Anjana: [00:02:43] Well, we love to start out by asking our guests about their career and how since you graduated and your time at Motorola, Capital One, Deloitte, could you walk us through what life was like postgrad and where you’re at now? [00:02:59][16.0]
Carlye: [00:03:00] Sure. So I have definitely one of those those curvy careers. There’s no straight lines when it comes to my career at all. So if I’m totally honest, actually when I graduated college, I couldn’t get a job. It was kind of right in that economic downturn, one of many, but one of the earlier ones. And so I ended up joining in AmeriCorps program really because I thought, hey, I don’t want to waste this year. And so I did AmeriCorps and it completely taught me about this whole career I’d never heard of, which is called corporate philanthropy. And so I fell in love with the idea of being able to give away other people’s money. Who wouldn’t? It’s a great career. Ended up going to grad school, specifically focus on international NGOs and really focused on how volunteerism can be something called soft power instead of hard power — hard power is military, soft power is basically volunteerism or tourism, that type of thing. And so I started my career running global volunteer programs for Motorola, moved into then understanding and funding grants. So funding non-profits and specifically focused on girls and women and giving them more access to STEM education, so science, technology, engineering, math education. And so did that for about seven years, did a lot of really cool things with that really focused on thinking differently around philanthropy. So not just writing checks, but developing cohort based funding, which basically means non-profits had to work together in order to get funding from us and really doing some more kind of experiential philanthropy and really early days social impact volunteerism for Motorola. And then that really led to a new kind of role at Capital One, and again, Google had purchased Motorola, lots of changes in corporate life. So I was looking for a new a new gig, and I found an awesome job at Cap One. They were acquiring a bunch of banks, so they needed some support to kind of reimagine what their foundation would look like. We’re really interested in kind of that digital space. And so it started there kind of managing their foundation and then very quickly grew into a broader role as actually their CEO declared one day that they were no longer a bank and they were going to be a tech company. And so basically they said, all right, go figure out how to do it. And so as someone who had a ton of experience in technology, philanthropy, I was tapped to help them think about how they wanted to show up from a social responsibility or kind of corporate responsibility perspective and so I help them reimagine their giving program, which was called Future Edge. It no longer exists, they actually just retired it. But what I helped to launch was a five year $150 million program focused on workforce development primarily for digital workforce, which is really what taught me about future work. What are those skills that individuals need to be successful regardless of their job in the 21st century? So from there, I moved with Capital One to a tiny little startup, so I was the third person to join this, so we called it a startup, but it was within a big, huge company, but it was called tech college, so I was the third person to join and spent three years there growing that from three people to 75. It was a full organization that taught everything from Scrum Master basics for Agile all the way up to developing chat bots and machine learning. And so we actually had a full teaching staff. Just think of it as like a full university, so to speak, for Capital One, all focused on technology skills and really thinking about how do you retain, engage and excite your future workforce from a technology perspective. [00:07:07][247.2]
Anjana: [00:07:10] Wait, so what does a day to day look like in this university? [00:07:14][4.3]
Carlye: [00:07:15] I think one of the coolest programs I got to work on that Capital One is called the CODA program, Capital One Developer Academy. And there were a couple of intents behind it. One was we really wanted to diversify our college hire software engineer population. And when I say diversify, I mean diversity of thought as well as then your traditional diversity indicators of race, ethnicity, gender. Yes. So we actually were able to develop a six month boot camp. So we hired recent college graduates who were not computer scientists, put them through a full six month boot camp. So they had four months of classroom training, they were getting paid. But all they did was go to school every day for four months and then two months of basically a mini internship that they went through. And then they were software engineers, they were full stack developers at Cap One. And so that could be what it looks like, or it could literally be, hey, let’s do an API class, it was actually an API escape room. So it could be an hour and a half and you have to build and design a great API in order to get out of the room. So that could be what it looks like too. So I bring fun to learning but then also really that purpose of how do you figure out how to kind of advance your career from what you’re looking for? [00:08:42][87.3]
Anjana: [00:08:44] That’s awesome. What kind of majors were you taking for that program? [00:08:47][3.5]
Carlye: [00:08:48] Everything so in our first cohort we had everything from from like art to more of your traditional scientists, so mechanical engineering and that kind of thing. But we really wanted to bring a diversity from a majors perspective because then the other diversity followed. And so we really focused on let’s try to every every liberal arts. Let’s also look at, like, you know, your relatable STEM majors but not computer science. And the program still running. Our first cohort was 60 individuals. And when I left, I think we’d graduated 250 total. And yeah, it was great retention and great performance. So I encourage any companies out there to do this. [00:09:39][51.1]
Anjana: [00:09:40] Seriously, every single company should do this. That’s really cool. [00:09:43][2.5]
Carlye: [00:09:44] Yeah. I mean it’s a huge investment. It’s not cost prohibitive but so is hiring an employee. And so, I mean, if you’re not going to train people how to work well at your company, then then you have the chance of losing them. [00:10:01][17.2]
Anjana: [00:10:03] I feel like if you’re also bringing in people from majors like, you know, the liberal arts college or anything like that, you’re seeing more of that empathy you were talking about and and bringing that into coding. [00:10:12][9.1]
Carlye: [00:10:13] Yeah, I am a huge, huge proponent of no code and low code. I think that it’s one of the major future of work disruptors that we’re going to see in the next five years, maybe even two years. And so to me, what software engineers will become are problem solvers who understand how code works. They will not be coding themselves because we’re going to automate all that. It’s already there with no code solutions or low code solutions. So really, thinking through the skill set of software engineer is probably a huge challenge for companies. [00:10:47][34.6]
Anjana: [00:10:49] So you take that information that this future of no code, low code and then you turn that into a program where you’re teaching them instead to be problem solvers, is that right? [00:10:57][8.0]
Carlye: [00:10:59] No with CODA, we were actually teaching them how to code. Future forward, I think that the need will be how do you understand what your customer wants, who your customer is, what they want, to then tell the machine what to code. [00:11:13][14.4]
Anjana: [00:11:14] Right. Right. So in the future, the programs would look like that. [00:11:17][2.4]
Carlye: [00:11:17] Yeah, exactly. [00:11:18][1.3]
Anjana: [00:11:19] Yeah, very cool. [00:11:21][1.6]
Carlye: [00:11:22] And then that brought me then I’d been commuting back and forth to San Francisco for a lot of my roles at Cap One, and I absolutely loved it. And so I was looking for an opportunity to be able to move out here to the Bay Area, and so that is how I joined Deloitte. They were looking to start up and grow their start up innovation ecosystem program, which they called Catalyst. And so I came on as their future of work expert. And so what I was able to do was basically start relationships and nurture relationships with startups, focus on future of work that we could then bring to our client base and help them to scale and innovate more quickly, partnering with the startup. And then that then lastly, finally brings me I’m now at Silicon Valley Bank, helping them to start up a very similar thing to what I did at Capital One, which is a tech learning organization, really focused on that tech and digital transformation. So my very curvy, long, short explanation of my career, [00:12:20][58.3]
Anjana: [00:12:22] There’s so much to unpack there. I was like I need to started taking notes. I have so many questions. [00:12:26][4.7]
Sydney: [00:12:28] You even got out your pen. [00:12:28][0.3]
Anjana: [00:12:29] Yeah, seriously. But can you — I think it’s funny because corporations and philanthropy often when people talk about it, it sounds like an oxymoron. In your first job, was it, and I don’t know how many years ago that was, but was corporate social responsibility as big of an of a subject as it is these days? [00:12:50][20.7]
Carlye: [00:12:51] It wasn’t, but it was just taking off, so I was really lucky to get in kind of early and, you know, at the ground level. So when I went to grad school for this, there were literally six universities in the entire country that offered this degree. And so now it’s also offered in undergrad. So it wasn’t even offered an undergrad at the time. If you think from that perspective and then I would say the foundation — so here’s the difference between social impact and like CSR versus foundation work. So foundation is generally more of a taxable kind of corporate way to… I don’t want to call it a tax shelter, but it’s a way to give funds to the community that is very separate from what the corporation is doing, whereas social impact or CSR, where you talk about your sustainability — that’s grown since I joined. So I think that’s the biggest difference, is it was really a focus on truly getting money from the foundation on behalf of the corporation. But you weren’t embedded in the corporation in the same way that it is today. So like something like Tom’s or Warby Parker never existed when I started. [00:14:08][76.4]
Sydney: [00:14:09] You said now you’re at Silicon Valley Bank. Is that correct? But prior to this you were at Deloitte, could you tell us a bit about your role there? Like Future of Work Startup and Innovation Lead? One, just sounds like a really cool and impactful title, but what did that mean? [00:14:26][17.5]
Carlye: [00:14:27] So a lot of what I did is I tried to understand what kind of the the biggest areas that were causing problems for our clients. So one of probably, I would say, like the biggest challenges of our current future work kind of area is understanding how skills are shifting to meet the demands of business. So my very favorite stat is that the shelf life of a skill is five years, the shelf life of a technology skill is 2.5. [00:15:08][41.0]
Anjana: [00:15:09] What? You mean I spent all that time on Tableau for no reason? [00:15:12][2.2]
Carlye: [00:15:14] If it was 2.5 years ago, it’s gone. [00:15:15][0.7]
Anjana: [00:15:16] Oh no! [00:15:16][0.1]
Carlye: [00:15:18] Tableau has hopefully developed different ways of doing things and not fully, you should be able to retain some of the base knowledge. But because technology is moving so fast, literally, we’re being out skilled by the technology. And so for me, the coolest future work thing that I got to work on at Deloitte was looking at startups who are really looking at this from a data perspective, because every single business, no matter if you’re a tech company, every industry is going to have this problem because skills are part of your workforce. And pretty much every industry has a workforce. And so helping businesses understand where they’re going from a business perspective and how to get ahead of how to train their employees ahead of time is probably one of the coolest things I got to do. And then really it was startups who are trying to build machine learning that could predict the future, where literally jobs would go. [00:16:18][60.7]
Sydney: [00:16:19] Wow. [00:16:19][0.0]
Anjana: [00:16:22] That’s so cool. But OK, what is the answer to that? Like how do you predict where that where jobs are going? [00:16:28][6.3]
Carlye: [00:16:29] So there’s not to get overly complex, but basically a lot of a lot of data. So what you can do is look at the history of how different skills and or jobs have shifted and evolved through time. And so with that, you basically tag the way that that’s changed to then help to predict the future. I’m trying to think of a good example. [00:16:53][24.0]
Anjana: [00:16:54] I was just going to ask. [00:16:54][0.4]
Carlye: [00:16:55] The top of my head, well, OK, so like actuaries is something where you can take the relative skill of an actuary, where over time, you know, actuaries never used Excel before. Right. What would they use it for? And so then well Excel is changing to a new term that’s called Citizen Data Scientist. So you can use actual machine learning so you won’t need to use necessarily Excel. But you are still using these data analytic tools. Power BI, for example, could be something that you might use. Tableau, right. So that could be something you might use. And so that job is one changing, the responsibilities of that job is changing and then the skills required for it. And so basically what the data is, is pulling this from all of the different sources. So whether that’s job boards, whether that’s company websites like where they’re posting the. The Labor, the labor board, US Bureau of Labor Statistics has a ton of data on this, basically crunching it, trying to find the patterns and then using those patterns to predict the future. [00:18:01][66.4]
Sydney: [00:18:03] What were, if you can speak to this, just like interesting findings or like unexpected things that you discovered about the future of work while you were in that role from those predictive models? [00:18:15][12.3]
Carlye: [00:18:16] Yeah, this is maybe interesting to me as a Future of Work geek, but I think to me, I think covid especially really unveiled or unraveled I think how far away we are from from Future of Work. So some of the stuff that I got to look at and work with startups on was like, well, how do we think about virtual reality work? Right. So how do we actually meet and collaborate in virtual reality with avatars or that type of thing? And when COVID hit and everyone actually had to go to virtual work, I think my biggest kind of surprise was how far away companies were from being ready. So many companies are pushing to go to the cloud right now, unless you’re on the cloud, you have no ability to even do or even think about some of these other things. And so interesting, probably not in the way you are thinking, but kind of interesting in there is this vision and there are all of these amazing startups thinking about the future forward. And there’s these big behemoth companies that aren’t even ready for those solutions. And so I think that gap was a really interesting kind of unveiling for me. [00:19:35][78.4]
Sydney: [00:19:37] It also just sounds like besides the philanthropy component, like throughout your career, I feel like a great way to describe you would also be an intrepreneur. You were talking about starting that foundation from the ground up at these companies and really leading like this philanthropic arm. So would you say that that’s an accurate description? [00:19:56][18.8]
Carlye: [00:19:57] Yeah, for sure. I’m like one of those entrepreneurs who’s scared to do it on my own. [00:20:00][3.2]
Anjana: [00:20:03] That’s the way to do it. [00:20:03][0.5]
Carlye: [00:20:03] In the sheltered walls of the corporation. No for sure. I always say I am a builder. That’s the way I describe myself. So I’m most passionate and most excited about my work when I get to build something, I can sustain and run programs, too. But I think I know where I add the most value is definitely in that building stage and really thinking through the vision of what something could be and then trying to figure out how to build it, to really make it come to life. [00:20:34][30.4]
Sydney: [00:20:35] Entrepreneurs and startups are definitely glorified, to say the least, in this day and age. But I definitely think there’s something to be said about, intrepreneurs like yourself who are working, like you were saying, to transform these big companies that started a long time ago and are having these outdated practices. And if they don’t, you know, start to get ahead of the curve, then they’re going to lose relevancy. [00:21:02][27.1]
Carlye: [00:21:04] Yep, for sure, and I think it’s interesting because I think we still look at some of the big tech companies right, so I’m out in the Bay Area and I won’t name them, but BANG would be a great acronym to describe them. And they’re old now, if you think about it. Right. So some of them are 20, 30 years old. And so there are all these kind of newcomers, so even for what we would probably more traditionally or stereotypically think of as your tech innovators, they’re in the same boat. They need to reinvent themselves and they need to continue to think about how to retain that workforce and engage their workforce in interesting topics. And so I’ve definitely kind of worked more in the financial services industry. But I think it’s a challenge across even with some of your what you would traditionally think of us as your innovators, like every company has to figure it out. [00:22:04][59.9]
Anjana: [00:22:07] Totally. I think a lot of people would be, you know, a lot of young people, especially in this day and age with everything going on, would be super interested in all the roles that you’ve had so far. And I am wondering, you know, for a student in college or someone just starting out their career, would you. Do you think students have to go to school to do what you’re doing? What kind of pathways do you see to doing philanthropic work at corporations? [00:22:31][24.8]
Carlye: [00:22:34] So no, and I and I’m raised by two academics, so they would hate that I say that, but I really think, so I was an art history major. I do think I I use my my undergraduate degree. I think what I studied in art history was people and and how cultures formed. And so what I’m helping companies do or what I’ve help companies do throughout my career is is basically help them understand how people work and how to develop great culture. You can do that through philanthropy. You can do that through training. There’s lots of different ways to think about how to do that. But I don’t think that you need a four year degree to really do that. I think for me, one, it’s definitely skill, but I think it’s also been luck and and I would say really leveraging my network. So that’s the other piece I’ve learned. But for me, I’ve always just tried to find roles that like I geek out about. And most of what I do today, I’ve learned on the job, I am not, I wouldn’t say like I’m a true, true technologist, but like, I can geek out pretty good with a lot of the engineers that I work with and have built training for. And that has all been learned on the job. Like I said, I was an history major and I can talk APIs, I was actually developing [inaudible] for APIs earlier today. [00:24:03][89.0]
Anjana: [00:24:05] I still don’t know what it fully means. I hear it thrown around so much and I’m like, yeah, sure, same. [00:24:11][6.6]
Carlye: [00:24:13] You can take my course. [00:24:14][0.6]
Anjana: [00:24:15] Sounds good. Will do. I had a question for you that I’m asking only because you said you’re an open book and feel free to not answer if you if you aren’t allowed to answer. But I’m curious, with all these different companies that you’ve worked for and done philanthropic work for, when you were doing, you know, the foundation work early on in your career and like in the last however long you were in the workforce, do you feel like corporations truly care about giving back or do you feel like it’s to get a tax reduction or, you know, like just because they have to, especially now? [00:24:53][37.6]
Carlye: [00:24:54] Yeah, for sure. It’s a great question. And I think it’s one I definitely struggled with when I was in the role. It’s a both and answer. So corporations make money. That’s that’s what they do. And so I think if you go into it thinking that a corporation isn’t there to make money, then you’re just fooling… it’s not the mission of a corporation. And so I think for me and I always I had this early on with my grad school peers because I went to the dark side and did corporate philanthropy while they worked for a nonprofit. And for me, what either my justification was or kind of how how I felt my contribution would be, is that I’d rather work for a corporation and be able to influence the resources, even if it was bad intent. I mean, my budget was in the millions of dollars annually. And so for me to be able to influence and help to direct that to nonprofits that I think were doing well, not to say I didn’t care for the reasoning, but I cared less because I’d rather have that ability then, and this is no offense to nonprofits either, but like to run a small nonprofit and not make as much of a change. And so that was kind of not my justification, but kind of the way I thought about, you know, yes, sometimes corporations are in it for the tax benefits, but that’s the reason they’re a corporation is to make money, and then too if they are doing well and they are thinking about this in the right way, they’ll hire people who really understand the community and will be there and giving the dollars in the right way. So that’s kind of the way I see it. But I think I was also lucky, especially at Capital One, they gave way more than they they needed to. And it’s really embedded in the culture. There’s a regulatory component to giving for a financial institution and they, year over year, went above and beyond and really provided additional support. So I was lucky in that that sense. [00:27:14][140.5]
Anjana: [00:27:15] Yeah, that’s a good answer. I once told told a friend who works I shouldn’t name the company, but she works at a company I don’t really support. And she was saying, you know, well, you can go work at this company and try to make the difference that you can internally and try to, like you said, pull resources in the right direction. Or you can or someone else will come do the job that doesn’t really care. So that’s a good way to think about it, I felt like. [00:27:42][27.0]
Carlye: [00:27:44] Yeah, for sure. And it is it is tough, especially, like I said, I went to school to basically run international non-profits. And I knew going into school, that’s not what I wanted to do. I wanted to do corporate philanthropy. But, yeah, I think a lot of my peers in grad school definitely saw it as like the easy way out. So that’s fine. [00:28:07][23.3]
Sydney: [00:28:09] And I’m sure both are like very difficult in, you know, their own respects, like doing this in the corporate world versus doing this like at a nonprofit, but almost seems like, you know, even even more difficult to, like, rally people behind, like, you know, allocating those resources at a corporation to where they should go in terms of philanthropy. It seems like it can be difficult to do that. [00:28:36][27.3]
Carlye: [00:28:38] For sure. My first manager, I think one of the best things she taught me was she said, “It may seem glamorous, but 99 percent of your job is going to be saying no.” And so if you think about that, like the amount and, it’s part of it, like you want to say no with humility. You want to make sure that you’re really making great decisions when you’re especially when you’re doing grant allocations and big dollar grant allocations, which is one of the things you did at Motorola, upwards of $1 million per grant. And so those are huge, impactful things for people’s careers even. And so if you change that funding or if you look at having someone having requested that and not get that, like how you communicate to them is really important. So I think what I learned in my early career was really that idea of empathy and really understanding how to communicate from a human empathetic perspective, no matter who you’re talking to. [00:29:35][56.9]
Sydney: [00:29:38] I definitely wanted to return to, you ouched on it briefly about COVID earlier, could you speak a little bit more about how COVID has impacted your role and we’re talking about the Future of Work, I feel like that’s such a huge conversation right now, but I would love to hear a bit more about your insights and your perspective on that. [00:30:00][21.7]
Carlye: [00:30:00] Yeah, for sure. I think I was with Deloitte when COVID first hit. And in the Future of Work space kind of primarily focused on that. And I would say just the need from a corporate perspective to really understand everything from wellness to communication to collaboration is just so high, and I think, I wouldn’t say that it shifted my work necessarily. It may have accelerated it. And if you’ve read anything on Future of Work, everyone’s saying like, oh, it’s the acceleration, that’s all COVID has done. I think the the behind the scenes of it is, it’s been accelerated and a Band-Aid has been put on it. Right. So I’m a huge, huge fan of the gig economy and the gig workforce and thinking about how companies can really leverage gig and how that can kind of free individuals up to choose where they work instead of choosing their benefits or all the things that go with career work. And so to me, this is like a huge step forward for gig, except for all the bad stuff that’s happening, which is people, especially like in your traditional gig, you know, they’re not feeling safe, right? They’re not feeling protected. And so that’s the Band-Aid of future work of like, yeah, all of a sudden anyone can live anywhere they want, but not really. Right. Because companies don’t really know how to support yet in those ways. Our pay structures are totally related to geographic areas. We’re just not comfortable with with this idea of a true gig. And so to me, it has accelerated and allowed companies who maybe would have thought it wasn’t possible in the past see the possibility. But I think it also formed a lot of really bad habits. And so there’s going to be a lot of undoing. I think that needs to happen as well. [00:32:01][120.6]
Anjana: [00:32:02] That’s really interesting. The pay aspect of it, which I did read on LinkedIn somewhere, was on the trending post was like, if I live in California and move to Texas during COVID, do I still get paid a California wage or salary? [00:32:17][14.5]
Carlye: [00:32:19] No. I mean depends on the company, but most companies would say, no, you do not. [00:32:24][4.3]
Anjana: [00:32:26] Yeah, we’ll take your $110k and bring it down to $65k. [00:32:28][2.2]
Carlye: [00:32:30] Yeah. And it’s interesting because it’s, it’s going to, it’s going to really impact cities and it’s going to impact housing and it’s going to, it’s to me, you know, it’s a great time to kind of live through and experience and also kind of scary at the same time, I’m a homeowner in San Francisco and I don’t want the home rates to go down. So, you know, it’s a both-and again, as everything is. But, yeah, I think it’ll definitely be an interesting unraveling once we get to a place where people are saying like, oh, the next normal or the new normal, really seeing what that looks like and I think one of the interesting, earlier on in COVID, especially a lot of the tech companies were saying, like, OK, we’re fully remote forever, you know? And my response to that is, that’s great. But have you asked your employees if that’s what they want? Right. Because a lot of employees, like I would say, myself included, I love going to the office. Not every single day. I want choice, I want flex. But I enjoy the networking and camaraderie that comes with the office. And so I don’t want that. I don’t want to work at home all day. [00:33:52][82.6]
Sydney: [00:33:55] It’s hard to connect, especially for all of the new grads like Anjana and myself right now who have onboarded remotely and just getting to know a new team. It’s hard to do that all virtually. [00:34:10][15.2]
Carlye: [00:34:12] Totally I mean, I just started a new job at a new company I’ve never been to in person. I don’t even know what their offices look like. You guys are on the same boat. It’s a whole different kind of mental mindset. And I think, too, especially as young people, I was actually talking to a colleague when I was at Deloitte about this. He had three roommates. They were in a tiny house in San Francisco. He’s like, I don’t want to sleep and work and play in my bedroom, I have no space. Like, this isn’t great for me. It’s like there’s a challenge of parents and I can’t even imagine having kids and home schooling and all that. But I think also for younger employees, it’s where we meet people. It’s how we develop our friend group as young adults. It’s literally how we get out of the house and away from our roommates. And so I think there’s lots of challenges, depending on both for all generations, but especially for younger, newer employees in that kind of how you build your career. I said that’s a couple of minutes ago, but I’ve leveraged my network for all of my jobs, and that network was built through mainly in-person events and conferences and network. So it’s like, how do you do that? Virtually? I don’t think we’ve figured it out yet. [00:35:32][80.2]
Anjana: [00:35:33] Right. When we’re talking about working from home in the future and this whole movement and you talked about the gig economy, what do you think is the pain point that’s the worst? So like what are companies, do you think, farthest behind it? [00:35:47][13.6]
Carlye: [00:35:48] So actually, I don’t think it’s companies. I think here in the US it’s policy. And so we’re so dependent on the companies for health insurance and 401ks and retirement. And so to me, that is going to be the biggest barrier to the US moving to the gig economy is that our societal structure doesn’t support someone being able to work for themselves. [00:36:15][27.0]
Anjana: [00:36:16] Yes, yes. [00:36:16][0.6]
Sydney: [00:36:19] Pulling it all together. Chatted about the future of work and your career. From your perspective, how can people at all management levels start to reimagine their workplaces to become leaders in the future of work? [00:36:36][17.0]
Carlye: [00:36:37] Yeah, so it’s a totally played out, tired phrase, but I think the intent of it or the meaning behind it still holds true, which is really embracing failure and failing fast. To me, we’re in a territory that we’ve never been in before, so we’ve never all had to work from home for a year plus or not all of us, those of us who are non-essential workers, work from home for a year plus. Figure out how to do this, manage also having children and pets and partners at home at the same time. And so I think as we really think about the future of work, it’s going to be trying things, failing, learning from them, trying things, failing, learning from them; the process of how do you really think about how to empower, what we were just talking about, right? Empowering those individuals who want to come back and want that sense of normalcy that we had in 2019 and then empowering those individuals who have fully discovered that work from home life is life, forever. And so as leaders, how do you not make that an advantage or disadvantage for any employee and create an environment where everyone feels safe to kind of embrace their best selves and be their best human, that they can be at work. Right now I think one of the best parts of COVID is we’ve embraced humanness. So it’s like yeah, well, that’s my dog, or that’s the kid. So I think that’s been amazing for just bringing some humanity to the workplace, so to think how do we continue to allow that to happen outside of this idea that we’re forced to. But really, that’s the failure piece. Right. So allowing it to happen when we’re back to our normal normalcy. [00:38:40][123.0]
Sydney: [00:38:41] Right. What is your, what is Carlye’s prediction, for the workforce and virtual work within like the next year or two years? [00:38:52][10.6]
Carlye: [00:38:53] Oh, within the next year… [00:38:53][0.4]
Sydney: [00:38:54] If that’s too soon, we can push it out a little bit. [00:38:56][1.9]
Anjana: [00:38:56] In the next five years. [00:38:58][1.5]
Carlye: [00:38:59] As far as workforce or if anyone is not yet graduated from college, I think the most in demand skill set is critical thinking and creativity. And so to me, what that will look like from a workforce perspective is, how do we take the mundane tasks that are taking up brainpower right now and give them to the machines, and then how do we spend our time focused on the human elements that you can’t teach a machine? So that’s where empathy comes in, like human centered design, like how do you literally think about solving problems for humans and then literally using your brain capacity to do that, instead of answering emails or… [00:39:56][57.1]
Anjana: [00:39:58] VLookup in Excel? [00:39:58][0.2]
Sydney: [00:39:59] Yes, I was just about to say. [00:40:00][1.5]
Carlye: [00:40:02] So to me, if we really can’t and that’s why I was like one year or two years, I think it’s a little bit further out. But I think we’ll especially see with this onslaught of just craziness, right. Where people are like, I don’t know that I can actually work eight hours a day given everything that’s going on in my house because I’m stuck in my hosue all day. I think the automation of some of those mundane tasks — that’s going to happen faster. So scheduling meetings, you’ll just get more efficient and then use more time being creative and solving problems. [00:40:40][37.9]
Anjana: [00:40:41] Would you tell people not to be computer science majors then? [00:40:43][2.0]
Carlye: [00:40:43] Oh, I would get in so much trouble if I did that. [00:40:45][1.9]
Sydney: [00:40:47] Off the record. [00:40:48][1.1]
Anjana: [00:40:49] Off the record. I’m putting that in there for my parents to hear. [00:40:52][3.1]
Carlye: [00:40:54] Yeah, no, there’s other, I’ve been harping on computer scientists. There’s other professions that I think will also get automated very quickly. Medical profession, legal profession, the accounting profession I think is all ripe for automation. [00:41:11][17.1]
Anjana: [00:41:13] Yeah, totally. Well, we’re really excited to see where this goes and your part in all of it too and to follow your career. [00:41:21][8.5]
Carlye: [00:41:23] Well, thank you both for having me. This was super fun. [00:41:23][0.0]