What Do You Do If They're New?
We are creating a generation of
highly-demanding if largely miseducated workers. Taking on this crew means
you'll have to change their attitudes about work before anything else. Or you
could let someone else do that first.
Executive director, Ed Kaplan Family Institute for Innovation and
Tech Entrepreneurship, Illinois Institute of Technology @tullman
By
and large, we're doing a pretty lousy job of preparing our college graduates
for the hard knocks and the harsh realities that they're going to face as they
leave school. Unfortunately, too much time and money is being spent by
employers remediating the fundamental deficiencies in basic reading, writing
and communication skills of many of these kids when they walk through the
doorway for their first grown-up job. Nor are we teaching them the "new collar"
skills and strategies that they're going to need to survive and
succeed in the future. They're going to require an entrepreneurial
mindset, critical curiosity, team-building talents, design and innovation
skills, a commitment to change and a bias toward action.
These
shortcomings are a much bigger problem for startups than they are for
established companies because, in a new venture, it's absolutely critical that
the newbies hit the ground running.
No one else really has the time to hold their hand. In a big business, it can
take quite a while before anyone figures out that you suck. That's one of
the reasons that I tell my portfolio companies to focus on hiring well-trained
people with a few years of actual experience-- especially for technical
positions-- rather than freshly-minted grads. And if you steal them from one of
the tech giants, that's even better because they will have a pretty impressive
base of knowledge and an appreciation for documentation and process rather than
seat-of-the-pants spaghetti code.
But
I'm actually even more worried about the attitudinal problems of the upcomers
than about their skills and aptitude. After all, you can teach a willing student
just about anything, but you can't rewire their heads if they're starting out
from the wrong place. We have to blame their parents just as much as their
professors for these problems. Nothing's
tougher today than the rocky transition from the cloistered and comfortable
world of college, and helicopter parents, to the real world and its
increasingly unforgiving working environment, where absolutely everything we
used to take for granted is going away or already gone.
When
everyone and everything is under pressure and in a hurry, there's less and less
time to demonstrate what you can do or could do if you were given the
opportunity and some realistic runway. But these days you rarely get a second
chance (or sometimes even half a chance) to make a first impression. It isn't
fair; it is a fact. There may be a shortage of terrific tech talent in some
areas, but there are also plenty of well-qualified people running right behind
you and competing for the best jobs. Smart employers, especially in rapidly-growing
companies, aren't interested in reasons, rhetoric or rationalizations; they're
simply looking for swift and sustainable results. You get paid for what you can
do, not what you allegedly know.
All
this talk about warm and wonderful work environments with the awesome perks is
great PR and a decent recruitment tool, but it doesn't mean a thing when the
rubber meets the road. There's no time to worry about "privilege and
politics" when you're being pounded by problems every day and management is
praying for a path to profitability. No one's telling these kids the facts
of life. Instead, the media insists on painting a rosy picture of how the world
just can't wait to suit their preferences and predilections and to happily
attend to their every need to be coddled and cajoled into doing us the great
favor of working for us. But that's only if the work is
an exciting experience, a worthwhile adventure, and chock full of plants,
pizzas and other pleasantries. And then only for a while.
As
a result of this misinformation blitz, there's a growing gap in the attitudes,
abilities and aspirations of our graduates as they set out to try to make their
way in a world of radical and constant change, accelerating automation, and
dramatically altered expectations. They're being primed for a world where
automation and new technologies are supposed to enable them to leapfrog over
all the dumb and boring jobs right into all the fun stuff. Since automation is
going to eliminate millions of entry level jobs, we all seem to think that this
is a good thing overall because those jobs are supposed to be menial, mindless
and redundant. Let the machines, bots and robots do those repetitive and rote
tasks (which they're actually better at than we are) so we can all be free to
do interesting, creative and stimulating new jobs. Sounds great. Sign me up.
But
the math doesn't work. To buy into this BS, you have to try your best to ignore
the clear numbers, which suggest that the overall compression/reduction in jobs
in some industries (retail, call centers, warehousing, manufacturing, trucking)
is going to be in the millions. We have no idea what all these people, with
very few transferable skills, are going to do for the remaining decades of
their working lives. Believe me, the gig economy isn't going to save them.
People working for peanuts isn't a solution to anything.
And
don't take any comfort from the fact that the first jobs to go are blue collar,
because the automation, A.I., and machine learning trends will eventually
extend into higher and higher skill levels and into the very areas where the
new grads aspire to work. We already have robo financial advisors,
tele-medicine bots, and machines that do a better, faster and more accurate job
reading x-rays than any radiologist. I keep hearing this talk about how the
jobs may go away, but the work remains and still needs to get done, but I don't
even understand what this means. The truth is that the few relatively low-level
jobs that remain ten years from now will be those that need to be done by
humans because they're too menial to waste expensive and intelligent robots on.
As
we eliminate all these entry level positions, the most critical loss is our
crucial ability to quickly graft onto our graduates all of the life lessons,
social skills, and values that you learn from doing all these crappy jobs in
the first place. There's still a great deal to be said for paying your dues.
It's not about what you're doing in these early days, it's all about how you go
about doing it that tells everyone else the story.
You
discover that every job is important and that each can be done with
professionalism and dignity. Filing and sorting isn't fun, but it teaches you
the importance of paying attention to the details and sweating the small stuff.
You meet and develop friendships and connections with "friends in low
places" and they will be assets and helpful to you for many years after.
You quickly learn that the doorman knows a lot more important information about
what really goes on in the place than many of the dorks who ignore him every
day or treat him like a doormat.
And,
maybe most of all, when you enter a culture with a serious work ethic and a
commitment to quality and caring, these strengths can quickly become your own
as well. You understand and appreciate that you're not entitled to anything
that you don't work for. That there are no shortcuts worth taking or tricks of
the trade to speed your journey to the top. And that, over time and with a lot
of practice and preparation (and after you've mastered the preferred way to do
things), if you're really lucky, you'll earn the right to do things your own
way.
You
can't learn this stuff by parachuting into the fifth floor and embarking on
some make-believe job like head evangelist, chief storyteller, culture curator
or head of heart. You learn it in the trenches along with the behavior boundaries,
the surmountable barriers and the guard rails which will help you to eventually
belong, believe and prosper.
Because,
at the end of the day, if you don't put the time and work into something,
you'll never appreciate what it's worth.