Teaching a Digital Mindset course - The New Employee

The Digital Mindset course that I have been teaching at Nebrija University covers some societal and professional challenges so that students can reflect on the positive/negative/neutral role digital systems have. 

The second topic of the course is “The New Employee”. I wanted students to start reflecting on their role in society. Their responses to my first question, “What type of job do you want to have when you graduate” were really interesting, as most of them wanted to be entrepreneurs, with only one of them wanting to be a freelance. None chose to be employed or become a civil servant. While this was a very limited, and non-randomised survey, I found it amazing. 

One of the main companies promoting a new way of working is Basecamp. A tech company offering a project management tool, they have always worked remote, and have written a few books about this topic. While in my opinion they are a very special organization and not everything they do can be easily transferred, they always provide lots of food for thought, like in this interview.  

 

Another piece of discussion was about the difficulties of working remote. My students are future computer scientists, industrial designers, industrial engineers or architects, so most of them already know they could work remote. Now, unlocalised work has its challenges as well. 

 

 

 

As an entrepreneur, I tend to talk about the advantages of becoming one, and the great experiences I have had. But in this case I also need to send a warning. Becoming a freelance or an entrepreneur is full of challenges. As I am writing this we are in the middle of a country/EU lockdown due to the coronavirus, and it is clear that freelances are going to suffer the most. During the class we did not use this example, but another one seen at Twitter: 

 

 

 

 

 

In the second session, students presented some works about different tools for working remote, and about whether they, as managing directors of a company, would accept remote work, and how. 

So the following topic was… The Present and Future of Education.