How do you stay updated on industry trends?

After a break back to writing the newsletter. And there is a new discovered format I want to follow. Recently I have been doing some personal double clicks on career, life and relationships. I had asked chatGPT a while back to give me a set of questions that one should ask themselves and try to find answers. And I found that help me retrospect a bit.

I try to answer the question and then even talk about it on Penpositive YouTube Channel. I also have that same aired as a podcast. So every week is being dedicated to go behind one question that pertains to my career and work and life. It is just to find parts of me that I might have ignored. Just to collate those pieces into something meaningful. These are written more in a "Dear Diary" format if you know what I mean.

And today's question is in the title. It is about industry trends ! What am I doing ?

When I read the question, I had to repeat that question a few times because the word industry kind of confused me. Two prequel questions kind of came to mind. Why do I need to stay updated and then what is it I need to be updated on and then we will figure out how

Why do I need to be updated: On one level it is about the work I do and get paid. There is change that is happening constantly as a result of which the industry where my company operates in and the industries where my company’s customers operate in, all change. This means my company has to adapt. This in turn means I have to change my way of working and even how I consider value delivery in my role. It also means that there is a possibility that my role gets redefined.

Without me realizing my role and relevance might be changing. Others expectations of me might be changing. I need to be aware of that.

Staying updated with industry trends becomes crucial to learning and to an extent staying employed. That is not all, there is also an industry in which I operate which in my case is the Agile, Scaled Agile, program management space. What are the trends happening there is equally important. So the ‘Why’ question encompasses different levels of industry knowledge.

What do I need to be updated on: I personally feel I cannot be updated on equal footing across all industry levels. So I might want to prioritize what I need to be updated on. Prioritization should be on value. The first priority should be on the industry my specific role belongs to. This would be Agile, Scaled Agile, Transformation, Program/Portfolio Management and similar areas. Even education and coaching trends in these areas matter. The next would be the industry my company operates in and then then the priority would be the industry in which my organization’s customers operate.

This prioritization might change for different people based on their roles and responsibilities. While what I do has external impacts the immediate benefit is internal.

These three levels are not complete. It will also expand to a lot more aspects of general professional knowledge. I would also think that I need to be updated on the trends in professional roles that I aspire to pursue in my career in the near future. If there is a career roadmap then mapping what that would demand from me should be one crucial point to look into.

How do I stay updated: Now this is the meat of the question. I should accept that I have not done a real good job and the efforts till now are not to my satisfaction. But that has definitely changed over the last few months I would say. There are some reasons to it as well.

Firstly I was in a position where I had to reach out and understand what is happening in the industry in order for me to perform my work within my company. This forced me to start looking at what all are happening elsewhere, talking about it and listening to other experts in my field speak. This forced me to take up some additional training and focus on specific reading that can guide me.

Secondly my career roadmap demanded some changes for the next few years. This newsletter and the following videos and podcasts all have to do with that career roadmap.

Maybe we all need to put the effort to find our voice within the space we operate.

Now I have a few sources for getting updated. One is Gartner which provides me with well researched Articles. The next is Medium that has helped me discover stories from the trenches. This has been so useful to me and I have a paid subscription for the same and get stories in my inbox regularly.

Then I have the Agile community blogs and the SAFe studio which are a great place to stay abreast on getting better at my job.

Podcasts are another place I go to for listening to conversations. I listen to them in Apple Podcasts. Some of the interesting podcasts I check every week are The McKinsey Podcast, The Grey Area, The Knowledge Project, O Being, SAFe Business Agility Podcast, Agile Coaching Network, Hello Monday from LinkedIn, The Seen and the unseen, Plain English, The Ezra Klein Show, Lex Fridman show, Happiness at work, The Next Big Idea, Masters of Scale, HBR on Leadership, NPR's Book of the Day, WorkLife by Adam Grant. A Bit of Optimism by Simon Sinek.

I have also subscribed to a few more shows. As you might notice, they are all not on industry but also on career, work and life. I know that is a ton of podcasts and evidently I don't get to listen to all of them every week. My approach it to see what they publish each week and based on my focus and interest for week, I will choose to listen or not.

Then I also subscribe to a few people on substack but not religiously following and reading them. ChatGPT has been a great tool, more as a search assistant than a trend informer.

The challenge I have and many would relate is that there is so much content out there and we have limited time. it can get overwhelming and I always have this feeling that I am missing on some other crucial information.

I think just like the career roadmap, there needs to be a learning roadmap to decide where our time should be spend.

I don't have a learning roadmap. Last year I tried something new. I decided I will take a topic every month and just focus on that. I will consume only content on that topic and also learn about it. Read, watch, listen only on that focus topic. But it did not work.

And on top of all these content there are books that I pick to read and countless more that I want to but don’t get time to read. The only way to remain composed is to create a Learning roadmap for the rest of the year and measure the value of that exercise. I will try and write about it some time.

You can also watch the Video on Penpositive YouTube Channel or Listen to the audio on Penpositive Outclass Podcast on Apple , Spotify and other major podcasting platforms. The Penpositive Blog also has a version of this same newsletter. Your choice of consumption.

Vinod!