In our emerging economy,
learning how to do something, like carpentry, may have more value than going to
a university for four expensive years.
EXPERT OPINION BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V
AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS @HOWARDTULLMAN1
OCT 15, 2024
Want your kids to still love you when
they’re in their 30s, when they’ve started work at a real job, busted their
butts for a few years, maybe had a child or two of their own, and hopefully
come to appreciate how hard you had to work – at whatever you did – to provide
them with viable options and serious opportunities for a strong and secure
future?
If so, then now’s a great time to do
your offspring a real favor, wherever they are on the education and employment
treadmill. Tell them that, for the next decade or so, the smart money is
on vocational training, OJT and concrete careers rather than investing four or
more years on college and grad school followed by a fruitless search for
employment in areas of the economy that are disappearing. Today, I’d rather be
a longshoreman than a lawyer, a builder rather than a banker and, for sure, a
plumber rather than a political science major.
The ugly alternative for millions of
students whose parents, like so many lemmings, followed the traditional route
and fumbled their kids’ future, is to condemn them after college to a few years
of wishful thinking, lots of numbing networking, go-nowhere gigs, and endless
pleading emails to family and friends. All of that accompanied by a
challenging clump of college debt that will likely be an
albatross around their necks for decades. In addition to the unavoidable loan
repayment load, these graduates suffer from the deluded and misleading
indoctrination offered by the faculties of most colleges and universities. These
Ph.D. fantasy factories do a miserable job of setting realistic expectations
and goals for their graduates.
A-range grades at Harvard and Yale
represent almost 80% of all grades “earned” by students at these two schools.
You might ask yourself how those participation awards compare with the typical
distribution of team members’ performances in your company and how this kind of
“everyone’s a star and a winner” crap is helpful in preparing students
for the vagaries and vicissitudes of the working world. Inflated grading on a
curve doesn’t help anyone outside of these institutions although it keeps the
campers and their parents very happy.
The reason we’re seeing so many employers unhappy with the newest crop of
employees has a lot more to do with attitude problems, unreal expectations, and
accelerated entitlement than with actual aptitude. That’s because in the real
world of work, you learn a cruel lesson early on: that the amount of education
you allegedly need to get a job has risen much faster than the amount
of education you actually need to do a job.
DON’T FIGHT THE TREND
There are three main reasons for this
disparity:
First, the present job occupants don’t
want new, younger threats to their own positions, so they raise the bar,
expand the requirements, and effectively pull up the drawbridge. But much to
their dismay, the inbound tide is unstoppable. By 2025, there will be more Gen
Z’s in the workforce than boomers– and the Gen Z’s are coming for those very
jobs.
Second, there are fewer and fewer
available jobs in certain “soft skill” sectors like banking, finance, and
publishing, because the mid-level positions in every organization are being
compressed or eliminated. So, the competition for scarcer slots is fiercer than
ever and the paper credentials required are more substantial, even though they
may have little bearing on the candidate’s actual ability to do the job in
question. In the long haul, preparation, perspiration and passion ultimately
win out over diplomas from even the fanciest schools.
The third reason is the growth and
expansion of disruptive technologies, which are changing the work requirements
in many of these fields. There’s no doubt that automation, robotics and AI are
job killers, but the nasty little secret is that the expected devastation is
highly targeted and primarily aimed at middle management, administrators,
editors, and bean counters.
WHERE THE JOBS ARE
But the good news is that the
front-line folks — the ones who need to deal with and deliver the goods and
services to the ultimate customers, the ones who work with their hands and
their heads — will always have secure positions. This is true across the board,
whether it’s construction, maintenance, early education, nursing and elder
care, or anything in hospitality and retail. You’re always going to need a meat
sack at the end of the production line if you care at all about customer
satisfaction and results.
Columnist George Will says that
we don’t have enough trained workers to build our
nuclear subs and those vessels are the most formidable tools we have to defend
our shores and discourage our enemies on multiple fronts. We’re going to need
millions of new team members to support our most fundamental industries and they’re
not going to be coming exclusively from traditional colleges and universities.
I’m increasingly convinced that
vocational education, industry apprenticeships, and union labor may save our
kids as well as our ships. We all learn by doing, not just by watching or
listening. It’s a “put up or shut up” world today. When you’re working side-by-side
with others who’ve been there and done it, the ongoing “education” isn’t
limited to specific physical skills; you learn a lot about cooperation,
connection, community and work ethic. Unlike college, it’s never just about
you.
The bottom line: I’d rather be a
welder than a writer, a mechanic not a mathematician, and a nurse rather than a
naturalist.