"Non-financial metrics are vital to today's valuations"/ Data engineer

Jul. 25, 2018 "Non-financial metrics are vital to today's valuations": Today I found this article by Hugh Latif in the Globe and Mail:

Vaughan, Ont.-based management consultant, author of Maverick Leadership

Evaluating a company’s business performance is usually done through financial analysis and metrics that concentrate on such things as sales growth, profitability, return on equity, working capital and debt-to-worth ratio.

I grew up in business believing the key ingredient for success is profitability through healthy sales and revenue growth. At the end of the day, profitability separates the A team from the B team. While this is still true, in today’s business environment success or failure isn’t always owing to those traditional bottom-line metrics.

Take Amazon for example, which has a whopping market value of US$874-billion and a price-to-earnings ratio of 284. The price-to-earnings ratio is how much an investor can expect to invest in a company to make $1 of that company’s earnings, so in Amazon’s case that would be $284 to make a dollar, which on the surface doesn’t sound very good at all. 

What’s more, Amazon’s profit performance is mediocre and the company pays no dividend.

Tesla Inc., a company in California involved in electric vehicles, energy storage and the manufacturing of solar panels, is another one. It has a market value of US$51.6-billion, and a price-to-earnings ratio of zero, as it has never made a profit or paid a dividend.

Then there is Tim Hortons. Long a mainstay as a top Canadian brand, it now just makes it into the top 50, according to a recent Leger survey of consumers ranking company reputations. Other big Canadian companies that have dropped in reputation are Bombardier, Weston and Sears.

Shareholders generally assume a higher risk investing in companies that don’t show profitability, but the means of evaluating companies is changing. Today, managers and entrepreneurs should also pay attention to key, non-financial metrics and criteria that can affect success and valuation. What are they? At the top of the list is employee engagement and retention.

High turnover almost always translates into long-term problems. If people keep leaving the company, there must be a reason. It’s like a car that continues to run, but has that persistent noise under the hood.

People are still the No. 1 ingredient for business success, and that is true for those who work in sales, marketing, operations, finance and human resources. People make the difference.

 Executives and department heads can only get troop engagement through strong leadership and team play. That means constantly developing your people, challenging them and celebrating their success.

Merely promoting attractive jobs is no longer sufficient. In today’s competitive workplace and dynamic business landscape, you need to promote rewarding careers to engage and retain high-calibre employees. How? 

Performance reviews should include career planning and development criteria for your people. This helps build a road map for employees to learn new skills, reinforce their talents and develop their strengths.

Promoting from within the organization is another way for leaders to get the best out of people. But measuring employee engagement can be tricky. While many companies do annual employee surveys, big corporations recognize that employee engagement is also related to the introduction of new products and services, and they have specific measuring tools for this.

U.S. multinational 3M is known to constantly introduce new products. It has annual sales of more than US$30-billion and employs 91,000 people in 65 countries, measures how new products contribute to sales and has a target of earning 25 per cent of its revenues from products developed in the past five years. Procter & Gamble Co., a large global consumer product manufacturer, targets 20 per cent to 30 per cent of its revenue from sales of products less than three years old.

Many think employee engagement depends principally on compensation levels. While compensation is a factor, employee turnover is also influenced by recognition, company culture and values, and how leaders demonstrate care for the troops.

Companies that promote a good work-life balance and supplement the benefit package with health and wellness programs help keep people fit and contribute to greater employee engagement. In other words, they live their core values and don’t just talk about them. 

A good example is the Royal Bank of Canada. RBC has an in-house wellness program for employees and invests in continuing career development through tuition subsidies for courses for its people. It is no surprise the company is consistently ranked as one of the top employers in Canada.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/careers/leadership/article-key-non-financial-metrics-are-core-to-todays-valuations/

Aug. 1, 2018 Data engineer: Today I found this article by Jared Lindzon in the Globe and Mail:

Job: Data engineer

The role: To take advantage of new technologies such as machine learning, predictive analytics and artificial intelligence, organizations must first sort and organize data that are often stored on multiple, incompatible platforms. The role of a data engineer is to make data from different sources available for data scientists to utilize.

“You have all this disparate data that’s not mutually compatible with each other, and it’s very hard for a data scientist to work with,” explained Colin Fraser, a data scientist for Vancouver-based online charitable giving platform CHIMP. “A data engineer is someone who is fluent with all of those database types and languages, and can access the data out of all of them and integrate it into something that is usable for a data scientist.”

Mr. Fraser explains that companies often mistakenly hire data scientists to build new capabilities using the data they’ve gathered, only to discover that they first need to organize that data into a usable format, something most data scientists aren’t trained to do.

“Companies will jump to hiring a data scientist before they have a data engineer, and then the data scientist ends up sitting around for four, five, six months not really doing anything, because they're not skilled in data engineering,” he said.

Salary: According to online career resource Neuvoo.ca, the average data-engineer salary in Canada is about $100,000, while PayScale found the average salary to be a little over $81,500 annually.

“I would think in an entry-level position in data engineering, you would be looking at about $50,000 to $60,000 per year, and then mid-level would be $60,000 to $80,000 [annually] and upper would be $80,000 to over $100,000 [per year],” said Mr. Fraser, adding that the more platforms data scientists have proficiency in, the more they stand to earn.

Education: While there are no educational or licensing requirements, a vast majority of data engineers have at least an undergraduate-level degree in computer science, engineering, statistics or a related field.

The most important educational requirement for many employers, however, is certification or proven proficiency with popular database platforms, such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

“If you’re someone that already knows three or four systems, you’re a lot more valuable than someone who has to learn it on the job,” Mr. Fraser said.

Those seeking certification can find training programs and exam preparation materials through the major database platforms, including Microsoft Certified Professional certification, Google Cloud Certified Professional Data Engineer and Amazon Web Services Certified Big Data Specialty. Exams are offered in major cities across Canada multiple times each year, and typically cost between $200 and $500 to write.

Job prospects: The demand for data scientists in Canada is skyrocketing, and organizations are gradually realizing the need for pairing them with data engineers. As a result, demand is growing, but not at the same rate as the more commonly understood data-scientist role.

“You might not find as many postings, but I think the need is just about the same,” Mr. Fraser said. “Big financial firms, banks, insurance companies, companies that have a long history of knowing that they need to protect and cherish their data will have bigger data-engineering teams, but it’s something that’s becoming more and more apparent and important for smaller companies, as well.”

Mr. Fraser adds that most employers are based in major cities, but data engineers are typically able to work remotely.

Challenges: Mr. Fraser says the biggest challenge most data engineers contend with is simply keeping up with the technology in a quickly evolving field.

“The way that you manage data today is very different even from how it was three years ago,” he said. “That means that whatever you learned in school five years ago is not used any more, so you constantly have to read about new technologies, try new technologies, go to conferences and see what other companies are doing.”

Why they do it: While keeping on top of advances in technology is the greatest challenge, Mr. Fraser says that, for many, it’s also the greatest perk.

“You’re really an architect when you’re a data engineer, in the sense that you’re building some kind of system with lots of moving parts that all have to talk to each other,” he said. “For the right personality, that’s a really exciting challenge.”

Misconceptions: The biggest misconception about data engineers, according to Mr. Fraser, is that companies don’t need to hire one if they already have a data scientist on staff. “The reality is that your data is probably very messy, your data is in lots of different places, and it takes a specialized, dedicated role to really process it and get it into a state where the data scientist can work with it,” he said.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/careers/career-advice/article-i-want-to-be-a-data-engineer-what-will-my-salary-be/

"An office worker is more replaceable by AI than a tradesperson"/ "Bro contact has me feeling left out"

Jul. 30, 2018 "An office worker is more replaceable by AI than a tradesperson": Today I found this article by Eileen Dooley in the Globe and Mail:

What makes for a career today? For many people who are mid-career now (in their mid-40s to early 50s), there are entire job categories today that never would have been considered as a viable career when they were starting out. Similarly, there are job categories that have or will soon disappear as progress marches forward.

In between those leading and trailing edge careers lies a considerable number of job groupings, each with their own concept of a “career.”

While we often might think that only white-collar office workers and professionals can really follow a defined career path, there actually are a number of hands-on trades and traditional blue-collar roles that deserve to be looked at more closely when people are making decisions about their career futures.

Skilled trades, for example, are seeing aging work-force numbers and job vacancy rates that are making some of these professions more attractive for younger workers who want to combine their intellect with hands-on roles, and potentially command a premium salary in the process.

Unfortunately, social attitudes toward the trades have often meant that hands-on workers are assumed to be in these roles because they didn’t have other career options.

Indeed, some readers might remember their parents warning, “Get an education or you’ll wind up working in a trade” as a stimulus to get that university degree. Today, however, the lines between being a skilled tradesperson and occupying a professional role are blurring continuously.

A refrigerator repair person running a computer diagnostic to find out what’s wrong with your appliance requires technological proficiency and problem-solving skills on par with or exceeding that of an office worker.

Indeed, it seems probable that a general office worker is more readily replaceable with an artificial intelligence program than that repairman (even accounting for futuristic robots making house calls). Who really has more job security moving forward?

In 1992, Robert Reich had just published his book The Work of Nations prior to becoming then-U.S. president Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Labour. He concluded that the old social contract around work was broken: There would be very few lifetime careers with the same company. Instead, he predicted many workers could now expect to have dozens of jobs during their working lives, potentially across two or more different career paths.

That volatility is the new norm and quite often the choice to jump career tracks is purposeful. People seeking new challenges or going through transition opt to retrain or reinvent their skills, or strike out on their own.

In a return to the values of craftsmanship, some choose working more with their hands – in roles that require physical skill more than acumen with word processors, websites or spreadsheets.

Where would we be without some of these trades? Many of our key resource industries would grind to a halt without welders, plumbers, electricians and many more roles that build the infrastructure upon which we rely. Same goes for those many repairs around your home, where few of us have time or skill to tackle a troublesome freezer or replace a furnace.

It’s perhaps an indication of the skill appreciated in some of these roles that we accept a four-hour service window as pretty much the norm. In contrast, when was the last time your dentist told you that your appointment would be sometime between 9 and 12, and just stay in the waiting room until he or she deigns to arrive?

The dramatic cave rescue of a trapped soccer team in Thailand also highlighted a whole cast of specialized trades that often go hidden. There were military and civilian divers who skillfully executed a rescue amid the treacherous confines of a cave system and fast-moving muddy water (at risk of life and death). There also were pump specialists, who found ways to keep water levels in the cave low enough to attempt a rescue.

Until we see the valuable roles these jobs play in a pinch, we’re largely unaware of their daily contributions.

So, next time you’re thinking of what you might want to do in your second or third career, or even your first, don’t immediately dismiss those hands-on trades: Many are coming back, and with more complex skills than you’d imagine.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/careers/management/article-redefining-career-status-an-office-worker-is-more-replaceable-by-ai/

CitizenWhoPaysTaxesNotTaxPayer

5 hours ago

I am a plumber. I served my apprenticeship in the late 70's early 80's. I left and got a degree in IT in the early 90's and in the mid 2000's came back to my trade.

I could see that people in their mid to late 40's could not get hired in IT. In the trades you can work till you want to retire so when I knew my current contract was ending I made plans to go back to the trade. It has worked out well. I combine my IT skills and my trade skills all the time. I usually make 6 figures a year and have pension and benefits on top.

In addition I found that IT was simply a white collar sweat shop. I had an interview once where the guy said to me and I quote " We have a 37 hr work week but everyone works 50 hrs a week so we don't mind if you take an hour off every once in a while to go to the dentist" I turned down the job offer.

Trades are not for dummies. Trades are a good career that can provide a good solid income and if your unionized a good solid pension and benefits to fall back on.

14 hours ago

I personally work in trades as an Industrial Instrument Mechanic (now called Measurement and Controls Technician).

I work with electricians to install, wire, commission and maintain industrial control and automation systems.

A very technical trade involving work on PCs, RTUs (Remote Telemetry Units), PLCs (Programmable Logic Controllers) and a myriad of other devices in a fast paced and ever changing environment.

Those that think ‘trades’ are a low end career have not kept up with the reality of trades.

We are the ones creating the automation systems that allow industrial systems to operate with a minimum of manpower.

Our field of work is in demand, growing and cutting edge.
If people don’t want to be replaced by AI, get a job building and maintaining it.
If not, no worries. I like the job security provided by the high demand for people in my line of work.

12 hours ago

"If people don’t want to be replaced by AI, get a job building and maintaining it." Unfortunately your line of work creates less jobs than it makes obsolete. But you go ahead and keep feeling smug for what you do for a living.

12 hours ago

And you keep pretending trades aren’t a ‘real’ career.
I’ll just keep going to work every day to a 6 figure career.

15 hours ago

 (Edited)

What, artificial intelligence and robotics will soon render millions of jobs obsolete in Canada because the jobs will be done by computers and machines?

Okay, so how long do we have to wait for an opinion column in this newspaper wondering if it is still a good idea then to keep having one of the highest immigration rates in the world?
Will we ever see such an opinion column?

15 hours ago

Thanks for this article - about time !

15 hours ago

Regarding what is it about time?

14 hours ago

It is about time ‘trades’ were recognized as the solid career move they really are.
A robot capable of repairing a plugged toilet hasn’t been invented yet and it won’t be any time soon.

My opinion: I find trades to be a respectable career.  However, I just find it boring.

"Bro contact has me feeling left out": Today I found this article by Rob Walker in the Globe and Mail:

Q: I work at a blue-collar job, and I am one of four women in a crew of 40. The guys never touch or harass me, or any of the women, as far as I know.

They do, however, constantly hug and grab and bump each other in a friendly way. It’s not unusual for one of the guys to go through a whole short meeting (a stand-up “huddle”) with an arm around another guy’s shoulder.

No one ever touches me, and it’s not that I want anyone to. That would be weird. But I almost feel left out. Should I let this “bro contact” bother me?

– Mary

A: It can be irritating or even troubling to feel left out at work – even if whatever you’re being left out of doesn’t appeal to you.

“There are a lot of ways to feel excluded,” said Eden King, a psychology professor at Rice University. “And a lot of them are non-verbal.”

Informal social rituals such as happy-hour gatherings and the office Oscar pool can improve an office’s culture – unless they leave some people feeling that they just don’t fit in. At worst, this can become a “coded way of excluding people,” said Dr. King, who directs a workplace diversity research group at Rice. “’We don’t want people like you because you don’t fit our culture’ can turn out to mean ‘you’re not our race, or our gender.’”

The classic example is golf: If you don’t play and your boss bonds in career-shaping ways on the links, that can be a problem.

The good news is that it doesn’t seem as if your colleagues are trying to exclude you. In fact, they seem to be behaving respectfully, and they probably don’t suspect their “bro contact” might be bothersome, and almost certainly don’t intend it to be.

Think about whether it might help to look for other ways to feel comfortably included. Since you’ve described a sociable workplace, consider conversational or topical gambits: joking, shared hobbies or interests, talk of sports or family or whatever feels right. Don’t consider this an obligation, but rather an approach that might make your days more enjoyable.

Any worker should be tuned in to the office culture and if some element of that culture interferes with her job, she should talk to a manager. But if that’s not the case right now, it’s better to focus on connection and inclusion. “If she can find other ways of being friendly with her co-workers, that’s going to serve her well,” Dr. King said.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-feeling-left-out-at-an-extremely-chummy-workplace-4/