Tag Archives: crowd

Kickstart Your Aerospace Career

Kickstart Your Aerospace Career – Freelancers, Clouds, Crowds, Open-Source, and Makers

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A trend over the last 20 years is that of freelancers, or contractors, as they are also known. Knowledge workers who hire themselves out to companies temporarily.

In the 1980’s it was comparatively rare. You only went freelance if you:

  1. Were extraordinarily bold, and had no fear of being unemployed;
  2. Had a particularly high-value set of skills that were hard to find, and that companies were prepared to pay a premium for;
  3. Were approaching the end of your career, and had a great network of powerful contacts who were prepared to compensate you handsomely for some consulting (often business-development-related).

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Innovation, Vision

Look out, aerospace, Amazon and The Crowd are coming your way

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Amazon’s last quarterly report announced an enhancement to Amazon Web Services (AWS) called CloudHSM.

It will be “a new service enabling customers to increase data security and meet compliance requirements.”

How long before we can design an aircraft entirely on the basis of crowd-sourcing and Amazon Web Services?

How long before we can design an airliner that way?

I’m thinking . . . . . Not long.

Discuss.

Kickstart Your Aerospace Career

Kickstart Your Aerospace Career – Post 1

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Boy oh boy, can things change in just 20 years.

In 1993, I was not long married, getting very little sleep (due to the new baby howling in the middle of the night), and less than a year into my second permanent job (with 7 months of unemployment in between them).

On New Year’s day, I vividly remember sitting in the hospital holding my one-day-old daughter, thinking, “Darn. If I’m going to attempt a career change, I’d better do it fast.”

I was already losing interest in my new job, and I suspected that my employer might also be losing interest in me. (They were.)

I’d been fascinated with flying machines ever since the age of three, when my grandparents had taken me to watch them at the nearby municipal airport. I’d been transfixed then, as I still am whenever anything flies overhead.

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Career advice

Stay on the leading edge of the drag curve

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“Oh, the times, they are a-changing’ . . . . . . ”

It’s a necessary, if unfortunate, feature of the aerospace industry, that it is highly regulated. Of course. The flying public has this irrational desire to want to arrive at their destination in one piece. With their baggage. Therefore, the process of designing, making, and operating aircraft must be regulated tightly.

Which means, those working in it live in a very conservative little bubble. You tend not to have much clue of what life is like in other bubbles.

And you tend to attract people who are conservative and blinkered in outlook.

I’m still meeting people in aerospace who say, “Yeah, I’ve heard about this LinkedIn thing. What is it?”

In a fast-changing world, that approach to life is fine, as long as your nice little bubble stays intact.

Don’t count on it.

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