After 7 years of working as a Web Developer remotely from the island of Gran Canaria (and nearly 20 years in some IT related position), I started teaching IT to high school students here in the Canary Islands. Working with teens has been an eye-opener, to say the least…

More than 50% of my students had never used email and had never heard of Netiquette at the start of the school year. Although the curriculum from prior years included the creation of PowerPoint presentations, writing blogs, and modifying HTML, not one student knew how to set a margin or a tab in a word processing application. I was agahst! How could such gaps in basic IT knowledge be tolerated? Where was the curriculum designer? Who gave all these kids email addresses without making them take (and pass) a test on Netiquette first?

To their credit, what they did learn (creating videos, for example) they learned pretty well. Nevertheless, in the business world (and for the foreseeable future) formal business communication (contracts, proposals) takes place in writing, not video, and via email, not via Tuenti. Furthermore, these students, moreso than those who came before, absoultely MUST master computer mediated communication if they ever hope to succeed in their careers.

For these reasons I decided to conduct a series of interviews with some of my former (and present) clients, co-workers, and related software developers. In these interviews we discuss a variety of aspects of working remotely. Most of the people I spoke with coincided on one thing in particular: being able to express yourself clearly, in writing, is the deciding factor of whether or not to work with you. One of the interviewees put it this way: “I am going to quickly look for ways to eliminate 95% of [the resumes that cross my desk].” Expressing yourself poorly in writing makes you a likely target for elimination and this series of interviews is intended to drive that point home.

Now that I’ve edited down the videos and watched them all myself, I’m surprised how consistently the following themes came up:

• There must be trust between both parties, but it’s not that hard to achieve.
• Expressing yourself clearly and effectively in writing is crucial to your success.
• Most problems that arise are the result of a lack of trust.

The café where I recorded most (but not all) of these interviews was my favorite corner café here in Las Palmas: Coffee Break.

The interviews that follow have been edited down to fit within the 15 minute maximum allowed by YouTube.com, but there was a lot of great stuff left on the cutting room floor… Click the names of each person to watch the video and enjoy!

• Jim Devereux, Director of IT for Hinshaw & Culbertson LLP: “”
• Geoff Hoffman, Web Developer (and Designer): “It’s important to be able to formulate a complete sentence…”
• Rich Siegel, CEO of Bare Bones Software, makers of BBEdit: “There is no more valuable skill than being able to express yourself clearly and effectively in writing”
• Ricardo Uribe, CIO of CGNet