THE MOST SUCCESSFUL output we can cultivate in third level is to graduate a select number of growth hackers. No more than one in every ten of our graduates from LIT-Clonmel achieve this standing.
I watch for students who can think in terms of "impact" and "scalability" in everything they do. They respect "sustainability" but are more focused on meshing their coding skills with a marketing vision and in the process, influencing the marketing vision with a clear pathway for company or sales growth.
Our growth hackers have an entrepreneurial drive (perhaps being too willing to accept risk) linked to a burning desire to make things work. They have creative solutions to problems that have not yet appeared on company roadmaps. They can build on solutions shared in code libraries that they visit and they can take snippets they find in mailing lists, discussion boards, and IRC chats and leverage those snippets through a disciplined process of prioritizing ideas.
We have several project modules where we want to see our creative multimedia students testing ideas, analysing things that break, and sharing their decision on why certain things were kept as part of a final portfolio piece. We know that our growth hackers graduate with an innate ability to repeat this development process in the real world and that they will refine this skillset while producing scalable, repeatable ways to grow in whatever business they work.
That's James Hogan in the photo accompanying this blog post, a certified growth hacker from Tipperary Institute, with a hand-on appreciation of GitHub. There are 20 growth hackers on LinkedIn, most involved in digital strategy or people with a strong presence in community coding projects like Sourceforge.
