July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Choosing a career can be a difficult decision left up to intuition and circumstance, but it doesn’t have to be.

Sparkon is building a “future visualization engine” that helps kids figure out what they want to be when they grow up. The system uses personality tests to measure 16 different areas of life. It then generates customized “sparkmaps,” or 25 page interactive infographics presenting potential education and career tracks. They are meant to help students discover their passions and how to turn those passions into employment. Sparkon also has a 16,000 video and quiz library for students to learn more about their possible futures.

“Our personality tests are for young people that lack work experience, but want to explore careers in terms that make sense to their lives,” said founder and CEO Bryan Starbuck in an email. “Everything we do makes it kid friendly. Our vision was taking Khan Academy to the next level, by building it for everything that a middle schooler or higher schooler wants to know now to prepare for their future.”

Let’s say your strongest “career personality type” is artistic follows by enterprising, you are extroverted, and you are passionate about art and video games. Sparkon suggests a range of jobs that bring all these together, like video game designer or art director, and suggests majors and skill sets that are useful for these areas. The engine then suggests specific videos, like “careers in the video game industry,” computer programming, or graphic design. There are also more general videos about college and SAT preparation, communication and leadership etc… Students can create a Netflix-style queue with recommended videos, and parents can also get involved by monitoring their kids’ progress to see what they are exploring.

Starbuck said that 46 percent of first time college students don’t graduate in 6 years and many don’t pursue careers related to their major. Sparkon addresses this issue by helping kids focus their course of study and supplying specific goals. It costs $3.95 to $5.95 a month.

Sparkon first started out as Empower.me and released an alpha version in August 2012 that incentivized teens with money to achieve learning goals set by their parents. Starbuck said after getting feedback from parents and kids, he decided to shelve the rewards-based model and focus more on intrinsic motivations, like future happiness and success.

The job market is tough right now. A recent report from Goldman Sachs, based on Department of Labor Statistics, found that unemployment rates of college graduates has surpassed those of workers without a high school education. Furthermore a report from the Center for College Affordability and Productivity found that nearly half of the nation’s recent college graduates work jobs that don’t require a degree. Not only is higher education putting students into record amounts of debt, but the ultimate value of that degree is getting called into question.

This topic comes up a lot in the tech community where college dropouts have more prestige than Harvard graduates and you can succeed without a degree if you are smart, creative and entrepreneurial. Some kids know they want to be a doctor or a computer programmer from a young age. However some people (like me) remained clueless up until early adulthood, relying on palm readers and tarot cards for guidance.

Sparkon aims to be a slightly more data-driven, practical alternative to my approach.

The company is based in Redmond, Washington and has raised half of a $1.3 million seed round.

Photo Credit: Simone van den Berg/Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

By Dr. Michal Tsur, a serial tech entrepreneur, and Leah Belsky, SVP Operations at Kaltura

We live in a world where young, ambitious women will now contend with a new, and sadly pressured life question – are you “leaning in”?

While Sheryl Sandberg, the second in command at Facebook and author of recent bestseller Lean In, and her ambitious following of female professionals have a nuanced understanding of the concept, in common speak, the words “lean in” convey something too simple, intense, and aggressive.

“We hold ourselves back in ways both big and small, by lacking self-confidence, by not raising our hands, and by pulling back when we should be leaning in,” writes Sandberg in the book.

Sandberg, who is trying to launch a social movement to empower women, is admirable and certainly has wisdom to offer. However, the intensity and pressure conjured by her phrase is not the right message we should be sending to female youth. In fact, remember old high school basketball coaches barking at us to lean in? Sandberg’s message is reminiscent. “Lean in ladies! Be aggressive. Run faster. The quarter is almost over. No taking a rest now!”

The words themselves were designed to motivate us to work harder and faster; to win.

Yet, unlike basketball games, careers are not broken into quarters. They are more of an evolving marathon filled with twists and turns. The opposite of a sprint. And while muscling forward may help one win a basketball game, it’s not clear that more energy, effort, and aggressiveness is what will get women into the boardroom.

What we’ve realized in debating the message of “lean in” while looking at the careers of people like Sandberg and Mayer, is that something big is lost in the colloquial phrase that Sandberg is championing. We must redefine the phrase to convey a vision that is as big in spirit and excitement as it is in raw ambition.

As Sandberg herself states, success depends on a fair bit of luck. Both Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and Sandberg had the good fortune to jump on the Google train in the early days. And Sandberg’s COO role at Facebook has catapulted her into tech godliness that was largely unpredictable.

Yes, smart negotiation, ambition, and sponsors were important. But, what distinguishes Sandberg, and what we’ve learned from our own careers is that success is also about creating, recognizing, and seizing opportunities.  It’s about putting oneself in a position that maximizes luck.

Let’s look at Sandberg. She had the confidence to jump between jobs with the government, the World Bank, and tech companies, following a varied and non-linear path. Mayer grabbed the CEO opportunity at Yahoo despite being pregnant, and knowing that she’d be following a long series of executive failures.

In our own careers, it’s been the opportunities that came from new connections made in school or at a conference, or from invitations to write, speak, or create, that pushed us forward.

And at Kaltura, we look at examples like Becky, one of our key project managers, who, after being told that she didn’t have enough technical experience or background, decided to take a leap, jump into a technical job and learn engineering basics on the side in order to make a career transition.

Or Charly, who, with no degree or any technical background whatsoever, led customer support at one of our competitors and later joined Kaltura as a key account manager.  Yes, these women fought hard to get ahead, but what really sets them apart is that they identified a passion, took risks, and seized new opportunities.

What we see in these examples are ambitious women that “leaned in” to advance their careers and families simultaneously. The message of “lean in” should not be to push harder, as Sandberg argues, “put your foot on the gas pedal and keep it there.”

The key, rather, is to be mindful, intentional and clear-eyed about possibilities that emerge in life and work. It is about not being guided by fear, but rather knowing your passions, being bold, and taking risks. And for women who are nearer to the top, leaning in is about being conscious of setting precedent and shaping institutions in ways that will also create paths for younger women.

So, to women (or men) who feel compelled and inspired by Sandberg but also scared about the implied added pressure to constantly push higher and farther – take a breath.  There is a way to lean in and achieve success with levity and spirit. Lean in to life. Opportunities will emerge.

The key is to be confident and aware enough to see them.

Dr. Michal Tsur is a serial tech entrepreneur, having co-founded online security firm Cyota and open-source video platform Kaltura, where she is currently president. Leah Belsky is a fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, where she contributes on online collaboration and technology policy, and is currently SVP Operations at Kaltura.

photo credit: Victor1558 via photopin cc

Collegefeed is a social network along the lines of LinkedIn, but it’s geared toward students and recent graduates. The online career marketplace helps them find desirable opportunities and companies use the network to search for candidates without having to go from campus-to-campus.

Founder Sanjeev Agrawal used to be Google’s head of products. He observed college students struggling to enter the workforce and saddled by record amounts of debt. At the same time, companies like Google were struggling to fill open positions and willing to spend thousands of dollars to find the right candidate. LinkedIn and Monster.com are often not effective for students who don’t have the professional network or work experience to stand out, and on-the-ground recruiting is a time-consuming and expensive process for employers.

This is the problem Collegefeed is trying to solve.

“It is no easier to get a good start in life today than it was 20 years ago preweb, presocial, premobile,” Agrawal said in a Q&A. “Starting this week, 1-plus million new college graduates will struggle to enter the workforce. Almost 50 percent of them will fail, according to most recent research, but more and more companies understand that their future is somewhere in college right now. Think of Collegefeed as a social career platform that brings together students, employers, alums, industry insiders and college career services in one place.”

Students create short profiles with their work experience, skill sets, and interests and the system will search for matching jobs and internships. They can also enter the names of companies they like and a recommendation engine will suggest similar companies and jobs, “like Netflix does for movies.” Agrawal said this will help them discover new opportunities with companies they may not have heard of or considered before. Students can browse through custom news feeds with updates on their preferred employers. It also has networking and educational opportunities, and students can share experiences with each other.

Employers on Collegefeed benefit from access to a wider network of potential hires at a lower cost. They can push content to news feeds, sponsor contests, and get a newsfeed of their own with recommended students.

Collegefeed launched in private beta in March with Stanford, Berkeley, and Carnegie Melon. Agrawal said students have already secured interviews, jobs, internships, and financial awards with companies including YouTube, eBay, Facebook, Morgan Stanley, and Microsoft. Today, Collegefeed is open nationwide to any students and employer.

Agrawal said that over the past few years, multiple companies have popped up using social media to address challenges in recruiting and hiring, but “no-one has created a new social network that combines everything together in one place for both students and employers.” Competitors include LinkedIn, Readyforce, and AfterCollege. However, Collegefeed makes use of “push” technology and the popularity of news feeds to curate, aggregate, and present the information in digestible form to both students and employers.

The founding team of six has 10 college degrees between them and is based in Mountain View, Calif. It’s a bootstrapped company.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

The world economies stand at a crossroads. Industries that once were dominant are long in decline. Spurred by tectonic technological shifts, nascent sectors (think digital, data and everything automated) are ascendant and will likely shape everything that lies ahead, including your career and opportunities.

With every career move, I have been positioned in new geographies or industries that were primed for growth. This has taken me around the globe and the digital world. When I’m feeling omniscient, I like to believe that can be chalked up to more than just sheer luck: Perhaps there’s something within that gives me the foresight to anticipate where the future may take us. Back down in reality, I realize that I have simply followed some basic advice that anyone can use to stay ahead of the curve.

The following are some simple rules for winning your future:

1. Take risks — big ones

In 2001, I was in New York helping advise technology and internet companies on marketing and communications strategy. Some of you may be old enough to recall this thing called the “dot.com crash” that began in the U.S. around that time. I read the writing on the wall and leapt at the chance to run consulting projects in Asia for a global company. Countless reports projected that China (and Asia) were primed to take off as the hot new markets, and I was correct in anticipating that it would take quite a while for any crash-related effects to be felt in the region. Through good decision-making and a stomach for risks (and a varied diet), I gained invaluable experience that continues to pay off.

2. Take all opportunities

Wherever in the world I have worked, I rarely shied away from any event, trip, assignment, project or initiative related (even indirectly) to work. This provided incredible experiences, such as leading the regional change-management program for a Fortune 50 company, being seconded to work in the headquarters of one of Korea’s largest conglomerates, and running a country for the world’s largest PR firm. None of these opportunities were actively pursued, and none were gigs I initially thought were an ideal fit. However, when given the chance I considered that there must have been something that made me right for the job. These all helped form the “evolving me” in my career, focused my direction and led to incredible opportunities further down the road.

3. Go where the future is

Just because this should be obvious to many doesn’t mean it doesn’t bear repeating: Make a smart bet on a career path and reassess at waypoints. One look at the fastest-growing jobs tells you where the future lies: tech and healthcare. Advancements in digital media, technology and data optimization (something I write about often); life-extension and an aging population; skyrocketing healthcare, infrastructure and resource costs – these all point to a techno-medical future. Like many, I wasn’t always a digital guy and I worked in industries that were fundamentally disrupted. However, through following the very rules described here, I pivoted my early career as a traditional journalist and PR guy and have kept pace with digital transformations.

4. Think beyond

In the digital, tech, media sandbox I play in, everyone loves to talk about the “era” we’re in. Depending on who you ask, we could be in the internet era, the social era or the mobile era. Don’t listen to them anyway. When radio was first popularized, you can imagine that many people thought: “This is the bee’s knees. How wonderful it is to live in the future!” Now, look at the technology you currently use. If you think you’ll still be using anything resembling a desktop computer or an iPhone in 10 years, you’re in for a big surprise. I’m getting ready for the innovations that are beyond the immediately available and doing what I can to be poised for success in a post-internet, post-mobile era. In a world that is constantly innovating, you had better always be innovating in your career plan for the future.

Jonathan Gardner is director of communications at Turn, the cloud marketing platform. He has spent his career as an innovator at the nexus of media and technology, having worked in communications and as a journalist.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

The latest U.S. census data says that working from home for at least one day a week grew 34 percent, and this comes just a couple of weeks after CEO Marissa Mayer famously killed the Yahoo’s telecommuting policy.

In 2007, 7 percent of U.S. workers spent at least one of their working days in a home office. In 2010, the most recent data that the Census Bureau released, 9.4 percent were telecommuting at least one day a week.

That’s 13.4 million people across the country, and these aren’t low-level employees that we’re talking about.

In fact, the Census Bureau says that they’re more likely to be in management and business, saying that “advances in communication and information technologies have allowed for a more mobile workforce.” And a growing segment of them are programmers, developers, and engineers.

The number of computing, engineering, and science professionals who work at home grew 69 percent from 2000 to 2010.

“The matter of how people work is as it has always been: What does it take to get the job done in a way that affords an equitable balance — a quid pro quo — between the organization and the individual?” said Joseph M. Pastore, a professor emeritus at Pace University’s Lubin School of Business. “For most companies, the issue is pretty clear: Do what works.”

What wasn’t working at Yahoo was home workers who were certainly home, but — alas — not workers. They were not logging into corporate systems like Yahoo’s VPN to get their work done.

But as someone who just had a child might realize, you don’t necessarily need to throw out the baby with the bathwater. As companies like Google, LinkedIn, Netflix, Cisco, Microsoft, AirBnB, Foursquare, and IBM realize.

Unless, that is, you want to do a stealth layoff.

photo credit: Travis Isaacs via photopin cc

Sheryl Sandberg’s new book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead has a lot of advice for working women, which we’ve previously covered. But according to an excerpt given to the Wall Street Journal, it also reveals some juicy tidbits about her life and career, including that LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman asked her to become LinkedIn’s CEO in 2006.

She passed on the offer:

“In the summer of 2006, a tiny startup called LinkedIn was looking for a new CEO, and Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn’s founder, reached out to me. I thought it was a great opportunity, and after five years in the same position at Google, I was ready for a new challenge. But the timing was tricky. I was 37 years old and wanted to have a second child. I told Reid the truth: Regrettably, I had to pass. …”

I think we can all agree, however, that given Sandberg’s career at Google and now Facebook, she made the right call. And while LinkedIn is clearly super-successful, very few companies on the planet — IPO or no IPO — are more important, more relevant, and more central to the emerging digital economy than Facebook.

Sandberg is only one of many super-successful women who have started or grown careers at Google only to jump to other Silicon Valley companies. An obvious example is Yahoo CEO and president Marissa Mayer, but a more recent example is Jennifer Dulski, who recently left Google to become president of Change.org.

Sandberg’s book is about women leaning into their careers to be successful, and features advice similar to what she talked about in a TED talk, including:

1. Sit at the table (Be present and don’t accept subordinate roles.)
2. Make your partner a real partner (Have or get a husband who helps out a home equally)
3. Don’t leave until you leave (Don’t emotionally prepare for maternity or other job interruptions by mentally leaving before leaving.)

Image credit: Hubert Burda Media/Flickr

Its best, most educated, and highest-paid staff are continually trolling on Twitter for a new job. They’re not actively looking for a better job, just keeping an ear to the ground in case one comes up.

That’s just one of the insights from social recruiting company Jobvite‘s latest poll.

“The mass layoffs that we saw in 2008 and 2009 frightened people so much that essentially they’re always looking for the next job,” Jobvite chief executive Dan Finnigan told me this morning. “The root of it is the presumption people have that they need to be the drivers of their own careers … that one company won’t do it for them.”

The survey looked at 2,100 adults’ behavior on Twitter, finding that college-educated professionals who are open to new opportunities but not actively seeking new jobs — passive career managers — are more than three times as likely to be using Twitter to advance their careers than even proactive high-school educated jobseekers who don’t have a job.

“We’re seeing more and more white-collar professionals doing this,” Finnigan said. “They’re currently employed, more likely to be higher income, and higher educated … and more likely to use Twitter to keep up on job opportunities.”

Those passive career managers are also, unsurprisingly, four times as likely to have found their job on Twitter or another social network, such as LinkedIn.

Passive career managers, Finnigan said, tend to create Twitter lists of companies they admire, plus lists of top companies in their industries and leading professionals in their area. Then, when an opportunity comes along, they see it immediately. Alternatively, over time, they build up a relationship with a hiring company or manager, which can lead to a job switch.

“We have a designer who got his job via Twitter — he followed our lead designer, and, over time, just asked if we were hiring,” Finnigan told me.

Forty-six percent of the American workforce now uses Twitter, Jobvite says, and LinkedIn is at 41 percent. That’s basically half the workforce. But more importantly, it’s the higher-skill, higher-pay half.

Which means companies have their jobs cut out for them to continue to engage existing staff. And recruiters, Finnigan says, need to change their game plans.

“This sought-after talent pool is using Twitter more than ever to stay on top of new opportunities. Recruiters failing to take advantage of this shift are missing out on this to the detriment of their clients.”

photo credit: Stéfan via photopin cc

AfterCollege, which bills itself as the largest career network for college students and recent grads, helps hundreds of thousands of college students all over the country find the best career opportunities. As part of the career exploration process, students select companies they most want to apply to, and AfterCollege shared some of that data with VentureBeat.

“It’s a reflection of an employer’s brand with students,” AfterCollege’s chief executive Roberto Angulo told me. “The data comes from 200,000 students at 2,000 college campuses.”

AfterCollege segments its data by type of student. Google heads the list of who tech students in computer science disciplines most want to work for, followed by Microsoft and Intel. Apple shows up right behind IBM, in fifth spot.

1. Google
2. Microsoft
3. Intel
4. IBM
5. Apple
6. Amazon
7. National Security Agency
8. Facebook
9. NVIDIA
10. AT&T

For engineering students, the list looks a little different — kind of like a who’s-who of the military-industrial complex. IBM sinks to 9th, and Google and Apple disappear entirely. Intel, however, maintains its high ranking.

1. Boeing
2. Intel
3. Lockheed Martin
4. General Electric
5. Raytheon
6. NASA
7. Exxon Mobil
8. National Security Agency
9. IBM
10. The Aerospace Corporation

Business students, on the other hand, are much more interested in banks, consulting agencies, and telecommunications giants. But Google holds a fascination for business majors (who apparently haven’t been told yet that Google prefers CompSci majors), and Apple reappears at the bottom of the list. Intel, surprisingly, is high on yet another list, in fourth position.

1. Wells Fargo
2. Google
3. Target
4. Intel
5. JPMorgan Chase
6. AT&T
7. Bank of America
8. Deloitte
9. T. Rowe Price
10. Apple

I found it interesting that Facebook appears on only one of the lists, so I asked Angulo about the world’s largest social network, which famously started on college campuses.

“Facebook hovers from seven to eight” based on all the lists combined, Angulo said. “Even though 90% of our users are on Facebook, it doesn’t mean they want to work there.”

And as for Apple, which ranked fifth on the computer science students’ list, behind first-place Google, and tenth on another?

“Google has a very good on-campus recruiting program and is thought to have better work-life balance,” Angulo told me. “So while Apple may be a good company to invest in, it may not be the best company to work for.”

photo credit: Kris Kesiak Photography via photopin cc, fisserman via photopin cc

Lest we forget, here’s a short list of what she’s accomplished and/or worked on at Google.

June 2012: Vice President, Local, Maps & Location Services

• Youngest member of Google’s executive operating committee (36)
• Managed Google local search
• Interviewed Lady Gaga (!)
• Managed Google Maps for mobile
• Managed Google Earth and street view teams
• Instrumental in the Zagat purchase

November 2005: VP, Search Products & User Experience

• Managing products such as Google News
• Introduced Google CheckOut
• Iterated Google Translate
• Championed Google “universal search results” … in which all results types (video, etc.) are included in the main results
• Ran the “Marissa Gauntlet,” Google’s new feature pipeline
• Fought to maintain Google’s clean, spare look

March 2003: Director, Consumer Web Services

• Nurtured Google Desktop Search
• Managed multi-lingual additions to Google.com
• Started Google Local search efforts
• Championed personalized search (iGoogle)
• Organized Google parties

July 2001: Product Manager, Google.com

• Managed Google News
• Worked on Google images
• First to work exclusively on user experience
• Managed user testing
• Almost killed ads in Gmail
• Added the Copyright sign at the bottom of the page

June 1999: Software Engineer

• First female engineer hired at Google
• One of first 20 employees

Are we missing something? Add it in the comments …

There’s good news for some and bad news for others.

In the bad news category, almost a third of tech workers in the West are worried about layoffs. That’s probably largely due to HP’s announcement in May that the company plans to lay off 27,000 people.

Source: Glassdoor

This are looking up(ish)

And, of the companies that made changes to compensation or benefits, 86 percent of them made negative changes: reducing pay or perks.

Employee confidence, which this survey measures, is an indicator both of what employers might do in terms of increasing or decreasing payrolls, and of consumer confidence.

Workers who are afraid of potential layoffs tend to spend less, depressing the economy.

In the good news side of the ledger, however, 90 percent of employees nationwide expect their company outlook to either improve or stay the same. Only 10 percent expect it to get worse, and the number of people concerned about potential layoffs decreased somewhat.

Another stat on the positive side? More jobseekers are confident about finding work — 42 percent this quarter, up from 36 percent last quarter.

Even more telling: It’s 17 percent higher than a year ago, when only 25 percent of jobseekers were fairly sure they’d find work.

One downside for those who are currently employed is that expectations of raises are low: 60 percent of workers are not expecting a raise in the coming quarter.

Source: Glassdoor

Salary: most are not expecting raises

The somewhat positive but definitely mixed results echo the recent Simply Hired jobs survey, which showed that job openings are up but that there’s still plenty of gloom in the market.

Given the economic and financial upheaval of the past few years, however, we may be able to count the absence of too many negatives as a positive.

Image credit: Kosta Kostov/ShutterStock

CEO Darren Bounds

Path.to has been matching up love-lorn job seekers in San Francisco since April, and in that time it’s started working with 200 of the hottest companies in technology. Today, CEO Darren Bounds announced that the company is expanding into New York, Chicago, and Boston.

“Path.to makes the connection between company and job seeker,” Bounds told VentureBeat. The company helps speed the hiring process, he said, because “the quality of applicants is very high, enabling many of our clients to go right to the final stages of hiring within the first week.”

The service works by gathering rich data from job seekers, including their career history and their social activity on key networks such as Facebook and Twitter. Then it adds detailed information about their participation in online work-oriented sites such as Behance, which hosts elegant online portfolios, and Github, the social software development community. It also imports data from LinkedIn, bringing in an applicant’s personal summary, skills, and jobs.

“We want to know their passions and interests, and pair that with a deeper understanding of a company and corporate culture,” Bounds said. Path.to then uses all the data to built a rich visual resume — the company calls it a social resume — almost a personal infographic:

In order to accurately match candidates and companies, Path.to needs to also get rich profile data from hiring companies. So the company ensures that recruiters who join the service fill in extensive profiles, to help job applicants get a good sense of what it would be like to work at their firms.

“We help them showcase their corporate culture,” Bounds said. “We help them build out a really beautiful profile page,” which can include video, blog posts, the company’s Twitter stream, and a photo gallery.

Path.to then creates a compatibility score between zero and 99, and connects companies and people it thinks will match:

The company is currently hyper-focused on the designer and engineering communities, and there’s a good reason for that, according to Bounds. “The tech industry is what we’re focusing on. We’re technologists and designers, and we want to do what we know.”

It’s a different type of job search experience, more social, more detailed, more human. Bounds believes that there has been little innovation in the recruiting and job search industries for the past decade, pointing to job-finding services like Monster and Dice as impersonal, “just searchable directories.” Competitors that are trying a similar approach include White Truffle, which also focuses heavily on technology jobs.

Bounds has a seemingly perfect career background for Path.to, having previously worked at Taleo, which provides human resources software for managing the job-filling process, and his own startup, CliqSet, which aggregated and organized social communications. Put the two together, and Path.to is the obvious result.

Path.to is based in Jackonsville, Florida, and is backed by $1.5 in financing from Adecco, an HR solutions provider.

Photo credit: ShutterStock