From First Internship to First Job: Getting Students Started in Responsible Tech - Highlights and Summary
How can students get their start in Responsible Tech? Steven Kelts (Director, Responsible Tech University Network) hosted a special livestream discussion about career pathways in the field with Alexandra Johnston (Associate Professor of the Practice and Director of Career Management in the Department of Linguistics, Georgetown University) and Deb Donig (Lecturer, Information & Data Science MA, UC Berkeley School of Information & Assistant Professor of English Literature, Cal Poly, SLO) on Thursday, June 27, 2024.
They were joined by a panel of students from the Responsible Tech University Network Board of Directors including Milan Wiertz (Political Science Student at UBC & Sciences Po), Katie Bernard (Computer Science and Creative Writing Student at Colby College), and Desiree Ho (Public Policy Student at UVA).
Below you will find excerpts from the conversation. You can watch the full livestream now.
Why was 2022 a major turning point for Responsible Tech Careers?
“Elon Musk bought Twitter and, in that moment, fired his Trust and Safety team, contracted a lot of the protections and a lot of that activist set of occupations around ethics, technology, public interest. What this did was send a signal to other companies that you could do this. You could fire entire Trust and Safety, governance, and DEI teams and still report a profitable model for your business. And so other tech companies followed suit with that.” Professor Deb Donig explained.
“This was in addition to a contraction in the market and in capital available for companies where they needed to, as they saw it, tighten their belts a little bit, and the first to go were these protective, ethical, Responsible Technology jobs. What you really saw is a lot of job precarity, or that is to say, dispensability to some of those jobs. With that dissolution of Trust and Safety teams you really saw a lot of the jobs that had risen up between 2016 and 2022 start to dissipate.” Professor Donig said.
How can the shifts in Responsible Tech careers since 2022 best be understood?
“I started to see a lot of people who had previously been part of these teams looking for new jobs. And now I think we're starting to see an expansion, but those jobs don't look the same as they used to look, those jobs are actually doing something very different in terms of where, for example, they're placed in the organization.” Professor Deb Donig said. “For example, rather than having a DEI team or a Trust and Safety team, you actually have people thinking about Responsible Technology lodged in different departments, working with departments across an organization. From my point of view, this is actually beneficial for an ethical technology model.” She continued.
Professor Donig explained how previous job structures were not beneficial to Responsible Tech efforts.
“The reason that it's beneficial is that one of the things that happened when I spoke to experts and people who had been critics of ethics of technology in my National Science Foundation study is they're very critical of a structure where a company had set up, for example, a DEI team or an ethics team that really wasn't in conversation with these other teams. They were kind of a silo. They were talking to one another rather than to the larger team.” Professor Donig said.
What skillsets are required to be prepared for cross-organizational jobs?
“I think there's a real opportunity for students to gain skills right now that can make them lead, not just participants in this workforce, but actual leaders in the tech industry.” Professor Donig said. “Institutions are notoriously slow, bureaucratic and really have a difficult time changing with the times. But as students, you can change with the times. To change with those times, we need to think about solving larger problems than what an individual discipline typically allows you to be able to think in terms of the problems that we're dealing with in terms of tech industry are so large and so multifaceted and so multidimensional that we need different perspectives to come to the table.” She continued.
Professor Donig emphasized the importance of being able to share common language and points of reference within teams.
“Now, this is a problem about how we organize teams, but individually, if you can learn some basic coding, some basic programming, or technical language. If you can learn how to understand the history of ideas, if you can learn some approaches to policy or governance and have that framework move into the industry, you're really going to be powerful in terms of your job achievement capacities.” Professor Donig said. “The goal here, and what I would urge and advocate students to do is, think outside of the traditional major, draw from whatever major you're in, and build outside of it because the problems that you're going to be asked to think about require that kind of multifaceted skill.”
How can sociolinguistics help students communicate with professionals?
“Linguistics is the scientific study of language. And sociolinguistics really puts the emphasis on language in society and how we use language in the world to do things. When you think about it, we use language to do all the things in the world. We need it to mediate everything we do.” Professor Alexandra Johnston said. “Being able to study the intersection of language, society, and culture is one of the most fascinating things because it can lead you into many different situations that you can drill down and look at the linguistic patterns that underlie communication. The communicative situations that I tend to study focus on language in the workplace and focus on the language of work.” She said.
“I can really drill down on that and show us all how we can pick up on some of those keywords from different sectors so that we can make ourselves more competitive, understanding, and fluent. And in how to bridge communication differences across sectors, such as government, industry, nonprofit, and Higher Ed, but also within organizations, which again, have many business units that make up the organization and many different languages associated with those business units. The work that I tend to do is focusing on language patterns and communication patterns in ways that we work, ways that we find work, the way that we find opportunities, and the way that we interact with people in the process of finding a career fit and finding career opportunities.” Professor Johnston said.
What advice can you share about informational interviewing?
“Part of learning a career management method is learning how to network and I tend to start a lot of my classes with a Networking For People Who Hate Networking workshop because a lot of people have very negative associations with networking. If you have negative associations with networking, I, I get it. I understand. If you're an introvert and you feel, “This is something that is not made for me,” I understand. I'm an introvert too. Here's the thing: Networking is anything that you want it to be. Anything you like. If you like research and learning, that is what networking is.” Professor Johnston said. “Don't call it networking. Call it research. Call it learning. Call it making a friend. Call it having a career chat. Call it just a conversation. It can be a conversation in a driveway or in the street. It can be a conversation at an airport restaurant. I've had these kinds of career conversations anywhere you can imagine. They're basically on-ramps to potential relationships, potential mutually beneficial exchange. Networking is not extractive. Networking at its finest is learning about other people and what they do in their work lives. It is meant to be mutually beneficial.” She continued.
“Informational interviewing is a named genre of interaction that working professionals make use of in the world to learn. This is a research tool. If you like research, then this is your way to do research on your own interests and your own connection with the world of work.” Professor Johnston said. “Don't be scared about connecting with people and asking for an informational interview…You are talking to someone who is a bit more further along in their career than you, and you are asking about their career pat, about their work and how they got there, about the skills that they have that they make use of all the time in their job about how the sector works, about how their organization works, about the projects that they're working on, about Responsible Tech and their role in it, and how they connect with other people in other parts of the organization or the sector in order to do the work of Responsible Tech.” she said.
About the Responsible Tech University Network
The Responsible Tech University Network is an intergenerational effort, making ATIH’s huge community of professionals a resource for student growth. The direction of all our programs is steered by students themselves, through the UNet Board of Directors. We empower students by bringing them in contact with a diverse cross-section of people in responsible tech, through things like our mentorship program that links students with early career professionals. And we arrange guest speakers on-campus and online to talk to our clubs about their own pathway into responsible tech.
About All Tech Is Human
All Tech Is Human is a non-profit committed to building the world’s largest multistakeholder, multidisciplinary network in Responsible Tech. This allows us to tackle wicked tech & society issues while moving at the speed of tech, leverage the collective intelligence of the community, and diversify the traditional tech pipeline. Together, we work to solve tech & society’s thorniest issues.
Join our working groups on Cyber & Democracy and Tech Policy
Read our reports, such as our Responsible Tech Guide and our recent Responsible Tech Org List 2024
Join our Slack community of over 9k members across 93 countries, with numerous individuals focused on creating healthy digital spaces
Read our Responsible Tech Job Board and join our talent pool