Remote Work

Today I received an email from Tech Target that included this teaser-line: "There are many questions around re-opening offices, whether that’s a hybrid model, a fully remote model or something else. One thing, however, is clear - it will be a learning curve for everybody."

There was also a Linked In notification that a colleague, Joe Simon, posted a comment about remote work as a trend in the future of the workforce. He included a comment from Satya Nadella: “Hybrid work represents the biggest shift to how we work in our generation.”

Not too long ago, The Center for Cyber Security Awareness and Cyber Defense held a community meeting on trends and predictions in cybersecurity. One of the keynote speakers, David Jaworski, a leading exec from Microsoft on the Teams project, commented about the rapid growth of the Teams product. He reported that even before the pandemic influenced every business's work environment Teams was the fastest growing product in the history of Microsoft.

There has been so much negativity about the influence of the pandemic. I thought it might be a good time to throw a little positivity around and praise the fact fact that the pandemic has shown us that remote work can be effective and productive.

The IT industry has been a leader in sponsoring remote employees for quite some time. This is not because of stereotypical images of coders working in dark rooms by themselves. The IT industry has evolved to realize that frequent contact with customers and stakeholders is essential to providing services that are rewarding. Using technology the contacts with customers and stakeholders can be more global, more often, more convenient, and much cheaper. Virtual meetings of teams can increase contacts, build confidence, and create customer-rewarding services. Because the IT industry is obviously tech-savvy, this was an easier transition in that industry.

More than 10 years ago, our MS in Computing program adopted remote, virtual, synchronous classes. An essential motivator for this was an expectation that a remote work force was the way of the future. Hearing of a former colleague's son who was working in Pittsburg for a tech company in California was just one piece of anecdotal evidence that convinced me that remote work was going to become normal.

There was a time when universities added team projects into classes to help students develop the "soft skills" required to work in teams. We added remote team projects into classes to help students develop the new "soft skills" required to work in remote/hybrid/whatever-will-come environments.

The Tech Target comment about "a learning curve for everybody" is true. The MS program put students on that learning curve before their future-employers did. Remote students could attend classes. They were assigned to work on projects with other remote students and those who were face-to-face in the classroom. Synchronous (remote/virtual) classes with remote-team projects build the skillset required to work in a remote, or hybrid, or something else workplace.

I am proud of the fact that we have chosen this modality for online classes and I am proud of the fact that we are recognized in the top six online master's programs in IT by US News and Business Reports as a result of the decision.