My name is Jaldert Maat and I am a big fan of people.
Earlier in my life, I was mostly obsessed with processes and tooling, but as I grew and developed I realized more and more that the people who were using these processes and tools were the ones responsible for success. As we are moving on into a new digital age, it remains imperative that a balance exists between tools, processes and the people who use them – and as the digital advancements speed up, developing people to grab onto them and make them a success needs to happen faster too.
This leads to wonderful questions like “how do I balance my work with my life?” and “How can I use my old skills in new ways when I change careers” or “how do I run a team when they are in several countries, have different cultures and languages?”. These changes are still ongoing, and each answer that is found causes a revolution in other fields.
Many times, change involves facing things about yourself that are confrontational, overcoming preconceptions and bias and learning new things, new ways. This is not easy, especially because it can be quite a challenge to find resources to help you. So I decided to start Smörgåsjobb as a personal experiment, trying to catalog how people can adapt to the changes in digital life, how technology can be adapted to our new ideas on work and career, and how organizations can respond and thrive on the evolution that their people (HR) and technology (IT) are going through.
It’s a work in progress, and I hope it will help bring progress to work.