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There’s a raging debate in the Developer community about what new skills to learn and hone. The debate differs whether you are a Junior Developer just starting in the field or a Senior Programmer trying to keep your skills sharp. The debate grows more complex when you think about all the tools and frameworks available and how quickly they’re being improved. You may be plagued by questions like:

• Should I learn .NET or .NET Core?
• Should my focus be on a specific area of the backend or front end or should I go full stack?
• What about mobile versus web development? Which is more important?

Remote workers rule today’s job market. According to a Global Workplace Analytics report remote work in the U.S. has increased 140% since 2005. While it may not be the norm in your company, the world around us has gradually changed so that remote work is not only desired by employees, but it’s the new normal for employers seeking an increase in worker productivity.

The U.S. has an employee engagement problem. The statistics tell us that one-third of our employees are disengaged from their work. Stress and burnout are high, we have the worst work-life balance of any industrialized nation, and it’s negatively affecting our health along with corporate productivity. Human Resources Today says the cumulative annual cost of employee disengagement is about $605 billion in lost productivity.

Technology innovation continues to impact humans. One of the hottest buzzwords in the media today is artificial intelligence, or AI. If you believe the marketing hype, AI is everywhere, including in our phones, homes, businesses, and even our toothbrushes. But the reality is that there is a big difference between the scary sci-fi AI and the real-life computer algorithms powering your Alexa.

Your business is only as good as the people you hire. Everyone knows this but many small companies fail to allot the budget for an HR Manager, whose primary function is supporting the people behind the products you’re pushing. Neglect of HR is particularly true in startup environments, where organizations are more focused on pushing a product into the marketplace.

Which is a more creative place to work: a startup company or an established enterprise organization? There’s a good chance you might pick the startup, whose very existence hinges on a creative idea for launching a new product or service.

But what about Apple, Google, or Amazon? These giant enterprises have managed to stay creative and innovative even after their formative years.

A Hiring Manager handles a lot these days, but they are tasked primarily with finding the right talent. That is much harder than it sounds, especially during times of historically low unemployment. There is more pressure than ever to find the right candidate when almost everyone in the U.S. is gainfully employed. Plus, Hiring Managers are all too aware of how much it costs a company when they pick the wrong candidate for the job.

For the layperson, computer programming may be an unfathomable world of algorithms populated by incomprehensible terms and rules. While our iPhones, smart homes, video games, and apps may have taught us the basics of how to use these tools, the idea of actually programming them to answer questions or navigate to the nearest restaurant (all in a smooth British accent) are completely out of our league. That’s cool, though, because we all know some Sheldon Cooper (a la Big Bang Theory) type that can probably fix the WiFi when it goes down.

Ask a Hiring Manager how difficult it is to find qualified job candidates these days. You’ll probably get an earful about the historically low unemployment rate, the labor shortage in technical fields, and how everyone that wants a job has one. Glassdoor reports that 76% of Hiring Managers say recruiting talent is their number one problem.

Hiring teams are looking for creative ideas for staffing up in this unusually tight labor market. They’re working on culture and partnering with recruiting firms to attract top talent to their companies. One of the newest employment trends Hiring Managers are implementing has them teaming up with marketing executives to create recruitment marketing plans to attract more candidates.