cloud and broadband can offer workers, in my experience this freedom tends to be something you need thanks to utilities companies, deliveries, school trips and shenanigans on the Underground.
At the same time, this freedom isn’t going to benefit everyone. Yes, those of us in PR, journalism or other related fields can benefit from the ability to fix our working lives around our private schedule, within reason. We can order online for when it suits us, make sure we’re at home to meet the gas man and structure our days so that, when needed, we’re always free to pick the kids up from school. Yet there are many, many more who won’t see quite the same advantages: your average bus driver, factory worker or shopkeeper might well be able to order their shopping online but making sure they’re home to receive it will be a very different matter. Like many developments in technology, the benefits of mobile working aren’t really being shared equally at the moment. Admittedly, given the needs of various jobs such equality could be hard to attain. Yet those of us who want to shout the life-changing virtues of much technology, and I count myself among them, still need to bear in mind how lucky we are to benefit from those changes in the first place. After all, in terms of its grand impact on society in a lot of opinions the internet is still some way behind the washing machine.
I am not sure if it is acceptable to discuss an article that is nearly three months old but I came across it and thought wow, tech PR is setting the trend for fashion PRs et al to follow and its not often you see that!
I want my own PC
The section on ‘IT skills’ is something that is often brushed over in many businesses. Today we generally expect people to have sufficient knowledge of the usual Microsoft Office applications. In the PR world, there are a few people who will also mention social media in this section but whether this is an IT skill per se is probably an entirely different discussion in itself.
In recent work with clients including Compuware and Hornbill, there’s been a lot of discussion around the changing patterns of IT ownership driven by trends such as cloud computing / SaaS and the consumerisation of IT. Now there’s probably an entire thesis or at least a whitepaper written on this topic, but coming back to the CV it feels as though the section on IT skills could in time become a really strong selling point.
The actual ownership of IT in our professional lives does come with a great deal of responsibility. For example, making sure a smartphone is correctly maintained or knowing how to resolve a performance problem with a specific application. If working out how to charge calls from a personal mobile phone in your expense sheet today is tricky, what will happen when you’re juggling costs across several IT suppliers?
Okay, it might be a little early to take a course on the inner workings of the “Information Technology Infrastructure Library”. However, assuming the world is indeed moving in this direction, failure to add IT management expertise to the CV might see us reaching for the violin instead of blowing our own trumpet.