Hello everyone, welcome to our session and thank you so much for making it to the very first session of the day. We didn't know when we you know they when they're planning things they don't always tell you when things are occurring and we thought this is actually awesome because now we don't have to be worried about this for the rest of my name is Melissa Bent and I'm a senior software engineer at Red Hat and this is my first time presenting ever at a conference which is kind of fun. I did that just for the I did that just for the clap so thank you for for getting that cue for me. I am the lead engineer on our customer portal which is at access.redhat.com and there are many engineers I should say this there are many engineers on that on that website I'm on the Drupal portions of it and I live in Mampa Idaho so I got in here very late last night I might be a little bit manic it'll make for more fun during this presentation and I have a small farm with goats chickens and many dogs I also love all things 3d printing Lego IOT and anything to do with plants so should we run out of topics related to Drupal there are many others if you'd like to talk to you about any of those. And I'm April Sides I am a senior software engineer at Red Hat as well or a back-end Drupal developer I work on developers.redhat.com cloud.redhat.com and kubernetesbyexample.com I too am into the Lego Harry Potter and Lego Harry Potter I work on the Drupal community working group community health team the alley talks accessibility talks monthly virtual meetup and Drupal Camp Asheville speaking of which is happening next month July 7th or 9th in Asheville, North Carolina trainings, unconference sessions, social events all the things check out the website get your tickets today or tomorrow or whenever back to our regular scheduled session so today we're going to talk about the problem we were trying to solve we'll go over a little bit of the discovery process and talk about our solution we will talk about a couple of different implementations that we're doing at Red Hat and then talk a little bit about our future plans so the problem this isn't a problem but Red Hat is big it's a global company with over 19,000 employees we are built on open source principles originating from the Linux community we use a lot of different technologies to serve our customers and these technologies include open source and homegrown solutions and redhat.com is made up of multiple Drupal sites and single page applications like react and view so our organizational data like product information and taxonomies ends up being duplicated in each site and app and managed by different product owners and content managers and engineers so changing the data is a very manual process that has to propagate across all sites and apps by different people and this leads to sad data pictured here is data from Star Trek being sad so we care about our data quality we want it to be consistent and accurate there has to be a better way right some data should be managed centrally and made reusable across the ecosystem so I wanted to make sure that I mentioned this as well I came to Red Hat about two years ago and discussions about this topic were already happening before that we kind of took it and ran with it so there are many many people involved in this we're just doing the presentation right so this is a this is a group effort but we are doing the presentation today so I want to make sure I called that out but when I when I came to Red Hat you know you go through the whole onboarding experience when you come to a new company you're like what is this what is life which team do I talk to and I used to joke with my my co-workers and say things like I feel like every time I talk with someone here it's like in Mario Brothers when you got to the end of a level and it says I'm sorry but the princess is in another castle because it would be like oh no that's this team and you talked to that team they're like oh we don't do that anymore that's this team and it that's kind of like a scale issue of course but really what it comes down to is because of that kind of like because things were split across multiple teams across multiple time zones countries it means that we ended up with a a data issue of who's going to maintain this who's going to be our source of truth and everyone agreed we needed it but they didn't all we didn't always agree on who should be the person doing it because we all have our own stuff right everyone has their own things that they have to do so I decided because I work on the customer portal that I would go ahead and try to do this because we needed it customer portal we we try as much as we can to make it easier for our customers to get the most out of their subscriptions through articles and solutions documentation all different kinds of things and we needed them to be able to get to those things quickly and also be able to show them hey you're talking about this did you know that we have this as well all those kinds of things that in a normal world in a normal like small Drupal system yeah you make an entity reference you you make taxonomies you make connections that way but when you have all these different systems in this complexity it becomes a problem so we had the greatest data needs as well on the portal because we're a support site so we don't just support the newest and best thing we support the server that's you know 12 years old that's running in someone's back office as well and they still need documentation for that or they still need oh I'm having this weird issue oh here's an article on it right so we have the greatest need for for information on this and specifically around product data meaning versions end-of-life data document all these different things and between that we also had multiple teams working on this together and it becomes it at scale it was getting difficult to grow that and do it in a way that's maintainable so talking specifically and airing a little bit of dirty laundry when I was onboarding onto this project I started realizing that some of our most important pages were actually just Drupal nodes the classic page content type where you're like I need to get this up today and we're going to just put it into the body field and then it's like the thing I say all the time is what happens when for now becomes forever right where you're like I'm going to put this up here for now and then three years later you're like we're still copying and pasting HTML into the field which happens all the time more than we'd like to admit so we see that kind of thing happening which is a bad developer experience it's a bad customer experience because it leads to things where things get out of date things get you know it's a product update comes out and it doesn't trickle down the way it should so additionally it makes because we're not using the CMS in the way it's supposed to be used it leads to us recreating content in multiple places all the time again it created fragmentation issues with maintenance issues with just getting our best forward to our customers but also again our our main goal was to get customers the information they needed as quickly as possible so they could be successful and then yeah the biggest one I think is at the very end here which is that we had lost time not just for customers but for developers doing things that they shouldn't have to be doing with their skill set the thing I keep telling my developers I want to get them out of the content game we shouldn't have to have a developer making these changes because it's too complex for a content editor to do so these are the kinds of things we were looking to fix so specifically what came out of this discovery process is that we needed to be able to share our data in a way that scaled well across all of our properties we needed it to be flexible enough that we could work with our team but also other teams we have a lot of other teams that work with data in their specific way we also needed to have different tech stacks because we have Drupal which is what we work with but there are plenty of other as she said before homegrown solutions there's salesforce data that you know we want people to work in the tool that they're comfortable with and we didn't want to sit there and say oh by the way now you have to learn Drupal to work with us it didn't make sense so we they needed to be able to work at the tech stack that they already used and then additionally we wanted to have it specifically be a single source of truth this is something you can rely on for product data for customer portal so our solution wait for it data lake so looking back at our requirements from before with a data lake we get scalable low maintenance solutions we have flexible structure and the there's also a schema on read option with data lakes where you can apply a schema onto the data when you're pulling it out rather than when you're indexing it it also or there's lots of tools for connecting with our current tech stack there's Drupal modules there's GraphQL there's PHP drivers and then as far as being able to set something up as a single size source of truth you can bring your own government governance so you can make it your single source of truth but with great flexibility comes great responsibility isn't that right Melissa that's correct April we didn't plan that at all uh thanks so whenever you remove some of these governance tasks from Drupal's purview it means that you now have to do it in a different way and uh one of the things that we had to guard against was what we call data rot which is when your data gets out of date like why is this in here this is you know three years old this should have been deleted a long time ago just things that normally in that in a CMS is like second nature I unpublished that it's unpublished it's removed from the site all the the things we take for granted and we also wanted to make sure that we're not having to reinvent the wheel more than we have to right to to make this work so we wanted to rely on things that we're already present in Drupal to manage the content itself we wanted to establish a governance plan um specifically around who's allowed to put things in what kind of data we put in how they use it and that's the biggest thing I think that was really hard to get down because we had to get people to agree and when you have lots and lots of people who all have things that they need it's harder to get them to agree on what they're actually going to put in and how and we also wanted to make sure that we restricted it in a way that protected customer data if there was any involved in what we were indexing we also wanted to make sure that we were protecting anything that was gated so that if there was security information in there related to like a release that had not yet been made public we wanted to make sure that that didn't go in um specifically not that uh people would use it in in a bad way but I wanted to make it harder to do the wrong thing right because when you have a really big system like this and it's removed from the the original source that created it it's easier for someone to see well the data is there I'm going to post it but they wouldn't necessarily know oh not yet right so we wanted to make sure that once something went in that it was free for someone to use and that was a really big important piece to get into the system and other things like GDPR we wanted to make sure that we were able to accurately identify information that needed to be managed to stay in compliance with privacy concerns and I guess it goes without saying when you have a large company like Red Hat it has to scale it has to work really well has to uh it has to be performant uh with redhat.com it gets a lot of hits and I don't know the traffic on redhat.com but on the portal we get like over 300 or sorry wrong over three million hits a month and I did the traffic analysis before I left and we were getting 15,000 hits an hour which is a lot I've never worked on a site quite this large so it's it's very very large for us and we wanted to make sure that that was maintained or at least that if we were going to do something it didn't make it worse right we wanted to always make something better and the the other thing that we liked about this data lake concept is that the architecture itself is simple anyone who's worked with Drupal at scale knows that yeah you can do it but there are a lot of different things you have to do to make it happen and there are a lot of layers but we wanted something really simple and this that covers that additionally this acts as a caching layer for Drupal everyone knows that with Drupal there's a lot of caching involved in general just within Drupal itself you can add additional layers on top of that but the the data lake itself if you do it the way we're doing it it allows you to then it becomes kind of your presentation layer of Drupal instead of using a traditional html page so our solution was MongoDB this is what we ended up using for our database backend for our data lake one of the things we liked about MongoDB is that it uh it doesn't care about what you put in it just says oh you have data in here that's great it's JSON blobs it just goes right in and that is in alignment with our schema being configurable customizable things like that uh it's not opinionated about what you put in as long as it as long as it's a JSON object you're good to go uh so that that was the direction we went so here's the nitty-gritty this is the Drupal part you're like you're talking about all these different things what about Drupal this is the Drupal part so this is where Drupal comes in into play in order to make this happen we decided to go with search api which most people everybody here knows about search api right you've used search api before i see three people nodding their heads more people yay okay somebody back there uh we made a custom backend that interacts with MongoDB uh so there does the MongoDB module on Drupal.org and then we also use search api on top of that using this custom backend it allowed us to create an event that we could fire and then we could react to that event with a subscriber using you know Drupal 8 plus concepts and uh because of how search api works it helps you prevent data rot the things we were worried about right if something changed it would go in instantaneously you automatically have access to all the search apis filters or plugins i should say so if something's unpublished you can have it removed all those different things it simplifies a lot of the process we can rely on the the shoulders of people before us and and build upon that and additionally uh it allowed us to be flexible with our schema which is absolutely a requirement for this when we were creating our data we decided that there are kind of two different levels of of data we needed to to worry about there's what we call primary data which is information that should be shared across all records so that way if you're indexing you can rely on that being present like a title right created date updated date author those kinds of things and then what we call secondary data which is where you can make it customizable for the source so for our product data it would be things like logos links to logos or a description that's specific to a product things like that so it allows you to then diverge from that primary list of data and create a unified schema that allows you to query things consistently and then on top of that you get all the Drupal has to offer so you have access control for the the ui you have permissions you have security and privacy you've got all the good things that Drupal offers involved in the creation of that content in the management of that content you don't have to reinvent the wheel to make it work it's just that in the end when you hit save instead of it showing up on a on a web page like a standard Drupal web page it gets indexed into this data lake and then as far as retrieving that data we have like i said before single page applications and Drupal sites so on the single page applications they're using GraphQL a GraphQL layer on top of MongoDB and for the Drupal solution which I've been working on we've been using the PHP MongoDB driver to just query the MongoDB database directly and we'll talk a little bit more about that in our implementations and hey we're in our implementations your transitions are so smooth so again back to our product experience which is this the reason we keep coming back to this is this was our proof of concept for the data lake we only just launched a page using this concept earlier this year and it was the result of two years of discovery conversations and effort to make it happen and the best part about it to me was that this is our product index page it's at access.redhat.com slash products you can go there today you can see it you can see it rendering this is a single page application that pulls information from MongoDB using GraphQL there's a GraphQL layer we're not going to get into the GraphQL layer because that's actually not something we have another team that manages that part for us so we're talking specifically about the Drupal portion but the the thing i loved about this is that the measurement of success was that our customers didn't notice that it had changed right that literally we swapped it out from being an html blob in a in a node to this statically built page and nothing changed on to their perception other than that it was like 200 or 300 faster when it loaded because it didn't bootstrap Drupal to do anything there was no caching layer on top of it it literally was just a statically generated page that went popped right up okay and the thing i loved about it is that our front-end developer when we launched it i was like chase are you so excited you don't have to ever touch Drupal again if you don't want to and he's like i don't know what to do with my hands it's like specifically what he said because now he doesn't have to touch the content anymore he can just focus on the build he can focus on the code he can focus on beautifying the actual presentation of the data which is what he wants to be doing anyway and we're generating this via a gitlab pipeline every 30 minutes so it automatically rebuilds the page every 30 minutes we can change that timeline we're still kind of tweaking what that timeline looks like but for to start with that's what we did because our product information doesn't change often enough to make it more than that but it does work really really well so far and i think the bottom point here is the one that i think is super important where because it was a page content type before and there are a lot of people in this site people could have technically deleted this page and then we would have no product index page anymore and now it's protected from that by being a spa we call a spa static their single page application is a spa it has two different displays there's an index page there's a category view that you see here on the category view we also have the ability actually on both views but we're pulling in translations from Drupal as well as part of the data lake this you you can tell that not all of this is translated because we're still getting the translations in but i wanted to show you that that's actually present on the page and it supports it natively from the data lake and just in april we launched our product pages themselves using this same architecture and you look at this page and i i mean you look at this and you're like well that could be a Drupal page absolutely it could be a Drupal page no questions about that but because it's statically generated because we're pulling things in from the data lake because we're using graphql we can do things like the section down there that's documentation that's pulled from a completely separate team that uses a custom homegrown documentation storage system that has nothing to do with Drupal and knows nothing about Drupal but we can pull that information in and there are tons of ways you can do this absolutely but for us the foundational data layer we're building here allows us to then build new things off of it and so we're building that structure now for this particular one product lifecycle api which we have for our customer portal it handles end of life data and things like that we're actually using that to set our titles of our products every so often though the company will tweak a name of a product or rebrand something and getting that information out to the public is a slow process and i remember when i was doing a proof of concept of the Drupal system and i built this this integration for the api that a name change had come through that night and my manager is like hey does this support like pulling in updates and i was like you mean this update that's already here right now that came in last night it was like already in and i was like and when it changes the name it saves the old name in an alternative name field so that it supports it for solar searching across all the websites and he's like that's so cool i was like it's amazing because then we don't have to do it anymore right we don't have to do it manually um and then uh something that i did add for this particular instance is canonical links are managed in Drupal as well so that's not something that someone's adding by hand anymore there's a lot of validation there uh let's see this is the new feature we added which is product bundles so some of our products have products within them there's a there's a bundled section in the middle there where it says included with red hat amq on here those are bundled products and in Drupal that's just an entity reference right but in the data lake it doesn't have it doesn't have any opinions about what things are so because we now have this unified id this an internal um this internal source of truth we can recreate kind of recreate that process but in the data lake instead and then make that available for other systems to query in the same way um so we can actually pull in all the same information documentation links those kinds of things in this way but then other systems could do the same so they would actually be able to say oh i want to know all the bundled products with red hat amq here they are so for the ui on the back end this is pretty con i mean you'll see this is basically claro and the the new beautiful add the new i on the back of dribble i think it's dribble 10 it's default now isn't it dribble 10 is it not yet okay but anyway this is claro uh i made a custom product entity using using drush and uh the the bundles entity then is pretty standard you see this kind of stuff all the time where you've got an end of your reference field and you you reference those in and um one thing i did do which i was you know it's it's a small thing but it's really nice is that the order of the products being added to the bundle are respected in the data lake so that our product admin who's managing all this data she can just rearrange these fields and then on the front end it'll reflect it automatically and every time she saves the product bundle it triggers an update to the data lake it's instantaneously available so that when it's next built it shows up on the page so to sum up you manage your data in dribble you index it into the data lake using search api you query it with graphql you build it with a git lab pipeline and it's refreshed every 30 minutes and then you enjoy your newly automated life and i get to follow that act wow all right so for the first site that my team integrated the learning paths data lake was the developers.redhat.com this is a site to learn about new products and technologies at redhat and just so we know like what a common understanding about a learning path is a learning path is a curated collection of content directing users to learn more about a particular topic or product. So the idea is that any content that can be a part of a learning path like an article or cheat sheet for example they're indexed into the learning paths data lake collection so we have a separate collection from the products collection in mongo db and then once that content is indexed it can be referenced and displayed in the context of learning paths so the way that we're doing this is we have a learning path content type and a resource content type learning paths reference resources in an entity reference field so we're using in this screenshot here we're using the entity browser contrib module for a nice UX so that you can see card views of existing resources within your site and then you can create a resource in the little tab there at the top and so the resource content is just a container for data lake content we're using the external data source contrib module so it allows us to create this autocomplete field and you can see we're looking for a title that's based on title but it shows you like the a little snippet of like the origin site that rhdp is the developer site we see what type of content it is what language it is in the title and when you click on it then it puts this universal or this uuid here for the data lake into the text field and that's what we're using to then pull that data we also have we're using the automatic entity label contrib module and a custom token so that when you save this resource it's going to use the data lake title as the title of the node so that anytime you update that node then it will match and we're also using the allow only one contrib module so that we don't have tons of resources referencing the same data lake data we should only have one a one-to-one ratio there so then if we look back at our example that I showed previously we see we now have like a hero and a sidebar that are driven by the learning path content type and then the data inside there is coming from the data lake so to display our data lake data in carding contextual views we're using a preprocess hook so we take that uuid we query um mongo db we get that data back and we add it to the render array so that twig can use it however our front-end developers want to show it the way that we're doing this is we have an internal contrib module that is pulling all this stuff together in a consistent way so we've got the the main points are that we have the ability to set our schema in this module so anybody that is putting content into the data lake the learning pass data lake has the same schema we're also we have a service used to query the data lake so if we ever change and add a different way of querying if we're not going to query directly we add a graph ql here we can just swap out that service as well um and then just reusable code so we've got a controller like you were seeing before with the the hero in the sidebar we have a controller for viewing resources within the context of a learning path and that will allow us to reuse resources on different learning paths so you may have like some setup instructions or something like that that can be a part of any learning path and you can still see it in the context of each learning path that was pretty cool to work on and then the event subscriber that she was talking about before we're using to pre-process the data and make sure it looks the way that we want to before it's indexed and we have a couple of constraints and validators just to make sure that when you're referencing content you know does this is this uuid actually correspond with data lake data those sorts of things and so yes that's a lot of stuff for just like showing a learning path um but the idea is that what we did last month was to integrate the hybrid cloud site with the same module so that now you can create a learning path on the developer site and reference content on the cloud site and vice versa you can create a learning path on the cloud site and reference articles cheat sheets ebooks from the developer site um so this was basically a first proof of concept of how we can share this data across Drupal Drupal sites and we have other teams at Red Hat that are interested in continuing to expand the capabilities of this uh shareability all right so our future plans and i wanted to make sure that i called out um that actually the customer portal is looking to reuse some of this learning path stuff that she's been building as well so when we talk about it being an internally contrib module that's something that we coined because we have so many Drupal instances we have kind of our own ecosystem internally but we're always looking for ways that we can contribute that back whenever possible which we'll show you in a minute so that for the customer portal side of things things we're looking at doing our standardizing our product taxonomy there's we have product taxonomy on most of our sites right now but because they're maintained manually they're all different all of them and it's it's it's really getting out of hand so uh when i say that when i say that we're doing this one thing to keep in mind because the customer portal is at one subdomain access at redhat.com but we're currently in the process of splitting it into seven different Drupal instances and in order to make that feasible we have to have a way to share a lot of these this different information so that's one of the reasons like you look at this and you're like this is a lot of work to share this stuff when a single Drupal instance could do it and that's true absolutely if you look at what we built it's completely overbuilt for what we've done so far but it's the foundation for what we're going to do later one of them being product taxonomy and once we get that available sites like developers could use that shared taxonomy module as well on their site and standardize the presentation across their site as well another thing we talked about doing is integrating other systems at redhat like our subscriptions information and our let's see again more more information from product lifecycle so we can do things like when a product gets and becomes end of life or an end of life date is announced then we can use our notification system on the customer portal to say hey did you know that this was just announced here's detail on that here are some articles on that from our site so we can create this really great customer experience for to get people again get them what they need when they need it oh this is still me sorry the other thing we wanted to do is i i was calling it content syndication but that sounds like rss feeds which is not what it is it's really patterns which you basically create content store the html the rendered html in a data lake object and then you could actually reuse it across multiple Drupal sites so you could have someone create like hey this is a this is a new feature of this product and you can show it on all the sub-product pages that it goes with and again in a normal Drupal instance this would be like a block like a simple block with an entity reference and you're good to go but because we have multiple Drupal instances going on this is a way to do that yeah then as far as the learning paths we're looking at like learning path discovery like she was talking about on the customer portal if you subscribe or purchase a product it would be nice to know where you can learn more about how you can use that product right so being able to share that data in that way we're also looking at adding the graphql layer or sub graph layer similar to what they've done with the single page apps so that it can be used by single page apps if someone wants to use it in that way and then i think just as far as like enhancing the learning path stuff gamifying learning paths like making it so that you can actually earn a badge or something when you've completed a learning path that data may not be strictly put into a data lake but like something that we are looking to enhance our learning path experiences so we went ahead and we actually did this presentation at Drupal con florida Drupal con florida is Drupal camp it is not a con it's a camp Drupal camp florida and one of the main questions people asked is where can we see this code and i was like you can't so i did this this is a sandbox module on drupal.org you can absolutely use the short link that i put up there it's not going to like ask you for anything or track you it's really just to make it shorter but also i put the long one at the bottom here which is the actual sandbox link to the module i will say caveat it is untested i took out all the red hat isms from it but it also means that you know we're listed as as maintainers so you guys can connect with us that way if you'd like to absolutely in the spirit of Drupal we are accepting contributions but within this module it shows you the event subscriber it shows you the the custom database backend there's also some example code in there of how to implement a schema how to get that into the to the data lake the way you want it there's some really good read me articles in there about how to set up a mongo db instance on your local to get it a proof of concept for yourself if you wanted to present this to someone else is like a hey this is a great idea i like this idea um and again we're we're available for conversation and and help whenever you guys need it yeah so these slides will be available and we put our resource links in these couple pages here um so there is um so thank you to red hat for letting us work on cool stuff and for sending us here to speak thank you for drupal con for selecting our session and thank you all for being here this early in the morning for our talk anyone has any questions anyone has any questions shout them out i don't know raise your hand whatever we've covered it all okay yep okay so the question is are we indexing to another search solution and indexing to solar as well um the answer is yes yes we have our our search backend is um also being indexed so they're just separate indexes in search api this is our proof of concept to say hey come join us yeah so that was the question was uh are there non-drupal products putting data into the data lake and we're not doing that at this moment but you know expansion this is the foundation i think we had a hand up back here so the question is well why did we go with mongo db i will say it's because jason smith said it was a good idea and he's sitting right there so if you want to ask him a question um no it was it was available and we had we already had architecture in place to do it it made it a really easy choice um i can say that with all the different back ends for search api you could totally do it with a different back end if you wanted to but this is also a way to it was it was non-complex to get it set up and we needed that we needed to take some complexity out when it was already so complex yeah so the question is are we looking to further or continue to use single page applications or spas to be the front end of our website and keeping drupal as the content management system you get to repeat the questions and i get to answer them yes um so the answer is sometimes uh we have for the customer portal we have a lot of single page applications in place for various reasons and so i would say that it's a case by case basis sometimes it makes sense sometimes it doesn't and i don't want to do a blanket statement and say we're doing the coupled all the time no matter what because sometimes it just doesn't make sense but sometimes it does so in situations where we needed to be highly performant and highly available things like that we tend to go towards spas and i've built highly performant highly available drupal sites before um so not to say that drupal can't but i would say that it's a lot more accessible for our our front end developers because it's a lot easier to find a react developer than a front end drupal developer and we have a lot of those um and it just makes it it makes it easier to cater to the skill sets of the people we have so kind of back and forth i would say and uh and and again we're not we're not looking to be like this like like thumbs down on drupal all the time it's more of a case by case basis you know the the follow-up question is uh can we share a case where a spa makes more sense is it okay a spa makes more sense yeah so we have um we have listings of like vulnerability information which would normally be probably a view in drupal but it's really easy to do that in a react application so that's one that's one that i can think of uh there's also a case where we have um our we call them vulnerabilities but we're revamping those two called security bulletins which is basically red hats response to a cde those are staying in drupal and they have elements that are uh asynchronous like a thumbs up thumbs down feature commenting those kinds of things those are asynchronously handled with javascript but the page itself is rendered with drupal and those will stay that way for now for the foreseeable future let's say it that way so those are two different situations more questions so in the back okay yeah so the question is um why did we choose to use mongo db instead of a relational database like oracle or something like that so one of the things we needed to have happen in the in the data lake is we needed it to not be not be opinionated about the data that goes into it because we have like i said the primary schema and then the secondary and it's just to store those objects as one piece of content in mongo db is a lot simpler to just say here you go there's no maintenance on the database side other than keeping it up and adding users as necessary the schema itself is maintained by us externally and then in we we basically the drupal instance enforces the schema that we create so it takes out a layer so if we need to change something we don't have to go to another team to do it not again not that we can't do it ourselves but it just makes it we can pivot more quickly and we needed that for this proof of concept so that's one of the reasons another reason we chose mongo db scalability uh is another one in performance yeah so the question was if there was a search api related module for mongo db would we have used that instead of our homegrown solution yeah i don't think that there was anything for a back end um to index and to mongo db so yeah that's why this was created for sure um i don't know if it's something that could be additionally added to the mongo db module itself or if it just makes more sense for it to be this standalone project and becoming a contra module instead of a sandbox yeah yeah and really the only reason there well there are two reasons one we needed the back end but the second one was to give us an event we could we could subscribe to to apply the schema in the first place um there are some things i mean you can do this with the if your schema is flat then you can use search api to do it because search api will let you you know you can do standard mapping through the ui just like you normally do a search api but we had some we had some uh i really didn't want drupal to leak out into my data at all and we all know that drupal tends to leave bits and pieces of itself all over the place uh with uh i mean drupal seven right like language none zero value situations so uh those kinds of i wanted the data to be i wanted if someone looked at our data i wanted them to have no idea where it came from i wanted them to be like that's that data looks great to me and and not have to know anything about drupal to access it so i was i was opinionated about how the information got in so that was one reason um but i i wanted to be able to have full control over because i didn't know how people would use it like april's project i didn't know how she was going to use the schema so i basically was as i was trying to be as unopinionated about that schema as possible when i created the module yeah any other questions do you mean internally contrived modules or yeah so the question is how do we manage our internal contrived modules that's probably another whole session um we do have a satis server um yeah again jason smith is here we probably know more about these details but we're adding we add basically a repository in our composer and we're pulling those packages in similar to a drupal country module it's just it knows where to find our modules you know and then i have a process where we create a tag for the module and it creates the package and it adds the version information just like drupal does um yeah thank you to our digital acceleration team at red hat for those fun technologies to make things easier customer portal they are sharing so the the he asked if the if the sites were sharing the same module we're using uh an internal indexing module that is similar so it's you know the learning path modules built on top of that to say okay this is how i'm indexing using this module here's my schema and all of that and how the learning path stuff is going to use that index process but really the index module is the mongo db module that you shared right yeah it's this one yeah yeah and the the examples that are in here are actually uh i took some of it like i said i took the red hat isms out of it but the example event event subscriber that's in this module is pulled from the one that i made so if you look at it you'll see the primary data the secondary data that kind of stuff in there it also allows you to do things like our graph ql team didn't like the idea that because search api is really geared towards solar most of the time so it requires all of your keys like your your object keys to be lowercase and we wanted them to be camel case for just because we wanted that so when you're doing your schema like like mapping and stuff like that on the back end you can actually you can do that and tell it to be to be camel case and do some pre-processing that's actually how i get the locales information in for translations because the way drupal stores it right is a single node but if you're indexing it was search api it'll index them as individual records but we wanted them to be one record so we actually have one record and then we have a locales key like a property in there and anything that's translated goes under there so that's how we that's how we architected it but we needed it that way so that's what we did and that's that's actually in there too i left the locales mapping i'm pretty sure i left it in there so if people wanted to do translation they could yeah yes translation for for what we're doing here so the question was to be trans have we thought about translating our application to allow for other locales other languages and this supports out of the box whatever you tell it to do so if you want your properties to be in french your properties will be in french if you want your primary drupal well basically whatever your primary language is on on your site is what your scheme is primary languages so you have full customizable control over how that data goes in so for us our locales or our languages we support on the customer portal are english as primary but we also have korean japanese and chinese and uh and we're actually considering adding french actually yes and uh but that doesn't mean you can't flip flop that and make french your primary and make english your secondary you could absolutely do that yeah mm-hmm so the question was i'll do it this time okay you can take a rest uh the the question was are we considering using this data lake for all for everything or is it just for customer facing and i think for now we're starting with public information because it makes it easier to protect the privacy concerns that we talked about uh we are talking about an access layer to protect like who's allowed to access what um but that's still in process and we didn't want to delay the development to get that in place so we started off with public information um and it's it's the classic thing of you can tell someone hey we're thinking of doing this and they're like that sounds great come back to me when you've done it um which now we have so we're actually getting a lot of people that are interested in it because we actually have proof of concept between april with her uh presentation with the learning paths is a completely separate and different implementation than mine but they're both using the same same concept and both of us have been getting lots of people saying hey i want to learn about that we're like hey you should go listen to this presentation we did but yeah so that that's what we're starting with i have a i have a feeling it'll expand over time but uh we just wanted to get a proof of concept out the door and then build upon it i'm looking at jason smith does red hat hat the question was does red hat have other data lakes we have other types of data like repositories they're for different purposes um and i would say that they were probably considered to be closed and should stay closed for the use case that they're they're made for this is specifically engineered for public information and specifically engineered to unify our public facing sites so that's why we made this one yeah and we are at time so i want to make sure i honor your time we are absolutely here for questions if you guys have more but otherwise enjoy your hookah thank you for coming thank you


This is going to be linguistics at work. This is going to be your overview for a wide variety of careers in linguistics beyond academia. I'm Alex Johnston. I'm director of the masters in language and communication program in the Department of Linguistics at Georgetown University. Before that, I worked in nonprofit organizations and as a solo entrepreneur and as a talent developer for corporate clients. What we're going to do today, I'll let my co-presenter introduce herself in just a second, but I just want to let you know that what we're going to do is to provide you with a lot of information. Maybe it'll be overwhelming. Maybe there'll be a lot of new and different position titles and different pathways and new things. However, this is just an overview. We're going to connect the information we present today to sessions that you can attend throughout this entire month of events. We'll be calling out different sessions that will expand different parts of this overview. I think if you go back to this presentation, you'll realize how it connects to events that you will be able to take part in later. Again, just a reminder to everyone who joins, please mute yourself. I'll let my co-presenter Emily Pace introduce herself now. Thank you, Alex.  I am currently the principal linguist at a company called Expert System USA that provides natural language processing products and solutions to federal government customers. I have a master's degree in theoretical linguistics and I have been involved with the Linguistics Beyond Academia group as a co-convener for a couple of years now and before that was involved with the group in a more casual capacity. I'm really happy to be here with all of you today and to see the interest that we've gotten in LCL. Alex, back over to you. Great. Thank you, Emily. So let's go to our first slide. Let's get into this. All right. I think you've heard this before. When you say you're a linguist, what do people respond? Next slide, Emily. Something familiar to all of us. How many languages do you speak? There you go. Yes. The same as that. How many languages do you speak? No. That is not what we do. And yet that is so often the first response when people learn that we're linguists. So next slide. What we're going to be talking about is how linguists have a translation problem and nobody really knows what we do. We are different things to different people and we can provide different types of value to different types of employers. So here's just a smattering of what many people think linguists do. Next. And we have to figure out, based on our audience, how can we connect with that employer, how can we connect and let people know what we do, how we can provide value, how we can solve problems in the workplace. So we're going to address some of that translation issue for you today and throughout the month of these events. So what we'll explore now and later is where linguists actually work. And this is going to be based on real data that we've collected. You'll hear about the data that we've collected on linguists in sectors outside of academia throughout business, nonprofit, tech, and beyond. And in addition to that, during our month of events, we are going to present a career management method for life. Yes, this is going to be something that you can take with you during this month and well beyond. So, and we're going to blow the lead right here. This is the lead. And this is your method that we are going to expand upon throughout our career management tracks. Number one, when you need to discover yourself, your skills, your values, interests, and what you really like to do. And we're going to provide some tools for you to do that to make explicit to you and to others what you are skilled in, what you value and what you like to do. And then we're going to try and find that fit. We'll give you steps, next steps to take to find that fit in the workplace. Next, step two, we are going to research where the jobs are. And through our career management track, we're going to show you how to do that research. A lot of that involves talking with people, interacting with people, networking with people, we're going to make that fun. We're going to show you the value of doing that. And then finally, we're going to show you how to tailor your documents to specific jobs every single time, tailor your documents, tailor your resume, and then apply to those jobs. That's what we cover. And that's something that is cyclical. You can repeat that throughout the course of your life whenever you find yourself in transition. So I know I'm presenting this as a really quick overview, but these are the basic steps that you can take as a linguist or however you identify in order to find your next step in your career journey. So we're going to give you that career management lens, which will change your outlook. Next please. It's not, there we go. Okay. It got stuck. So Alex mentioned that what we are going to be telling you about today was some actual data that we've collected. Back in the summer of 2019, so approximately an entire lifetime ago, we did an initial career linguist survey run by the Linguistics Beyond Academia Special Interest Group and distributed throughout some of our personal networks as well as our SIG Facebook page to try to get a sense of what were people with linguistics degrees doing. And, you know, a couple of caveats about this survey. So we, this was our first time doing something like this. So we had a good number of responses for our first distribution over a pretty wide time range. So we even got some future career linguists into that set of responses. And, you know, a couple of other notes about this, we did not necessarily circulated it as widely as we could have. We did not do extensive user testing with it. So this is just a snapshot of one part of the career linguist community. So we will be highlighting a few things that we found as part of this survey, but we hope you will see this as a starting point for what linguists can do with their degrees, not an exhaustive list of what linguists have to do with their degrees. And, you know, a range of people who have linguistics degrees at various levels, as well as non-linguistics degrees. We do have this survey data publicly available for anybody who's interested in checking it out. I will post, I don't have the link handy right now, but I can share that link in Slack later. And by the way, if you haven't joined us on Slack yet, you totally should. There's going to be a lot of great discussion and resources that will be shared there. And so what I want to do is focus on, sorry, I'm trying to move to the next slide and it's stuck. There we go. On some of the places that you'll find linguists and specifically looking at some of the first job titles that we collected in this specific survey, which again was kind of a limited set. And you can see there's a lot of different titles here, but what I want to focus on are some of the variation that you might see when you're looking for job titles. And again, don't worry too much about everything that's on, you know, this slide will be retouching on these themes throughout LCL. We will make these slides publicly available as well. So you can see that if you just look for something like communications or linguists or speech, that is a small subset of the job titles that people have as their first job after getting their linguistics degree. And what you can take away from this are other job titles to look for and the range of jobs that people can do with their linguistics degrees, some of which will clearly be related to linguistics based on the job title. So something like, you know, an NLP engineer or cross-cultural communications. But we find a lot of linguists who are employed in broad sectors, even going beyond what some might consider to be in linguists, you know, in linguistics. That's not a viewpoint that we take. We see linguistics training as incredibly valuable and incredibly applicable to so many different sectors. So even even these positions that might not seem on face to be related. And Emily, if I could break in. Sure. When we look for keywords in job aggregators to look for announcements for positions in linguistics, we search for linguist. Linguist means different things to different people. So if you're searching for linguist in the government, in the federal government, that's going to mean somebody who is multilingual, somebody who speaks English and an additional language and uses that knowledge in primarily in translation and other means. Linguist means something different in NLP companies and in other types of organizations and industry. So we find across the job sectors that linguist is used with different shades of meaning. So you need to know how it's being used by a particular company and for a particular position. And we can also see that so many as these positions are so generic sounding, right? You see a lot of program coordinator, manager, project associate associate coordinator, manager, all of those different levels of advancement within those tracks in a certain organization that don't tell you anything about what you're going to do, right? So those are titles that you may not think apply to linguists and yet they will link up with a job announcement that will probably or potentially describe a project you might be coordinating that absolutely makes use of your skills as a linguist, perhaps as a sociolinguist, someone who understands how human interaction and conversation. So we're bringing this up now to let you know that you won't be finding jobs by keyword that will access all of the different types of positions that you may be very well suited for. This is again something that we're going to expand on in our career management track as we talk about ways to find jobs within those big aggregators like Indeed and like Idealist which is a job site for nonprofit organizations and higher end organizations. Thanks Emily. And to add to what Alex said about the career management track, I also want to highlight our career panel track because that is a great opportunity to hear from different linguists who will have job titles different from these who work in specific industries and who will be a good resource for answering some of those questions about what does a linguist mean in your industry or your company as well as you know figuring out the space of job titles in that sector. So just to highlight that as a another programming resource that will be coming your way. I'm going to just go quickly over these these next two slides. This is just a snapshot again of this particular career survey that we did to show the variation in the level of degree that people have but please don't walk away from this thinking that if you have a bachelor's degree in linguistics you can't work in non-profit or for an NGO. That is not what this data means. Again this was a very small subset of what people with linguistics degrees do. And you can see the same type of thing when you look at current industries, a wide wide variety of sectors that that people take their linguistics degrees to and that's actually what we're going to unpack in the next section here to start with a little bit about the private sector. Yeah and okay so we have two columns here. On the left we have areas where linguists can and do work. So I'm acquainted with linguists, some of whom have graduated from my program at Georgetown and some of whom are part of all of our personal networks who work in these areas. And then on the right I just have a list of some job titles associated with these areas. And again what you're going to see is that the titles maybe they do include language like language strategist or strategist and linguist but other titles will have far far different keywords associated with them. You may not think that a market researcher might include someone who has training in linguistics but that can be the case. And you can find market researchers doing that type of work across different sectors. You can find them in for-profit and non-for-profit organizations. And just a reminder as we go through here, non-profit organizations are a particular type of tax status. For-profit companies and organizations can definitely be mission driven, can definitely have values that align with yours. So as we think about some of the roadblocks we might have about what organizations might be a good fit for us we can think let's try to keep open minds about different types of organizations and not close off to for-profit organizations. It just takes research to figure out if it's a good fit. And if I could add one thing here Alex about some of these areas. So what we have listed here may look like these are totally distinct areas but they might not be. So for instance healthcare market research is going to be a smaller sub-sector of both healthcare and market research. So that's just something to keep in mind about all of these different areas that we're highlighting. These are not necessarily standalone industries they can combine in in different ways. And I want to add one thing if I may. I'll turn my video on so people can see who's talking. In these areas this is really just a short list and by the end of the four weeks it'll be extending really long. Absolutely this is just a small subset and you'll learn a lot more. So for fear this is restricted at all. Moving into other areas of the private sector consulting training and development human resources talent development and retention in these areas again this is a small subset of some types of careers and titles that you'll find in the private sector. This is a these areas can be associated with job titles such as corporate talent, developer and manager, human resources, diversity, equity and inclusion specialists. In fact tomorrow when we have our first career panel you'll be hearing from one of these human resources specialists who is a DEI consultant, diversity, equity and inclusion consultant who has created her own company. That is Suzanne Wertheim who will be presenting on the career panels, linguists in unexpected places. So join us tomorrow for that panel. Just want to draw your attention also curriculum designer and instructional designer. Hey there's me this is what I used to do I was in corporate talent development and that is from the website of the business that I worked with that provided professional development training to corporate clients in the agricultural, biotechnology and financial services space. So yeah as a linguist I worked in those spaces training executives and managers in relationship management in intercultural perspectives as you see here and in many other custom tailored curricula that I designed and delivered. And there are a number of private organizations that employ linguists just putting that in quotes as a shorthand for what we what we all know and love as people in our linguistics community but they're often called something else as we've noticed. So these companies listed right here these organizations some large some small very well known names in here like Booz Allen Hamilton and Mitre which are government contractors. Ogilvy which is a health care organization. Comcast yes, Comcast employs linguists and you're going to hear from representatives from some of these organizations. Every single one of these organizations have employees several linguists that I personally know and who are known to us in our LCL organizing staff circle and who will soon be part of your professional circles. So again please use this time with us to reach out to some of those linguists who we know over LinkedIn and through messaging so that you can start to get to know linguists in those circles and expand your professional network because that is going to be key to learning about what they actually do at Booz Allen Hamilton at Mitre at Comcast and figuring out wow you know what they do day to day that sounds like what I know how to do from my training in academia they're just using different words for it and part of talking with people about what they do is learning those words it's part of that translation issue it's figuring out how to call what we do in academia say a playback analysis with a recorded sociolinguistic interviewer a semi-structured interview calling that focus grouping so we're going to learn about those different words we can use in different sectors nonprofits so again nonprofits non-exhausted list of ways that you can work with nonprofit organizations and what those job titles might be so we have research translation and communication yeah that's a thing that's a way to be what we call a ling calmer someone who engages in linguistic communication if you were available in April and heard on social media about Gretchen McCulloch's first ling ling ling com conference a conference for people who communicate about linguistics you would have heard about this type of area where people work yes ling com that's what many people in academia make a living doing now is translating linguistic research to general audiences so that it's accessible to people who don't have the specialized jargon that we use within the field that is a growing area and we'll be hearing about people who work in that area later on in our program we have many graduates from Georgetown University who work in these nonprofit organizations so these are just a sample these are just people that I know personally to let you know that yes linguists can work as as ling commerce as a client facing communicators who help other nonprofit organizations craft their brand messaging craft their mission and craft their messages to their stakeholders for example with frameworks institute we have linguists who work in journalism you'll be hearing from one of them later Alexandra Boti who has worked at NPR at PRI and who has a new job in podcasting which is a growing area for linguists as you as you well know we'll be linking out to a number of podcasts and we're happy to have a podcaster here with us as well and also the Center for Applied Linguistics is a way that you can find people who are turning research into application to reach out and help people immigrants refugees and people in K-12 education people who teach languages and we will be hearing from Francesca then uh to Silvio later on from Cal in our applied research panel so stay tuned for that next turn over to Emily yeah so I'm going to pick up here to tell you a little bit about the public sector which means the government at the federal level the state level and the local level that could be city or county level government as well and you know when we talk about jobs outside of academia we sometimes use the cover word of industry which also can sometimes signal to people that we mean something like tech but we're we're generally trying to use that that term in a broader way and one of the the areas for employment for linguists that's in that that alt-axe space and that presents a ton of opportunity as much opportunity as exists in the private sector is the government so you know I know people who for instance have might have very or relatively similar job titles job descriptions things that they work on skills and knowledge that they bring to the role but one person works in the private sector and one person works in the public sector so what we have listed here on on this slide are just a few areas within the government uh where again we know people who personally work so on things like language assessment or training in the intelligence and defense space but this is again by no means an exhaustive list of what people can do in in the government I know somebody with a bachelor's degree in linguistics who works in auditing for the for the who works for the federal government doing auditing not necessarily something that you might think of as a career in linguistics but she you know relies on her linguistics training her linguistics training to do communication in her job and and so again you know a lot of people might think that it's it's sort of just you know just specific organizations in the government that hire linguists and this is where it's worth underlining again that what in particular the federal government means when they say linguist is very different from what the private sector means or what we mean when we talk about linguists so linguists in a in a federal context would be somebody who is a speaker of another language who has been tasked with something like translation or or doing intelligence analysis in that specific language that can be a great job for a linguist if you are also a speaker of another language but that does make it complicated if you're looking for jobs you know so us usa jobs for anybody not familiar with it is the website for federal government employment thank you alex you posted the link in zoom and um when when you are looking for jobs on that website if you are looking for you know uh not the federal government's meaning of linguists you're going to be using some of those different job titles because if you search for linguists that's all you'll get um and i see somebody's made a comment in the chat as well but public sector mostly hires us citizens that is certainly correct um and particularly for federal government agencies in the defense and intelligence space here we're talking about federal jobs that would only hire us citizens but there will be different opportunities at the state level and the local level so that's also part of what we you know what we're trying to get across with this message that government sounds like one big monolithic entity but it definitely is not in terms of the job opportunities are available that are available and we will be actually having a government specific session on i believe thursday july 22nd we haven't quite finalized it yet so it might not appear on the calendar but we should be hearing there from someone who works for a uh a federal contractor from someone who works directly for the federal government and for someone who works for the washington metropolitan area transit authority which for those of you outside the dc area runs public transit in dc maryland and virginia and is a place where you might not have thought a linguist could have a role um but they certainly can so i just want to like highlight can i highlight can i highlight three more uh sessions yes please this is because you do have several sessions focused on government so let's talk about absolutely absolutely and it's a great uh first entry point for many people so you will hear from jenny reddish r e d ish and uh i think next week middle of the week wednesday she's going to talk about uh writing for the web and there are so many ways to take her book and her ideas and put them into use in all sectors jenny has a long experience in relating to government agencies uh second one is uh that i'm aware of a woman named um i'm just i'm losing her name i can say her name sit harrell sit harrell yes c y d is her first name h a r r e l l and she has written a short book which she may make available to us as a e book about civic tech and don't be turned off by the word tech because when you're working in a tech environment you have to call yourselves by the names that the people in that environment will recognize as authentic and authoritative and so uh i definitely recommend hearing what she has to say and i think she's picked out a few skills that many of you have but may not recognize as a hireable skill and the third person i'm thinking of is dana chisnell c h i s n e l l she's just getting her approvals to be able to talk to us and this is her second time working for the u s digital service which is a federal agency that was started during the obama administration and so dana was there during that administration and has come back now with the new administration and she calls herself a general problem solver and she'll talk to us a bunch about one of the problems she's trying to solve now having to do with what are the rules and regulations that the law demands that we do to provide for language access for speakers of other than English language but also how do we provide accessibility for people who may not be literate in their first or second language so lots of things to be interested in there and don't worry if they call it civic tech it's also linguistics so um and one more panel actually to highlight is a panel that alex already mentioned which is the applied research panel so that panel is going to feature one linguist who works at who does research at a nonprofit one linguist who works in the public sector and one linguist who works in the private sector so that will be another panel to check out as well for those of you who are interested in honestly any of the areas that we've talked about here today if you're interested in research and I just want to make one final comment here we've I'm not going to to read out this slide but this is a an example of one thing that you can do if you're interested in finding your way into the federal government particularly again into the intelligence and defense side is to start off doing something like contract rating or contract testing for the fbi this sort of contracting route either through something like this or through working with for a defense contractor like mitre or rand or or booze allen are ways to get started on that government path to get a security clearance and then to transfer or move directly into the public sector and I do want to add one thing here about obtaining a clearance which is that if you are in a state where marijuana is legal you should know that it is not legal at the federal level and it is a disqualifying feature for getting a security clearance so just take note of that things that are legal at the state level but not legal at the federal level are problematic for obtaining a clearance if that is a route that you may want to go and we're getting we're getting close to the end here so I do want to go ahead and and move on to talk about tech a little bit and we have tech here in quotes because tech is enormous and varied you can do technical work at an organization that is not explicitly a technical company you can do non-technical work at organizations that are tech companies so your big tech companies like amazon apple google have people who work there who are not technical because they have a lot of things that need to get done and we are certainly at this moment in time you know at a place where most companies these days have to be tech companies to some degree just because of how the the world works and so what we've listed here are a a huge number of of areas and again this is even just a limited list within within the broader tech sector of of different types of work that people can do some of which are technical in nature so doing things like working on human language technology or natural language processing and understanding are probably going to require some technical skills but there are other areas like user experience and localization and ontology sometimes also called taxonomy sometimes called knowledge management which is just all about sorting sorting and organizing information so we we're going to have several sessions and I'll probably miss some of them but I will mention a few specific ones and then Alex and Nancy can chime in as they remember others so this Thursday July 8th we are going to have a session on human language technology jobs in industry so that'll be a bit of an overview of what what are different titles mean and how technical are they we will have a session how to on July 12th about working in human language technology natural language processing and data science in terms of the types of technical skills that you need to do that I do want to stress that that is not a session to teach you those skills but that is a session to identify what skills do you need to do what type of job in specific companies so that'll be a start for that we are having an nlp panel that will be so natural language processing panel that will be on July 22nd we will have a user experience panel that I think is on July 15th is that right Nancy I think so um we will have I think probably some other panels but we have a lot so we want to help me out if there's more to add to the list well we'll be sending out those daily emails with these types of positions marked for you and we'll also be inviting the linguists who present on these panels to join us in mixers so you'll have a chance to interact directly and actually two more one more panel to flag we are doing an education technology panel as well which is a subset of tech and when Alex mentioned you know working in the private sector but having a mission focus ed tech is one place where you might find that because of course it is focused on on education and then as Alex said keep an eye out for the for the daily emails where we will be highlighting all of these different types of events but the big takeaway here is that working in tech does not necessarily mean that you need to learn how to program it is all going to depend on what is the company that you're at what are the different roles that they have and and you know what value can can you bring there and the answer is a lot of course um and here just to highlight a few companies um so of course you see some of the the the big tech ones here um amazon apple google um we also know linguists who work at at sales force um expert system usa that's my employer i lead a team of what we call knowledge engineers they are not they are all linguists by training but that's not the job title that we use for them because they work on problems of linguistics they work on problems of natural language processing they do not have training in computational linguistics which is a whole other thing about tech that we'll talk about as we go through the program um and but they also do work in things like ontology and taxonomy development so that's why we use this alternate job title and i also want to make a note here um about appen so appen is a a um an employer that provides language data so they hire a lot of contractors to do various types of work around language data things like annotating that language data um in order to provide it to other companies who need that for the products that they're building and that can be a great way to you know get some industry experience on a relatively flexible schedule but it's also important to note about contracting that it does not uh it is not necessarily a path to a full-time job either with the your employer as a contractor or the company that you are providing ultimately providing services for and this is really important in tech because a lot of tech companies rely on contractors to provide various types of information and you are often limited in how you can present that work on your resume so if you for instance are contracted by um through a deco to provide services to google you cannot list google on your resume you have to list a deco by google on your resume because a deco is your actual employer and so for more information about this you know the contracting and consulting space can be a a great place but it's important to understand what that means for you as a as a worker and we are having a panel about that um i believe in the third week of the program we will have a a or maybe the second week it'll be on the schedule um but we are having a program specific to consulting and contracting where linguists who currently do that type of work will be able to talk about their experience and and answer all of those sort of thorny questions about consulting and contracting all right so now what are you feeling overwhelmed it's okay if you are good it it'll all start to make sense this is kind of meant to be an overwhelming dump of information because i really have confidence that over the course of this month some of the terms we've been using and some of the companies and organizations and people that we've been you know name dropping here will become known to you you'll at the end of the conference i have a feeling that there will be people in these organizations that you will be connected with and that you'll have an idea of what they actually do day to day and maybe that you could do that thing too and you know rest assured we're covering all areas of linguistics this is a really big tent program so it's not going to be overly focused on one area of linguistics we have organizations and people coming who represent the the qualitative research methods that some of us are more familiar with so yeah like as an interactional sociolinguist i'll be pointing out those people and making sure that if you you share that background in discourse analysis and an intercultural communication and interaction i'll point out those people that you should connect with as well in those panels so graphic here research develop apply we are going to be going through that throughout our career management sessions and that's something that you'll be doing throughout your life researching developing your documents and applying for jobs you'll be at different stages at different points in your life so moving on to how we're going to do that we're going to talk throughout our career management sessions on how to turn your CV into a resume turning your bullet points and your narratives into what we call star stories we're going to flesh that out for you we're going to assist you in making a linkedin profile so if you don't have one you can get that up start connecting with people in this program and enlarging your professional network that is going to be key to connecting with people outside of academia this is a social professional platform that not many people in academia really use a lot but outside of academia it's going to be your key to connecting with people guaranteed and we'll give you examples of how you can reach out to people on linkedin if you're not comfortable with doing that we'll walk you through that process as part of that that's going to be part of your networking part of enlarging your professional network so we're going to talk about how to build and manage relationships with people who can link you to other people other jobs and other opportunities that's going to be part of the work of this month we're going to mention that it might be a good idea to think about creating a portfolio an online digital portfolio that can showcase some of your projects yes your academic projects but presented in a way that are accessible to people outside of academia that are accessible to to anyone especially employers who may ask to see a portfolio when you're going through the hiring process again don't worry about this now we will flesh out later we're going to talk about how to research these job lists and aggregators that we've thrown out today what kind of keywords may be useful for you to use in your search we're going to talk about how to target specific organizations which you'll need to monitor for their career pages and their social media and we'll have a session on analyzing job announcements for the keywords that you should adopt you should learn as if you're learning another variety of language in order to be able to connect with the hiring managers and employers who wrote that job announcement we have to learn to speak their languages and their varieties in order to show them what we can do for them and we're going to talk about how to tailor your tailor your resume to apply to those jobs so no worries Emily next slide you know every organization needs a language they just don't know it yet and it's our job to tell them and show them what we can do and convince them sometimes absolutely and I just want to point out this is one of my students who uses this quote and I just latch onto it and use it all the time even because it is so true and we have the data to prove that to you and we have the methods so that you can use it to show your value as a linguist and show how you can differentiate yourself position yourself really well for jobs that fit you outside of academia if you choose to follow that route again we are agnostic about your choice of career we just want to give you the information that you might need the tools you might need should you choose to explore these careers outside of academia so you're well positioned as you take your next steps in your career journey this is how you connect with us you know how to get in touch let's open up to any questions and before we start answering questions I I also just want to reinforce what we've said which is that you may have a question that occurs to you later about some of these and as we indicated there are going to be so many sessions that will be great places to continue to ask your questions we have provided you with a bit a bit of a teaser for a lot of the things we'll be talking about over the course of the month let's stop sharing we've added our audience and if any of you feel like you want to unmute or you Rachel if you've seen some questions that have occurred in the chat that we can address just just feel free we really appreciate this audience here today I believe in wait time and while we're waiting for questions to arise let me add build on what you said Emily and Alex and that is many times when you look at a job description it may have 10 or 15 items listed that they want you to have and I'm going to say to each of you don't be too negative with yourself if you only have five of those things it might still be worth exploring that job because you probably have five or 10 others that they forgot to ask for because they don't know what a linguist can bring so the the fact that people are writing job descriptions for people other than linguists isn't our fault yet but the fact that we're not responding to those job postings is our fault go ahead and brave it yes Alex don't be your own gay peep keeper exactly yes and that question about salary you know what we have a we have a session for that that's going to be our answer for almost anything I hope we have a session with Daniel Moglen coming later on I think it's week three rest assured we'll let you know it's going to be about preparing for that first job interview and there's going to be a bit of mock interviewing there there's we're going to go over different types of questions and help you know how you should structure your answers hint it has to do with these star stories and we'll be talking about money let it let's talk and be transparent about money because that we need to do that to let one another know what we can ask for what is out there and how we can research those salaries so we're best positioned to negotiate when we go through that hiring process so yes we will talk money absolutely and there's going to be a session about other kinds of compensation so all of you who have no professors know that professors get a salary and certain benefits if they're full-time people like health care and perhaps retirement account contributions and so on but you don't get a signing bonus by being a faculty member and you don't get stock options and there are a whole bunch of other kinds of compensation that you might want to ask for in private industry and so you should know what you're what we say what money you're leaving on the table if you don't ask for those things and so during the I think the last full day of the meeting the Thursday of the last week the 29th is that we're going to have somebody come in who has been an HR person a human resources person and helped a lot of new graduates figure out what their compensation opportunities are that's my daughter leveraging all of our personal networks here to pull off linguistics career launch yes and I want to draw your attention our program assistant Rachel Lurch is going to drop our link to the session valuation in the chat send that to everybody please Rachel and to get to another question isn't it oh by the way our short name of our program which is what is asked for in our survey is what's called opportunities all right opportunities that's the short name that you'll enter in the session evaluation that Rachel is sending out to all of us right now so we had a we had a couple of other questions in the chat that I think we can knock out how common is it for people to have a lot of the job attributes the answer to that will depend a lot on the organization and the position you know larger organizations that can draw from a bigger talent pool are likely to have applicants who you know do have a lot of those those job requirements that doesn't mean that you shouldn't still apply because again like Nancy said you might be bringing something that they hadn't thought of that is valuable for them but for smaller companies you know where they have a smaller talent pool that they draw from and I am a hiring manager at a smaller company we sometimes get job applications from people who do not meet necessarily have necessarily a lot of the requirements that doesn't disqualify them from the position that's exactly what I would expect when I post a job so again it can just vary a lot based on the company and the role and timing and many different things and let's see we have another question here about remote job opportunities this is actually an interesting question we do not have a specific session about remote opportunities but this is a question that I would encourage you to ask throughout panels and over the course of the program because there are for instance a lot of most consulting and contracting jobs are going to be remote or certainly a lot of them will you know depending on what exactly they need and then of course post pandemic a lot of companies are reevaluating their requirements for people to be in the office so this this is a really good question about remote jobs and again we'll just depend on the company and it's something I would encourage you to ask throughout the program you know recognize too that we're still in flux as we are in various stages of this pandemic and different organizations are managing remote and in office work differently so that is going to be something to check in with different organizations about and to see how they're planning ahead and and know that this is very much in flux so go ahead oh I was I was just going to say I saw I saw one question because we're getting to the end of our time and we should stop how do we find out who will be at office hours look in your launch manual in the section about office hours there is a link to the roster that is going to tell you who will be at office hours and you should continue to check that we are updating both that and the mixer roster as we go through the program and then we'll take this one last question that we have about infer can I go ahead with this question yeah I love that question okay I was wondering how will there be information on how we can compete with those who majored in the field we want to go into e.g. marketing course development non-profit Alex you were so excited to answer tell us I know this question the straight the short answer is you can compete in fact your linguistics training gives you an edge in so many of these fields trust me and also look at the data we will be featuring linguists like alexandra bowtie who not bowtie for the transcription um who is working as a journalist based on her masters in language and communication aka of socio-linguistics from Georgetown and she will let you know straight up that her linguistics training was what set her apart and what has helped her throughout her career in journalism the same with marketing we have many linguists who work in marketing and linguistics training knowledge of human interaction how conversation works that is something that differentiates them and gives them an edge in positioning so themselves for that job rest assured we're going to cover that you don't necessarily have to have that degree name to be able to work in those job types of jobs you just have to know how to talk about your skills and talk about what you can do for that employer what problems you can solve and what you bring to them so that's part of this this you know learning the language of the people you're interacting with in those organizations to tell them how you can be of value so it's we're going to cover that and please keep bringing that question up that's something you can always ask panelists and we'll we'll find that will be a theme running through our months together together