A developer for life
It's the whole person that matters and the #YouGotThisConf had this message at its heart.
Its delegates, speakers and audience were early career developers from the digital world in which we live.
Photographs by Paul Clarke, and are provided with a CC-BY-SA license
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
Problem solvers and creative people - and there are many in the digital industries - are very often driven by powerful individual goals in a fast growing, target focused and sometimes hard-faced industry.
These shared characteristics can lead to wonderful performance and also to an obsession with unobtainable targets or perfectionism. And this can have a terrible effect on both the individuals and the businesses which employ or contract them.
Photographs by Paul Clarke, and are provided with a CC-BY-SA license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
The changing and challenging nature of work and employment practices was a consistent theme throughout the conference because of the instability or flexibility that is now built into so many employment opportunities as standard.
This flexibility has hugely positive effects for bottom line financial efficiency and for meeting the massive and growing demand for digital transformation in business and society at large. The persistent instability it brings with it can also deliver chronic economic insecurity employees, contractors and members of full time staff.
Even in perfect conditions, it can be hard to avoid neglecting yourself in work and even if you are adept at resisting the challenges of overwork or Imposter Syndrome which many people share.
So, it is not difficult to believe that it is harder to manage challenges such as these as an early career professional - and with so much less experience of what work can do to the worker.
The #YouGotThisConf conference attendees shared powerful testimony about managing the self in the digital work and marketplace and heard from a series of presenters who had seen both the positive and the hard sides of managing a life-work balance.
Subjects addressed across the day included managing mental health, controlling money, the importance of physical well being, coping with hierarchies or, the lack of them and digital knowledge overload.
We hope we helped simplify some of these powerful challenges to early career professionals with what we drew at #YouGotThisConf.
