How Internet changed competition rules in various profession

By Nino Bigvava, The Global Volunteer Training Program Participant, ISOC Georgian chapter

“Congratulate Malgorzata for starting a new position as Global Startup Program Leader at…” – it became a very usual notification in the LinkedIn during last years, telling us that majority of the positions on the job markets became free from geographic boundaries and people are enabled to live in Prague but work for company operating in Paris, Warsaw, and Amsterdam, planning various actions and scheduling e-meetings for colleagues and customers in these cities from the cafés located near the Charles Bridge.

The world is grateful for all the opportunities that Internet is bringing to citizens to enhance the education, technical or soft skills, improve the speed and quality of communication, share  and get information from all over the world, obtain better services, see the benefits of ICT in healthcare system and rapid progress in any domain. However, all of us also started complaining how exhausting and stressful our career life has become during last years.

Why?

Before the Internet advanced, the process of reaching target audience was managed through mediums, which played censoring and selection roles. For example, if you wanted to write a book and sell it, it was supposed to be reviewed by appropriate publishing house and regarded as interesting for public. Publishing houses acted as filters of certain quality. If you wanted to teach a math at school, you had to be accepted by certain teaching institution, which assessed your qualities. We can name many other industries, where there were such mediums filtering service providers before it reached its customers.

Once Internet 2.0. brought direct access to targeted customers without industry mediators, sensors and quality controllers via proposing various digital communication platforms such as Amazon, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and others. For example, HR agency’s business model is based on pre-selecting candidates and providing the potential employer a short list of top candidates – this is their core value. While LinkedIn offers open electronic platform for anybody, selection and spotting the best options is delegated to actual users.

Thus, the burden of choice is totally on us, whether we want to hire anybody, find a course to improve skills, or get competent business advice. So, Internet, together with wider access, more information and freedom in general, brought greater responsibility by transferring all the risks associated with choice on us. Because the information provided is not filtered any more, Internet users have less trust and thus decision making became more stressful.

A choice burden and lack of trust is only part of the challenges. With Internet, soliciting fast exchange of ideas, money and goods, it became simple to shop, educate oneself and entertain by using the source from far away, available at a click of a button. Suddenly, average Georgian writer must compete with average German, American, British and French writer who are readily available alongside with the greats of the genre. You want to earn by giving online classes on coding? Great, Facebook and YouTube  give you perfect opportunities. Oh sorry, but there is a guy from Buenos Aires, who can talk fine English and has better teaching skills than you do. So, it’s enough for him to target users from your city with online ads and you may end up starting from zero.

For majority of the professions, such as data analysts, project managers, writers, programmers, business consultants, lawyers, designers and anything that allows remote working, competition increased exponentially. Nowadays we are facing new challenges to speed-up our professional developments and remain on top. Because the competition became very intense and thus harsh, especially for those, who joined job markets over 20 years ago and could not predict how Internet would affect the rules of competition.

To summarize, finding the best among the unlimited options and beating competition for it, becomes more challenging in digital world.

About Global Volunteer Training Program

The Chapters Training Program will be the first engagement and learning program for members that focuses on developing new community leaders.  These community leaders can work together with their respective Chapters and create local awareness of our 2020 Action Plan work and explore options for members to become involved.

The program was born to satisfy the increasing need of our Chapter leaders to engage their members locally in an impactful and informed way about some of the Internet Society’s main initiatives.

The program is thus based on important topics of our 2020 Action Plan projects:

• Shaping the Internet
• Securing Global Routing (MANRS)
• Building Community Networks
• Open Standards Everywhere
• Encryption

In 2020, the regional Chapter workshops/meetings will be an integral part of this training program.