When presidents sack you on Twitter and what it means if you’re 17

Opinion and Analysis

Pupils in class. Today’s teenagers will have to change careers entirely throughout the course of their working lives. PHOTO | FILE | NATION 

By Wallace Kantai

In Summary

• Time was when a journalist needed to know all the public relations officers in the institutions she covered. Increasingly, though, the journalist and the PRO have become redundant.
• Audiences are reaching directly to the companies, and often the CEO, cabinet secretary or president is answering his or her own Twitter messages.

A few days ago, I was invited to sit on a panel and discuss issues of media, western perceptions, and the future. It was an interesting session, and my co-panellists were some of the most accomplished names in the business, including Caroline Mutoko and Daniel Kalinaki.

The most interesting thing about the session was the venue. It was an international school in Nairobi, and our interlocutors were the students themselves.

The average age of the audience was 17, and of course at that age they know everything. I also still think I know everything, and this led to a very lively exchange of ideas. The young men and women were irreverent, inquisitive and leery of received wisdom.
Some still spoke in clichés, but these were no worse than the conventional opinion fronted by the chattering classes in Kenya. The interaction got me thinking about the future that these young people will inherit, and what kind of world they will lead when they are in the right positions.

They will be living in a world that will be remarkably similar, yet markedly different, from this one, and how they prepare to interact with it will determine how successful they will be. So I took out my crystal ball, and came up with some prognostications. Some will obviously be wrong, but hear me out all the same.

The first one is that we have no idea how the world is going to change, and thus how to prepare for it. If you had lived in and observed the last 50 years (the years of Kenya’s independence), here is what you would have seen: a world of steadily incremental change, and then a sudden wrenching disruption in the last 15 years.

Technology was easy to adapt to, since it came at you so steadily. If you were in the secretarial pool of a government department, this meant learning how to use a Dictaphone, and then an electric typewriter. The skills remained largely the same, and only the tools differed.

Now, there is no longer even a secretarial pool any more. The bosses write their own e-mails, often painstakingly pecking out a message on a tiny smartphone screen.

Time was when a journalist needed to know all the public relations officers in the institutions she covered. Increasingly, though, the journalist and the PRO have become redundant.Audiences are reaching directly to the companies, and often the CEO, cabinet secretary or president is answering his or her own Twitter messages.

It can lead to uncomfortable outcomes (over the last couple of weeks, two presidents have publicly told off their subordinates on social media – President Paul Kagame countermanding his health minister on the country’s plans for Ebola screening; and President Yoweri Museveni sacking his social media handler publicly and humiliatingly on the same medium).

However, the notion that this velocity of change will hold forever may not necessarily hold true in the coming decades. The world has gone through wrenching technological change before, only for this “progress” to be slowed down by social and political circumstances.

This means that the best skill that these young people can learn is adaptability. Prepare for a career that could change or disappear even as you’re learning it.

At the same time, though, there are several sets of skills that will hold up regardless of what the future holds. Financial skills; how to deal with customers and deal with them well; negotiation; and technological skills, however rudimentary.

The second big lesson, especially in Kenya, is that these young people don’t have as much time as they think. Two of the most dynamic CEOs in Kenya today – Joshua Oigara of KCB and James Mworia of Centum – are in their 30s. The idea that one will have decades to climb the greasy pole of their careers is long gone.

Add to this the fact that today’s teenagers will have to change careers entirely throughout the course of their working lives, and what you have left is either the cause for a great deal of angst, or the thrill of possibility.

The coming decades will mean that workers will become like movie stars: going from one multi-year project to another, while curating one’s career to ensure that this trajectory represents growth. Loyalty to a particular company will be deep and intense, but momentary, and companies and employees need to adapt to that