June 1, 2015 - Building Automation
by Ken Sinclair
Let me use Google to help explain and better define my obscure title.
"Becoming" is the process of coming to be something.
"Autodidactic" is a self-taught person.
"Asset" is a useful or valuable thing, person, or quality.
So our May theme is: The process of coming to be a self-taught person who is a valuable thing.
I started several months ago with the realization that our greatest assets as an industry are our people. This led me to the conclusion that we needed to grow our industry by dragging young IoT savvy folks across the skills gap. During this journey, I discovered that our lead industry assets badly need to become autodidactic, bridging their skills gap about IoT and its savvy folks.
This includes being part of all the social media interactions that they are now not part of, to learn more about how these young folks think and interact.
Ironically the skills gap is widened by our (yes, us old guys) lack of evolving skills; always in teaching it is the teacher that is taught.
I was very pleased that Realcomm/IBcon published my article in their show magazine realcomm-edge/flipbook. This prompted me to tweet: "Be sure to read page 42 and Grow younger with me."
So you see you can teach an old dog new tricks (smile).
Be sure to read Jim's and my discussion about IBcon - The Smart Building Discussion Gets Louder and Louder!
I just returned from the BACnet Global Roadshow in Seattle with great presentations by all, and this month Jane and I are part of the Haystack Connect event in Colorado Springs. I am a presenter and moderator.
From last month's start Self-Learning Knowledge Sharing Platforms: How internal company Wikipedia and other virtual knowledge sharing platforms allows Creating Self-Learning Cultures which attracts self-learning assets.
I am still hoping that I can learn to think younger, learn to try to think like them. Here are some of my thoughts this month about this journey: Social Media Interface. Give me some Slack!
So you can see we are taking our own advice and Becoming an Autodidactic Asset.
Linkage to the kind of thinking brought got me here:
Creating Self-Learning Cultures: How do we create them? How do we use them to increase the value of our only assets our people?
Our February editorial Growing our only Asset our People: How do we motivate them to be Curious? Passionate? Generated lots of interest and comments from the industry much of which was captured on social media.
To achieve the ability to grow our assets, our people we need to create a self-learning culture within our companies and communities. For the last year I have been exploring ideas in my editorials on how we might achieve this. Some of these editorials are: Autodidacticism, Creating Your Collaboration, The "I of Me" of IoT, and Education for Your Vocation.
Please join me on my crusade to help our industry attract more self-learning assets to build our industry stronger and younger.
