Today’s blog post is by Gloria Maher, a web developer here at flyte who also blogs over at Maine Baby Boomer.
Note to Baby Boomers: You don’t need Social Media to do your job.
But what about your NEXT job? Earlier this week I attended the Social Media FTW conference here in Portland Maine (hosted in part by my employer flyte new media). Over 400 people sold out the conference in advance of the actual day, and you could feel the excitement in the room amongst everyone from beginners to the seasoned early adopters. It was a time to step away from the day to day and do a perspective check.
A while back I saw a picture of old fashioned elevator call buttons with a giant sign above them saying – Don’t Push, for Decoration Only – from the days of manual operation. Suddenly my memory flashed back to Freese’s department store in Bangor where the elevator buttons looked just like this “relic”.
In my early childhood they were still working, along with the uniformed elevator man. Other technological feats of the time were the pneumatic tubes used by the clerks to send cash payment up to the accounting office and get change by return. I also remember (very young) when my brother read aloud from the newspaper that Freese’s was getting the first escalator in town. I asked what it was and he told me the tall tale that it was a moving stairway – that you just stood on it and the stairs would move. (I of course knew he was trying to pull one over on me – whoever heard of such a thing?)
My early work days were as a secretary. Some of the technological wonders were:
- Moving from manual typewriter to IBM Selectric. Moving from carbon paper to photocopiers. Moving from eraser, to white out, to strikeover tape.
- Moving from IBM Selectric to a model that would hold one line of type in memory before it shot it out like a machine gun attack.
- Moving from one line of memory to a Wang word processor, where you could cut a whole section of text and paste it in another location (Beam me up, Scotty).
Why the trip down memory lane? In the last 10 years I’ve moved from developing websites with Dreamweaver templates and library items on local computer, to using includes to change all pages with one small move, to developing websites on WordPress, where after it’s built even the non-techie customer can take over the majority of their changes without advanced knowledge.
The job I do now has changed since one year ago, changed drastically since 5 years ago, and is almost unrecognizable to the job I entered almost 10 years ago.
In a few years from now it will change again.
No matter what your age or experience, if you are working for a living it is imperative to not only stay on top of the newest technology in your job, but also in the newest technology period. The manual elevator operator is long gone, out of most people’s memory, and eventually that will happen to most of us no matter what job we are currently doing. Social media is one way to look to future trends to prepare for the job resurgence that WILL come, but might not look the same as the jobs we’ve done in the past. Good luck to all the job seekers out there!
You can follow Gloria Maher on Twitter.
Crazy week here at 
