Scott Jancy

Founder @ Cgility | Hiring alignment for AEC firms | See how people work before you hire

[Scott Jancy @scottjancy]

The first question most people get asked about work is: what do you do?

It’s a reasonable question, and it’s also the wrong one to start with.

https://t.co/HO9BJ8fQLF

[Scott Jancy @scottjancy]

Systems can organize work. They can't bring it to life. That part was never the system's job.

[Scott Jancy @scottjancy]

Jane Jacobs looked at the same cities Le Corbusier designed and saw something completely different. That tension is worth thinking about right now with AI and work.

[Scott Jancy @scottjancy]

"What do you do?" is the first question most people get asked about work. It's reasonable. It's also the wrong place to start.

[Scott Jancy @scottjancy]

Titles get reorganized away in a Tuesday afternoon meeting. How you create value doesn't disappear that fast.

[Scott Jancy @scottjancy]

Climbing and navigating are not the same thing. One of them describes how careers actually work.

[Scott Jancy @scottjancy]

When cities were treated purely as machines, something human got lost. Streets became systems. Neighborhoods became zones. Life became optimized, but often less alive.

AI may do the same to work.

https://t.co/iDDRIP95iV

[Scott Jancy @scottjancy]

Only 15% of graduates work in fields related to their major.

We spend four years optimizing for specificity.

85% pivot.

And work is being redesigned faster than education can keep up.

We're preparing people for stability that doesn't exist, in jobs that might not either.

[Scott Jancy @scottjancy]

A ladder assumes the destination is up and the path is straight. Most careers don't work that way.

[Scott Jancy @scottjancy]

Systems optimize work. Humans create value. The opportunity right now is remembering those aren't the same thing.

[Scott Jancy @scottjancy]

Le Corbusier tried to make cities run like machines. They did. They also became less alive. AI and work is starting to feel similar.

[Scott Jancy @scottjancy]

As AI does more of the talking, the things that are unmistakably human start to carry more weight, not less.

You know them when you encounter them:

The handwritten note...

https://t.co/5ohddEiK4j

[Scott Jancy @scottjancy]

Career readiness gets you through the door.

Career preparedness determines what you do after you walk in.

[Scott Jancy @scottjancy]

The handwritten note. Showing up in person. The unrehearsed moment. As AI does more of the talking, those things carry more weight, not less.

[Scott Jancy @scottjancy]

Every architecture student learns to draw by hand.

Not because firms still draft by hand. They don’t. The industry runs on BIM software now — complex, powerful, collaborative platforms that produce things no hand drawing ever could.

But schools still start with a pencil and trace paper. And they’re right to...

https://t.co/iTp8BnCA09

[Scott Jancy @scottjancy]

Two people can hit identical numbers and be completely different. The system treats them the same. They're not the same.

[Scott Jancy @scottjancy]

When you only measure output, you can tell what someone did. You can’t tell much about what they’ll do, or why, or in what environments they’ll do it well.

The organizations that figure this out aren’t smarter. They’ve just learned to look at something the standard system isn’t designed to see.

https://t.co/6VQO6kPXyg

[Scott Jancy @scottjancy]

Output tells you what happened last quarter. One's behavior tells you what's going to happen every quarter after that. Most systems only measure one.

[Scott Jancy @scottjancy]

Architecture schools still start with pencil and trace paper. They're right to. There's a lesson in that for what's happening with AI right now.