Introduction

We live in a world where technological change is frequent and seemingly perpetual. It is a world where gadgets and tools once considered cutting edge are now a routine part of our daily lives and obsolescence of these tools happens on a two to three year cycle. With such a short time to keep pace with a changing landscape, it is imperative that organizations take stock of the skills held by their labor force as they similarly do with their technology and infrastructure investments. Doing so will help identify skill gaps and help leaders put together a continuing education plan to retain talent longer.

Talk About The Past

Let's start with a bit of observational history. The rapid pace at which technological advances take place is mind boggling if you consider that the internet, the vehicle that has enabled the Information Age, was operational in the 1980s. With computers becoming mainstream in the 1990s, routine-cognitive jobs became the staple for computers replacing the demand for clerical workers and technicians and creating a shift in the labor market. This created a surge in demand for professionals possessing analytical skills, formal education, and training. The workers who were replaced by computers and not able to keep pace struggled to remain relevant. This caused an increase in unemployment, increased the time it takes us to come out of a recession, and created a host of other social problems many of us are familiar with.

Part of the work force impacted by the technological advancement have found ways to retrain by either paying for the education themselves or finding grants and programs that will pay for the education needed to become employable. Some of these workers have eventually found employment to once again become productive citizens. However, with automation and machine learning becoming better understood and implemented, these workers and the professionals who previously replaced the clerks and technicians will also find themselves in the same quandary where the new wave of technology will make them less relevant to their employer as companies work to keep their products and services relevant for their customers.

Current Landscape

Broadly speaking, in the current corporate landscape, learning is generally left to the individual worker. Some workers are better equipped than others to manage their careers themselves while others may require some assistance to reach their full personal potential. As leaders in an organization, it is vital to believe that every worker is capable of doing more than they perceive they can achieve. This is where I propose that organizational leaders take stock of their work force skills and begin formulating a plan where they can improve their labor pool through training and education and retain talent that is better equipped to handle the needs of your customers over time.

Training and education of your existing workforce should not be an exercise in simply letting every employee find a course that interests them and signing them up. The learning should align with your business roadmap and overall corporate vision. This should hold true for all business units. Doing so will allow a mutually beneficial experience for the workers and the decision makers.

Let's Talk Benefits

There is another reason to make this a common practice in your organization. As workers age and spend time with an organization, there is a depth of knowledge that is amassed which cannot be replaced by simply employing knowledge base systems. These workers are a source of guidance for new workers as the broader society moves towards automating away more of the cognitive tasks. By becoming an active participant in growing the skill level of workers, organizations can earn a level of good will that cannot be measured. While tangible benefits help retain talent, a workforce that can rely on an organization to keep pace with the changing landscape and partner with them in their personal growth is priceless.

Taking stock of employee skill levels within an organization has a potential future benefit. With machine learning becoming more of a commodity, more recruiting firms are making use of social media data and candidate profiles they have on file to build systems that better match employees with employers. Having a strong understanding of your labor force will allow you to understand skill trends in the marketplace and improve your overall hiring speed when additional workforce is required. Presuming a scoring system that works across your organization, it is not difficult to imagine a world where the requirements for a new team member can be quantified and quickly communicated via recruiting channels.

There is, however, a salient problem underlying these networks. Let's consider Facebook as the epitome for this case study. It is a company that freely provides a platform to share your content with others, find people you may have lost touch with, and share other people's content you may have found interesting. The way they make their business profitable for themselves is by selling your browsing habits to other businesses willing to pay for your attention. They also assert copyright ownership on any content you post in order for them to legally share this information with others on their network. Therein lies the rub.

Let's say you want to create a group on Facebook for people who are like minded. You create a group page and add a few of your friends who share your interests. Now you want to grow your group. How do you do this on Facebook without paying them for advertising? Word of mouth works if you don't have any money to spend on this project. However, it will take a long time for you to get the word out. Let's say you decide to pay Facebook to increase your group's participation. Therein lies another problem. You never own your own audience and Facebook shares the copyright to all content you or the group members create.

Let's consider a business's point of view. You have a great product. You want to reach the market you set out to sell your product to and you decide you must have a Facebook page. You complete the necessary forms and now you have a company page. You invite your friends and family to like your page and ask them to spread the word about your business. You consider advertising on Facebook because there is no other way for your business to reach it's intended audience on there without first paying for the advertising and the data Facebook has collected on you and millions of others who use Facebook. Furthermore, you place your trust that Facebook's algorithms are correct in identifying each person's interest so that your advertising dollars are not wasted on the wrong audience. How do you validate this on Facebook? You can't.

This is where I see a strong case for moving to a model where social networks are focused on our interests and are searchable based on our personal interests. The walled garden that is Facebook, or most social networks today, actually work against the original mission of the world wide web -- create an environment for the free exchange of ideas. Keeping with the discussion about Facebook, the news feed is nothing more than an unconscious stream of unstructured thoughts. Value in each post is then determined purely on its ability to get you to click on it.

There is a way to still keep the value of a social network and ownership of content with the creator and not having it co-opted by business behind the network. Private social networks can serve the interests of its members and create a viable opportunity to fund its activities. Businesses wanting to showcase their products to an audience within its target market can pay the private network for their attention. In essence, a private social network can earn revenue from the advertisers that are willing to pay for a few seconds of your time. By doing so, a new market opportunity can be created that is open, fair to it's participants, more targeted for advertisers, and more structured in the way ideas are shared.

Facebook and most every social network today do not have a revenue sharing model where it pays it's users a portion of the profit they earn because of the content you created. This model will probably not change anytime soon. Taking this further, if you consider chat data and the data mining opportunities there, it's only a matter of time before you start seeing apps like WhatsApp or Messenger following suit and taking your conversations to create profiles for advertisers. Private social networks allow a new opportunity to flourish and perhaps let us decide who, when, and how our private data is shared and sold for a tidy sum.

I needed a decent amount of performance from the message queue and have it work with NodeJS. The design had to be simple enough that it can be deployed with the application or hosted separately. The solution also required a guarantee that at least one and at most one client will process a message. The decision was made to try out Redis Pub/Sub.I already had Redis in production and the thinking leaned towards leveraging this technology.

One problem immediately surfaced, I cannot meet the guarantee that was required for the project. Before completely giving up on Redis and moving on to something else, I decided to perform a quick proof of concept to see if this can work with Redis as a data store. The result was that it could be done and the elegance of Redis shone through.

With Lua scripting inside of Redis, it makes addressing such a problem possible. I have made the solution available on Github for those of you interested in the technology and dealing with a similar requirement. The code is also available as a NodeJS module on NPM.

If you find this useful, I would love to hear all about your use case.

Happy experimenting!