I have often been asked what we need to teach our students to make them successful in the long term. Like, EXACTLY, what do we need to teach them? There is not a specific class to be named. There is not a skill I can name.
Our students need an employable skill on graduation day. Plus one more thing. It can be almost anything. It can be fluency in another language. It can be art. It can be another science. One more thing. Now, we will explore jobs and ways you can make a difference with those obscure things that give you passion. The one more thing.
My story…I love solving puzzles. Not here’s a picture cut up into little pieces, put it back together type of puzzles. I love the logic problems, anything that makes you think creatively to solve something. I am also a 3-dimensional thinker. So when I am driving around a city, in my head it’s a 3-d map/globe that I am moving around in. So the chance to creatively solve a business problem with my 3-dimensional thinking makes me a more valuable resource. When I am designing CRM, in my head it’s a 3-d mapping of the architecture. How does this piece fit with that piece? Is this the right relationship to this other thing? That crazy virtual board of things from Minority Report? That’s almost like what I have in my head when building a new schema.
Chris is a successful CRM professional. His job includes lots and lots of customer support. His hobby is restoring old cars. How could those possibly be related? The process of getting into the details, figuring out how things work, cleaning them for better appearance, find solutions to missing parts and correct factory finishes, all make him better in his Dynamics Job in how he has to complete discovery, research, often cleanup messes, and revise for better user adoption, find ISVS, and provide easier upgrade and maintenance paths. The creative thinking and attention to detail needed for the car work directly match with what’s needed to help and troubleshoot customers with their own different and creative CRM implementations.
Gustaf has a slightly different view of how his dedication to Aikido helps him in his work as a CRM consultant. The basic philosophy of Aikido is to embrace the force of the attacker and move the attacker in circles to the direction of your choice, ideally without them even knowing it. How does that relate to Dynamics work? In his words, “When working with a customer and I find that their processes, for instance sales process, is backward or sub optimal, instead of confronting them head on and telling them that you have to change, your process is bad. It is often more efficient to try to listen, understand, embrace how they work and why and the slowly try to change their perspective so that they end up where you want them. It can only work if I first establish a firm base of trust for the people I work with which is similar to a firm stance which will be the center of the circle of the movement.”
What creative skills do you have that will help you in your career?