1 Million Younglings (January 29, 2011)
Apparently here in the UK there are 1 million people between the age of 17 and 25 not in work or full-time education. Can you imagine the waste? 1 million people not developing and realising the promise of their future? Before I was a teenager I determined that I'd work for IBM when I left school. We'd often drive by Hursley Park near Winchester when I was a kid and I'd say to myself "I'll work there one day". I didn't know what happened the other side of *that sign*, I didn't know there were 2,000 people that worked there. I didn't know they were developing colour screens and disk drives. We're talking late 70's / early 80's.
School, College, Uni…
The point is this, I left school (1979) in an era when the only thing to do for a kid with a slew of 'O' Levels was to go to college and then on to university. But being a self-willed kind of person I told my careers adviser I was going to work for IBM! "Yeah right!" came the reply. Well any way, I did, I spent my first 4 years of employment at IBM. This was partly a function of determination (a story I'll tell another time) and mainly a function of era. A function of an older generation looking at a youngster and thinking: "let's knock him into shape". I cannot remember the guy's name that hired me, he was a kindly old gent, told me I was a rubbish communicator but not to worry, they'd teach me. That was a different era. An era where the older generation were benevolent, they cared, they handed down experience without counting the cost.
It's different now
Young people here in the UK leave school having been processed by a system that treats them collectively as a set of numerical possibilities, that could reflect well on their endless need for statistical improvement. I resent this system. My youngest son is 15 and the pressure he's under to do well is extreme. Why? Because the school he attends wants to maintain its statistical high-ground, their focus is on their needs, not the needs of their students. I resent the damage being done to my son.
No wonder we have a generation of disaffected youngsters. They're the result of a league-table oriented sausage machine. A system that pressures our children for better results than the preceding year for the sake of collective reputation, an ideal held superior to the needs of individual students. In addition, some young people have unrealistic expectations. They've been entertained by machines, difficulties in games are overcome with cheats or codes, boredom has been smoothed away by gadgets. Moving to the work place is going to be a shock: entitlement thinking simply won't work, new behaviours have to be learnt and quickly!
Who gets the best jobs?
Not necessarily those that went to Eaton or even those with degrees. You'll get a job in IT if you're highly motivated, determined to learn even if it means learning by trial-and-error and learning from books. I say this because schools and universities do not invest at a pace that means they're bang up-to-date. You can out-strip them and be useful to potential employers if you have a mindset that says "I can learn without being taught!"
Who gets the best employees?
Employers that choose wisely. Schools, colleges and universities cannot teach experience, drive or ambition. That's our job. As employers we have the responsibility to do two things:
1. Shoulder the responsibility of employing and training young people
2. Choose our trainees wisely
Senior managers focus exclusively on this years profits — and shaping a trainee amounts to a distant ideal that doesn't fit with any contemporary management instruments such as return on investment. We owe young people the opportunity of work and this has to be a conscious decision. We owe young people the opportunity to become the best employees.
PS: On reflection, IBM wasn't my first job. I worked with my Dad from a very young age, mixing reconstituted stone in buckets for the production of garden ornaments and then working on building sites as I got a bit older. Well before being a teenager I used to start diesel concrete mixers, carry 112lb bags of cement and work anywhere from deep trenches to rooftops. I can't think of a better way to inherit a *can do* attitude and thank my parents for putting aside safety concerns in the name of learning.
Related post: http://xjg.co/gerhRi
