All Hands on Tech

3The Citizen Journey

Every citizen is unique in some respects, but there are patterns in how they develop their technical capabilities and apply them to their jobs and organizations. Even if the specific details vary a bit, it’s useful to understand their journeys to facilitate more people becoming citizens. By “journey” we mean not only how they became citizen users of technology but also what it means for their long-term careers.

We’ll first discuss the typical progression of citizen activity over time and then discuss the longer-term career implications of citizen activities. For the former discussion we are indebted to Alan Jacobson at Alteryx—until recently the chief data and analytic officer at that vendor and previously director of global analytics at Ford Motor, where he led a citizen development effort that eventually included more than 12,000 people.

Diverse Journeys

While we describe some typical paths that citizens take in becoming more technology-oriented, it’s important to make clear that citizens come from diverse backgrounds and go into diverse citizen-oriented roles. They also inhabit diverse geographies. For example, the Microsoft Power Apps webpage has a section entitled “Six people who changed careers with low-code from Power Apps.” Without endorsing that particular technology, we found the diversity of backgrounds and roles quite fascinating. They include the following:

• A senior audiologist in Australia who became a low-code developer analyst for her ...