This year -- 2020 -- there have been photographs of taxi cabs being stored in fields afar for lack of passengers .... and thus, no jobs for drivers.
Bummer!
But what does that have to do with project management?
To answer: In the late 1970s there was a depression in the defense and aerospace business as the Federal budgets were re-prioritized.What happened?Software and hardware designers found themselves driving taxi cabs to make a living, forced out of the tech industry.And now what?Taxi cab drivers are being forced out of their jobs by the realignment of work location, and some are seeking training as software and hardware designersAs the door revolves!First, tech engineers are forced into the taxi business, and now drivers from the taxi business want to get into tech.
For project managers:
- Presumably, there is a vetting process for aptitude and a training budget for basic skills, likely not part of a project, but handled at the enterprise level, or in a public/private training program
- Project mangers will be asked to take on some of these newbies and that will require mentoring, job planning, and perhaps some adjusting of project velocity.
- There may be some fall-out ... even after training, etc, some will not cotton to the job and will drop out ... or be forced out. That broken work stream will have some cost/schedule impact
- There may be some super-stars: who knows who drives a taxi these days ... there may be some tech gems waiting to be discovered. Having an open mind to this possibility may garner a real asset for the project and the business.
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