Welcome back to the Interline podcast. I have a fun show lined up for you today. One that connects a lot of different dots, especially if you’re part of the digital product creation (or DPC) community. If you’ve followed us for the last few years, you’ll have seen our DPC reports that come out at the end of each calendar year, just ahead of the holidays. There’s another one of those on its way this December.
Those annual reports are the most visible manifestation of what’s really a year-round interest in how 3D design, simulation and visualisation is influencing the way fashion conceives, develops, collaborates on the construction of, and tells the stories of, its products. You might also have seen our report on Real-Time 3D, which came out this September in partnership with Epic Games, the teams behind Unreal Engine, MetaHuman, Twinmotion and of course Fortnite.
Now, the part that’s less visible is the amount of time I’ve personally spent researching, thinking about, and writing about 3D. And that runs the full 15-16 years I’ve been doing this. And it goes from an initial deep dive report way more than a decade ago to hosting the CLO Summit in Munich a month or so prior to recording this episode. But as long as I’ve been in the DPC orbit, there are plenty of people out there with deeper wells of expertise and both specialist and cross-functional experience in really implementing 3D initiatives for major brands and then documenting their learnings afterwards.
Today’s guest, Christian L. Harris, is one of those. He’s a multi-hyphenate designer, garment engineer, software professional, and a big figure in the DPC community. You’ll have seen his name attached to industry events, educational programs, and a whole lot more.
Bizarrely, Christian and I had never actually spoken prior to this episode – strange given how often our work has crossed over, but something I was happy to have the chance to address. You’re going to hear me chat to Christian about the next generation of hybrid talent and fashion. You’re going to hear us talk about where modern technology projects start, how to define digital product creation in its current form and future scale, what automation means, what’s happening with AI and a lot more.
The transcript below has been lightly edited.
Christian L. Harris, welcome to the Interline Podcast.
Hello, hello. Thank you guys for having me. So excited to do this.
We’re thrilled to have you. Let’s start with some background. So you’ve had a lot of different roles across the spectrum in fashion. I think it’s fair to say both creative and technical. How did that base of experience lead you to where you’ve dedicated such a significant amount of time to 3D and digital product creation? How much of where you landed today was based on what you consciously chose to focus on versus maybe where your career path organically took you? The DPC community is so tight-knit and there are so many people with such different trajectories where they landed in it. I want to know what yours is.
First, it never really occurred to me that being creative and technical were two different things. The apparel industry is great, especially post globalisation, and I’m not anti-globalisation, but it did cause some changes. And I think one of those is definitely that roles got more bucketed out to where you have designers and technical designers and then this whole different network. But some of the designers who’ve really done the most for our craft of garment making and design were people who were both technical and creative. It wasn’t like they were just these unicorns, it was just how they created and I am deeply in love with both sides of that. But is it something that I did intentionally? No.
I’ve always just been someone who followed what I was interested in and in life the paths have just opened for me to do that. I was working in New York making very high-end evening gowns in one place and working on another high-end womenswear label in another building, and I was doing an internship during the day at Marchesa. And then at night and on the weekends I was working for a brand called Azede Jean-Pierre. Because I really wanted that experience of working in a high-end label that had great visibility at that point in time. So I just sort of made it work.
I was doing that when I got a little earworm about a job at Gerber Technology because they had just launched a 3D tool. And that is really how my career in 3D started. And I was excited about it because there were so many things that I was working on in New York that would benefit from better ways of communication and more digital tools, because the high end industry in New York is still very analog with lots of paper patterns still being passed around. There are definitely digital components, but digital is not as well integrated as it is in other parts of the business.
So I saw so many opportunities for it and being an advocate for this industry, I’ve always wanted to say like, let’s connect the dots. Let’s bring in and use technology where it makes sense so that you don’t have 20 interns sitting in the back room cutting out thousands of organza petals. We can go right over to an innovation center and have a cutter knock this out for us.
I think the organic side of that is interesting. I suspect a lot of people who are either in education right now, or who are just getting into the industry, they’re maybe facing that sort of consideration between the creative and the technical or that kind of organic blend of the two. But maybe it’s happening in reverse to what you just described.
Up until pretty recently, I think going with the flow and fashion skills development and employability means or has meant focusing on traditional core disciplines – patternmaking, merchandising, or so on. And if you chose to focus on a tech-enabled or tech adjacent skill path, that would have been bucking the trend. That would have been doing things differently. And the odds were that you probably would have needed to build up those hybrid skills either outside of an institutional education, or on your own time.
Today, it feels like digital has become such a focus for employers and for education that the prevailing wind is blowing the next generation of key talent towards tech and innovation roles first, with the reason being, that maybe a better grounding in technology means a more future-proof career path because the traditional skills exist somewhere else or they’re becoming prime targets for automation. How do you think about this for individuals, people who are going through their own career paths and trajectories? How do you think about that blend between traditional skills, digital skills, and how you acquire them and grow them as an individual?
For individuals to figure out, this is going to be tricky because a big part of that is really how much time are you really prepared to commit to your career journey and what your best life looks like for you. I am a careerist and I can say that I’ve just been so determined and dedicated to what I’m doing. It’s genuinely the only thing that I am consistently interested in.
Okay, so I have always double tracked my learning and all of that naturally because I was interested in it and every time I find a new tool that can help me do something better, more efficiently, I’m always excited to at least explore it. But that has come with a serious time commitment. So step one for individuals when you’re trying to figure out this balance is also to take into consideration what your best life looks like and how you’re going to use your work to support you having that joy and excitement – because it’s not for everyone to just be at every conference or reading all of the interesting things. Some people are more interested in reading fiction or something like that. For me, if I’m reading a book, it’s probably something fashion related and that’s just who I am, but that’s also me living my best life.
So how do I see that blend in education? The industry is a bit of a mess right now. A lot of the interest in tech, I think, is because it’s the next thing to point to, and it’s what gets people excited. They’re excited when they see a body scanner and garments being made from that body scanner. But those foundational skills are still very important because at the end of the day, today at least, we’re still making physical product. And yes, a lot of that skill exists somewhere else, like with our factory partners and things in different parts of the world. But there’s still a need for it. And there are still so many things about our digital tools that are only made better when you understand the physical product and how to create that physical product, how to bring it to life.
Because then it also puts you in a great position to be able to ask the right questions when you’re dealing with tech companies, tech partners, or solution providers. When you’re trying to get over the next hurdle for your DPC journey or whatever your integrated creation process looks like, you can do that so much better when you have that blend and that mix of talent and understanding. Also, just on the tech side, I’m a major advocate for the solution providers, those creating 2D, 3D tools, AI. Employing all of those things, you need to have people who are really passionate about the physical product and understanding how it comes together. Because consistently what I found is when you give the engineers creating the code, the tools to understand the industry they’re serving, they stop and say, gosh, we wish we knew this when we started building these tools. But people often just take that part for granted and don’t think that your engineer needs to understand the complexities of how warp and weft can respond to gravity differently. But it makes a big difference in the tools and the outcome of what they’re creating.
Yeah, I think that’s going to become more evident as we talk a little bit about it later on. But I think as we observe the way that AI does or doesn’t make its way into particular areas of fashion, into particular disciplines, you’ll find that core expertise, garment construction knowledge, material knowledge, and so on is suddenly in higher demand than it has been and maybe than people would expect. Put it this way: having and acquiring that kind of traditional knowledge, or what you might term traditional knowledge, still seems like a fairly safe bet for people who are either in education or relatively new in their careers, building up that base of understanding of not just what technology is in isolation, but how it relates specifically to the task at hand, which is making real things.
Absolutely, 100%. And it’s not a fork in the road. They’re two parallel roads that, at certain times, need to support each other. We need both, and there is space in the industry for both. I am always a fan of seeing people who are very tech interested and understand that space well coming into apparel spaces and vice versa. But we need to do that with empathy and understanding. And, unfortunately, between tech and fashion or apparel, there’s this divide where people just don’t quite have the tools to understand one another. So it’s not the easiest avenue for someone who’s deeply interested in computer science to understand garment making because of the sort of patina that we have placed over fashion where what people outside of our industry recognise is the magazines, or the runway garments that don’t quite make sense that they would never see walking down the street. So sometimes we just don’t have that respect for one another.
But what I find is when you all come into the space and recognise the equal engineering talent it takes on both sides (because garment making is engineering. Engineering for bodies that are different every time and materials that are different every time). And it’s complicated. And the more you sort of explain and help people on the tech side understand where garment making connects with engineering, the better results we get for everyone. So we need to work together better, but we also need to approach it with a little bit more empathy and understanding.
What do you think that means for the brands, retailers, suppliers, the companies that are either hiring new talent, forging partnerships with tech partners, service companies, and so on, or deciding how and where to upskill or reprioritize existing teams? Because it’s one thing to say, here’s the next generation of talent, and that level of hybridisation and understanding is what the industry needs from them. It’s another to say, well, we have this big reservoir of existing expertise on both sides, you know, on the technology side of things, in the traditional garment skills side of things. For the companies doing this, how do you think about them growing those skills in the right way that doesn’t create that fork in the road where you say, you will go and become a technology professional, you will remain a fashion professional and the twain shan’t meet? How do we get to where upskilling is a matter of taking the whole industry forward on that parallel track?
Well, I think for the past, we’ve seen the results of our industry not making education, learning, design, thinking, iterative design and exploration a priority. It’s biting us in the rear end again and again, because we sort of expect that those things will happen. Like, we’ll look for the best university right now and who’s teaching this. We’ll recruit from there.
But you have to create the talent that you want within your organization. You’re not gonna be able to just hire it from this resource or that resource or steal it from your competitor because what happens is you bring in all of these things, all of these different components and essentially it’s like having a kitchen full of ingredients but not having anyone there who knows what to do with them when you don’t have learning and discovery and education as a priority.
So if you don’t have a person, a team, initiatives that speak directly to learning and upskilling and that are stable and consistent. If you’re only relying on external resources to come in and train your people and really having education as a priority, not just something peripheral that we’ll do occasionally, you’re going to continue to fall behind and feel like, our people are not where they could be. And you will see that your talent will also have that feeling, they won’t really understand what’s going on, and they don’t know the most about what these tools can do and how to use them. So we need to shift that paradigm first and really have each brand dial in who they are as a company and then figure out how to educate against that so that they can start to build the talent that they want within that organization. So that even when they bring in the most talented person, you also want to be able to say, okay, we want your talent to be able to help us accelerate success in all of these areas, but we’ll sort of just leave that a mystery for them and won’t say, hey, here are the areas, here’s the why, here’s who this brand is, here’s who we are not.
So it gets to be really challenging and you’ll find that companies will get great talent in and then that great talent will be on the move again shortly thereafter because we’re not setting people up for success when we don’t make education a priority or learning a priority and collaborative learning.
Yeah. And I think one of the other ways that shows up is when we as an industry don’t give good people the agency to actually start to drive transformation. And that’s one of the key differences that I’ve observed, I think, in 15-16 years of analyzing technology for fashion in general, in 3D, digital product creation and beyond. And that’s a change in where projects begin and who the gatekeepers and the decision makers are.
Historically, tech projects would be driven by executive teams, and ideally they’d listen to input from department heads and subject matter experts, but ultimately you’d have top-level business strategy which would inform technology choices, and then the responsibility to use those tools to deliver against the strategic objectives would cascade down. Nowadays, in an ideal scenario, it feels more like tech initiatives are worked upwards in a grassroots way with passionate heads of departments and champions, people who are listening to the real needs of their talent, mapping those to technology and then taking business cases upwards to the top. Does that mirror your experience with 3D or are you seeing more of that but then the change doesn’t happen and those great people then move on somewhere else?
Across the industry there are several examples of it going well and several examples of it not going well. And I think your assessment there, yes, I have seen so many initiatives now that are being led from grassroots up. And a part of that is because these new exciting things happen. You have these self-starters and people who are excited within a company to adopt certain tools, those people who are also careerists and are just keen to stay up-to-date on what’s going on because their work is also their hobby. So those people will start fires there and just as fires do in any scenario, they make us uncomfortable, right? But we have some leaders at the top level who see those fires and they get uncomfortable and that moves them to action. And they’re like, okay, here’s what we’re going to do. Here’s how we’re going to mobilize around this great new opportunity for energy. And then you have leaders who become uncomfortable and their instant thought is to squash it because they are still stuck in a very waterfall mentality where we need to bring those innovations or the new technology needs to start at the top and work its way down. So I’ve seen several examples of both.
I think some of the most well-used 3D tools today are a great example of that bottom up work because they went out into the industry and really developed a grassroots user base that then created this pool of talent for bigger companies to go in and hire versus 15 years ago, we had a more enterprise software sort of approach to how companies use advanced digital tools like 3D because 3D has been around for a while.
Until the past seven or eight years, we never really had a grassroots base of users. Like the scrappy kids in school, the people from outside of the apparel industry who find this new tool and realise they like building digital garments. That was different.
So I think that is also inside a lot of the companies which is fueling some of the bottom up nature of how digital has been driven more recently.
I think that’s a really good answer. When we talk about designing digital garments, we have our own working definition here at the interline of what constitutes digital product creation and how that term differs from the general term 3D, but more specifically how it differs from “digital fashion”.
I’d like to get your take on what you think the DPC acronym actually covers. Because it’s one thing for us to sit up here in our ivory tower and say this means this and this means that. For somebody on the ground like you, what does digital product creation really cover?
I see digital product creation as leading to that physical product, whereas digital fashion or 3D, the intention doesn’t always need to be to create a physical product. So that for me is how I interpret it. And then there are lots of ways to include digital, and I look at it as having a toolbox and I don’t always need my wrench and maybe 3D is my wrench. I don’t always need my screwdriver, maybe that’s the 2D. But you want that whole toolkit and you want them to be good tools, right? And you want to know how to use them. So I see it that way.
So then digital product creation could be that this garment never made it into 3D, but from 2D to the schematics for prints, all of those components, we have made the best use of digital tools in our road toward creating that physical product, right? It doesn’t make sense to use every digital tool. So in my mind, it’s not like this static thing where you have to have a first proto that is digital or anything like that for it to be considered digital product creation. But, did you make the best use of the digital tools available in your journey to create physical product? That’s how I see digital product creation, but that’s just my definition.
Well, as luck would have it, it aligns well with ours. Digital fashion, for us, is a separate category of kind of expression and idea that does not need to be anchored in a producible garment. So the same kind of thing there. And 3D is part of the wider ecosystem of tools and processes and workflows and innovations that are all targeted at streamlining the creation of physical goods. That’s the essence of it. I think we’re using slightly different terminology, but we’re fundamentally expressing the same thing.
I really like your analogy that digital product creation does not need to encompass the use of absolutely everything. There is no single pipeline where you would say, I have developed this, I have people working this way, I have all the tools lined up into a toolkit that I now apply across the board to every conceivable scenario. But what you say is that working collectively, the industry, the technology vendors and service providers who serve it, codified around best practices and tools and are consistently iterating on those in a way that gets you to where you can bring your wrench out when you need it, and you know it’s going to make the maximum contribution it can to whatever it means to you to streamline the creation of a physical product. Whether that’s doing it faster, doing it cheaper, doing it with fewer sample iterations, creating better content around it. However you measure those outcomes, it’s saying, do I have the right things in my arsenal to improve those outcomes?
Absolutely. We really need to be prepared for our toolkit as well to continue to change. We live in a world now, for people my age – coming up on 40 – and older, we grew up in a world and space where technology was a lot slower. I think we all sort of remember when we started to switch from VCRs to DVDs and things like that. But now the technology and the tools that we’re using are changing so quickly that we need to be prepared for that change as well. And thinking of the different digital tools that you are prone to use as a toolbox and that you don’t have to force every solution at a time is smart because it also gives you the opportunity to start to integrate new tools. Like, I’m going to try this out, in this isolated example before we decide that it needs to be a part of our end-to-end workflow for everything that we’re creating. That just doesn’t make sense in every scenario or every business. And that’s also one of the ways to really spark a rebellion against whatever tools you’ve selected when you’re requiring people to start to use tools that don’t really make sense in their workflow. So we really just need to be careful with that and not feel like we’re doing digital ‘wrong’ because we’re not using all of the digital tools the way they have been built for us.
Yeah – to be driven by use cases rather than driven by the ubiquity and the availability of technology. I am on the wrong side of 40, so I’ve got you beat there. Not that that much changes. So thinking about everything we just talked about, it seems like every time I’m in a position – which I’m privileged enough to be in a bunch of –
to talk to industry at events etc. the near universal ambition is to scale digital product creation. But what that actually means in practice, it’s pretty variable person to person business to business, right? It might be ubiquitous digital assets for content creation, storytelling and marketing. It might be majority or all in digital prototyping for a particular collection for a particular product category. It might be full collaboration with vendors based on digital representations of the products. It might be fabric digitisation at massive scale. It could be onboarding, empowering patternmakers and garment techs with tools. There’s a lot of different ways to slice what scaling digital product creation means. In your personal opinion, what does it mean to scale DPC from here?
That’s an interesting question and it is one of those things that I think we don’t discuss or speak to enough. So I really appreciate, in this platform, you asking that question. What does it mean to scale DPC? But I continually have to go back in my brain to the why. Why are you trying to scale digital within your organisation? What are the outcomes that you’re hoping to see? What problems are you looking to solve? Because all of the things that you mentioned – that counts in my mind as scaling digital product creation. If we’re thinking through that toolkit, you have a better supply of wrenches. You have wrenches that don’t require you to come off of the bolt and then readjust and get back on to turn it some more, right? You have some ratchet action going on. All of those things equal scaling, but we need to understand why.
For example, one of the big buzz things of 10 years ago was digital for fit, digital for fit, digital for fit. And what we find is, especially at that point I was working on the tech side, people were trying to use 3D to solve problems that are not 3D problems. For example, if you don’t know how to fix a fit issue in the physical world, seeing it in 3D is not going to help you fix it. So if you’re trying to scale digital because you want to reduce fit issues, then scaling digital isn’t the solution for that. So you can scale digital and still not be successful at your goal.
So I would always go back to, are you trying to scale digital? What do you hope to gain from it? Are you just doing it because it’s the cool thing to do and it’s something that’s going to make this leader’s five-year plan really sing to the leaders that they have to present to? Why are you doing it? And if you can’t answer that question, then let’s start there. And then once you figure out what your why is within your organization, then scaling DPC is whatever you want it to be. And you get to define your own success that way.
I am happy to see people using 2D tools better, as archaic as some people feel like our legacy 2D tools are. You put me in front of a CAD system from 10 years ago and I am in a happy spot, let me tell you. So using those tools better is still a win in digital product creation because there’s a lot of rich feature functionality there that can help you do things. I have a friend right here in Portland who does amazing things using software that’s coming up on 20 years old. He’s like, I can do everything that I need to do with this tool. And that is also the experience of a lot of factory partners around the world where they have invested in tech people who can keep their Windows XP systems running so that their old software still works because they’re fully automated using those tools.
If using 2D tools or whatever digital tools work within your business model and for your product, and you find better ways to use those and scale it up, to me, that’s a DPC win.
I will say, as somebody who’s 43, Windows XP still feels pretty fresh to me. So that’s something that comes with age as well.
Ben, we need to have coffee sometime.
There you go. Next time I’m in Portland. So I suspect the answer to this one’s going to be broadly similar to the previous one, but I’m going to ask it anyway. Outside of scale, another key word on every kind of DPC team or leads’ lips is automation. We’ll get to the AI part of that in just a second. But outside of that, which parts of the DPC workflow are the most ready to be automated from your point of view? Or again, is this very idiosyncratic? Is this very much a use case driven business-by-business consideration?
Well, of course, it’s definitely business-by-business, but the parts of the business that are the most ripe for automation are the ones that have been the most standardised. That’s how automation has thrived in technology for this long. One of the examples that I gave in another article that I was contributing to is: think about where we were with phone numbers. If you watch old movies, they’ll say, “connect me to Great Neck, 4985” or something like that. Eventually we say, we can, instead of just having those last few digits for each number, we can actually also add a number for the local area. And that got us to seven digits. And we also have an area code. So that’s our sort of 10 digit soup. And then eventually once you have all those numbers built in, now you can automate like nobody’s business. We don’t have switchboards and you know, all of what we needed before, but automation has always happened. The more we’ve been able to standardize things and have a mechanism to support and adhere to standards.
We try to standardise a whole lot in the apparel industry today, but standards are only as good as the system, the mechanism, and the organisations that are supporting it. Like, do your people know how to use and employ your standards for success? Yes? Great. Then you’re all set for automation in those areas. If your folks, the people working for you, your suppliers, your vendors, partners, whoever, if they’re unclear on your standards, your automations will automate you to a lot of unfavourable results. So start with what standard I have.
Yeah, I think that’s a good way to put it. I like that analogy. Thinking back to scale, then the other side of the scaling consideration is, I think the introspection that I know is going on with a lot of organizations at the moment, where they’re maybe asking themselves whether AI – generative AI specifically – is an opportunity to do the opposite. To downscale their 3D initiatives, or at the very least to reduce the overheads associated with them through a different kind of automation. I feel at the minute like it’s going to become pretty clear in the near future that there are spaces where 3D will thrive and spaces where generative AI is going to end up living, and they’re going to become more well-defined and well-delineated over time. But I’m keen to hear your thoughts because it feels to me like there’s a lot of circular conversations ahead happening in this weird, blurry, uncertain space in the middle where everyone feels like 3D and AI are crossing over and maybe cannibalising one another. But nobody quite wants to commit to figuring out which bits go where. How do you see this shaking out in the next couple of years?
Well, AI is the new baby in the household, right? And we have to help the older siblings in the family understand, okay, our family unit has changed. Here’s how we’re going to integrate it. And yeah, for right now, baby gets what baby wants because the baby is the loudest, right? That’s AI. People are excited about it. It’s the new member of our digital product creation toolkit. But what we saw with 3D is also kind of happening with AI. So with 3D, we saw that having these great digital tools doesn’t necessarily solve our problems if we don’t know what to do with them.
There are some people, organizations, spaces out there where 3D is being used in wonderful ways to do all of the things that people ever imagined it could do. But a lot of people, back to my earlier analogy, like if you don’t know how to solve your fit problem in 3D, in the physical world, you’re not going to be able to solve it in 3D either. AI can do similar things because it can present very realistic images. And they will continue to work on this. I have faith that these things will improve. But gen AI today can show me a very beautiful, very realistic looking garment that’s not possible. Not the way that it’s been created because at the end of the day, patterns in fabric do not give a hoot how beautiful the image that you’ve created of this possible garment are when you actually have to create a pattern for it. So in an example with one AI tool that I saw, they were showing different design iterations for a shirt. And they showed it with a set in sleeve, then with a raglan sleeve. But the drape of the sleeve stayed exactly the same. And me, as someone who’s pretty well versed with patternmaking, can tell you, is it somewhat possible? Yes, but not with the design lines presented in those images for the type of garment that they have.
There’s a lot of room for growth with AI. It’s shaking things up. But for me, the jury is still out on how disruptive it will be and how helpful it will be in communicating. Things are already pretty contentious between tech and apparel, but also just within apparel. Like we’ve sort of set up our armies of designers and technical designers, and they don’t always communicate well either because we’ve driven their parallel roads. We built a median between them and they’re just throwing prototypes across. But when you have a design team that has all this wonderful gen AI, but you don’t have that communication to really work back and forth and say, “okay, we see what you want. Here’s how we’re going to make that a real garment, but maybe it’s not going to look exactly like the AI for these reasons. Let’s talk through this. Let’s figure out how we can make it better.”
So I’m hoping the optimistic me, the daft and dewy, the dope with impossible hopes (that’s Rogers and Hammerstein), that version of me hopes that it will lead us to a better understanding of one another and better collaboration to really solve some of the issues for design and technical design using AI tools. But there’s still some room to grow before we really see a shakeup that’s gonna leave a lasting imprint, in my humble opinion.
I think that’s a good answer. And if we think back to our definition of digital product creation where we learned it today, and it was what is meaningfully contributing to streamlining the creation of real goods, to streamline the creation of physical products, feels like that’s a good decision-making matrix to judge AI’s contribution to, and a good lens to look at it through as well.
Yeah. I mean, hey, start with your why. Simon Sinek said it. Liker, the author of ‘The Toyota Way’, he said it. Find whys. Why, why, why until you know exactly where you’re starting from and what the issues are. And then the tools will take you into outer space. But if you don’t start there, you’re going to end up meandering. You remember how you just said, Ben, that it’s become a circular discussion? That’s how, because they’re circling around the why instead of getting to the core of it.
That sounds about right. So as we record this episode, it’s about the time of year where our team at the Interline is really digging into this year’s DPC, Digital Product Creation 3D Report, which is due out about year end. Without giving too much away, and also because so much of it’s still up in the air, if you could get us to cover one topic that you think isn’t being talked about enough or isn’t being discussed at the right level, what would it be?
I’m gonna sound like a broken record here. Education. Education within the companies, but also we need to be as an industry more supportive of our education partners at the university level. There needs to be better community. Opportunities for the students to: 1, see what is actually going on in the workplace; but 2, we have to remember that our educators – and we have so many great educators out there and they are generally well underpaid and their full-time job is to work with the students and to keep them on track – don’t all have the time, space or opportunities to stay up to date with what’s going on in industry.
But there’s no reason that we as people in industry can’t lend a hand there. We have to invest in and build up the next generation of talent because this industry is becoming more and more of a complex and even sometimes hostile environment. And a lot of the information that we need the next generation of folks to understand and be successful, we’re not talking about and we’re not sharing.
So if you could cover a topic or something that needs to be discussed, I would say not just focusing on the big name universities or the ones that have the most cache when it comes to integrating digital, but how do we as an industry and as a DPC community better support all of the talent? Because I have seen some of the most talented kids across the spectrum in the United States, especially whether I’ve seen wonderful talent coming out of New York, I’ve seen talent coming out of Iowa and Oklahoma as well. So, you know, we need to be more supportive of the whole community of educators and we can. They have conferences too. You know, we can attend their conferences and contribute their due. Even if every student can’t attend an internship or something like that, more of us can speak at the universities and introduce them to the things that are going on and find ways to help build up the next generation.
So that’s my shtick. Education.
Good. Well, you’ve set a high bar for us to hit. Let’s see if we manage it. I appreciate having a good target. Christian, it’s been awesome talking to you. I’m glad we were able to finally connect. I feel privileged to have these platforms, to have these kinds of conversations. It’s been wonderful having you on board and I hope we do get to have that coffee at some point in the future.
It’s a must, it’s a must.
All right, amazing. Thank you.
Thanks, Ben.