Category Archives: Personal

Here you find our best thinking on questions that apply to you as an individual, regardless of your career choices.

University, crops and separating the wheat from the chaff

1 Reply

“The literature clearly demonstrates that postsecondary graduates tend to fare better in terms of labour force participation, unemployment, and earnings than do people with less education.”

The Cumulative Earnings of Postsecondary Graduates Over 20 Years: Results by Field of Study
— Statistics Canada

“Gigs move the risk away from organizations and on to the individual. This is in stark contrast to the secure 9-to-5 corporate arrangement that workers demanded and received in the mid-20th century. The latter is becoming more and more of a spectre as cost-cutting, off-shoring and salary-pruning continue to erode economic security for the average person. It’s easy to argue that ‘developing one’s own brand’ is becoming more important as we move further into this new century.”

How The Gig Economy Is Reshaping Careers For The Next Generation
— Forbes, Feb. 15, 2019

If a family has second thoughts about the house it just bought, it can sell it, usually at a profit. If its new SUV turns out to be a lemon, it can be used as a trade on another one or sold at a modest loss. A university degree, on the other hand, can’t be sold. It can’t be returned for a refund and it does not guarantee an income.

It has to be worked the way farmers work their fields until the crop is harvested and a buyer found, and that assumes a favourable growing season and an equally favourable market. Graduates have no “crop” to sell until four years after they “plant” it at the earliest. If they plant the wrong “crop” and can’t sell it because of poor market conditions, they’ll have to settle for something less than work “in their chosen field”.

Borrowing money to finance an education can saddle a graduate with student debt for years. This is the point where you’ll want to research student debt in the U.S. and elsewhere, starting below.

There are 28,000 universities in the world. By 2025, enrollment in them will reach 262 million. Each of those students will be looking for a permanent, 40-hour-a-week job, benefits, a pension and the relationship that spawned them that was over 100 years in the making. It was supposed to have been carved in stone. But the C-Suite would rather hire technology and software than people.

That thinking will impact on up to 43% of all jobs, professions included. Many employers are hiring for the duration of specific projects only. When projects end, contractors leave. That’s what the gig economy and precarious employment look like. Parents I speak to say they’ve heard of neither and have no idea what they are. Universities do, and they’re resorting to similar tactics.

What will your strategy be for dealing with the state of the world’s economy and those 262 million students? Where will employers be shopping for the graduates they’ll need? How will the two groups relate to one another when your children enter the labour market once they graduate?

In 2012, as many as 300,000 graduates with one or more degrees experienced both. They were working as unpaid interns because they couldn’t find work in their chosen fields. They couldn’t find anyone who would pay for the education they were trying to sell. Unpaid internships have since been banned by law, but they persist. What’s on your child’s list of chosen fields? Why is it there?

I founded Personal Due Diligence (PDD) in 1976 so that my children would have a resource to help them understand what university education as a commodity looks like and how that would determine what the labour market would have in store for them before they made any commitments. See “What Jobs Are Affected By AI?” (Brookings Institution, Nov. 2019) and “The Ultimate Backup Drive” (Bloomberg Businessweek, Nov. 18, 2019).

In “The World-Shaking News That You’re Missing” (Nov. 26, 2019), Thomas L. Friedman wrote: “I still believe that the most open systems win — they get all the signals of change first, they attract the most high-I.Q. risk-takers/innovators and they enrich and are enriched by the most global flows of talent, ideas and capital.“

This is some of what you’ll find when you do due diligence on this subject:

Universities are paid to open the eyes of their graduates. Employers separate the wheat from the chaff based on what graduates look at and what they see that others don’t. If money’s no object, none of this matters. If it is, it does.

Personal Due Diligence sees things that others don’t. Bring us your questions and your concerns about what you just read and we’ll talk.

Sincerely,

F. Neil Morris
President
PERSONAL DUE DILIGENCE

info@personalduediligence.ca

Writing, reading and the lay of the land

1 Reply

“The greatest benefit of writing is that it provides the tool by which society can record information consistently and in greater detail, something that could not be achieved as well previously by spoken word. Writing allows societies to transmit information and to share knowledge.”

Wikipedia, History of Writing

In the 5000 years since mankind invented writing (somewhere between 3400 and 3300 BC), we’ve learned how to store, sift through and find patterns in the 2.5 quintillion bytes of new data we generate about ourselves every 24 hours. The World Economic Forum’s (WEF) most recent report How much data is generated each day? focused on three key areas: Mastering the Fourth Industrial Revolution, Solving the problems of the Global Commons, and Addressing global security issues.

Our children are going to inherit this planet, or one that will closely resemble it. The better we prepare them for the transition, the better the odds that they’ll experience job security, a good life and the means to continue feeding, clothing and sheltering themselves.

“As assumptions about growth models are overturned, the international balance of power continues to fray, and scientific and technological breakthroughs promise to transform economies and societies, the unique platform provided by the Forum helps leaders from all walks [of] life to prepare for exponentially disruptive change.”

World Economic Forum: How much data is generated each day?

The 7.7 billion of us on planet Earth are in the midst of unprecedented change. We’ve built our civilization based on higher education courtesy of the world’s 28,077 universities. Our children’s way of life will depend on how wisely they choose and apply that education, and that they bear in mind that its value will lie in the eye of the employer.

By 2025, enrollment in those universities will stand at 262 million. When they graduate, those students will discover redefined employee/employer relationships and academic credentials that will be more valued in certain circumstances than in others. This is already happening against a backdrop of a buyer’s market for knowledge and intellect.

These examples of what that world is up to were published between June 5th and June 7th, 2019. Each comes with its own set of upstream and downstream implications.

Bloomberg Businessweek’s The Wealth Detective Who Finds the Hidden Money of the Super Rich (May 23, 2019) is a different but revealing insight into the workings of that world. So is the 2019 FORTUNE 500 ranking of America’s biggest corporations.

We’re a stone’s throw from starting the process of settling the Moon and Mars (NASA and Wikipedia respectively). On Earth or off, our children will be shaping and living with the consequences. It’s why we’ll continue to send them to school. Their ability to earn a living will depend on it.

We’re not in Kansas anymore. It won’t be long before some of us add, ” … or on Earth, for that matter.”

Sincerely,

Neil Morris

Everything old is new again, but with a twist

Leave a reply

Twenty-five years ago, people in the know predicted that we would work at five different careers before we retired. They were short on specifics, but their model left no doubt that people would have to re-educate themselves to qualify for those new careers. They didn’t mention the part about bills to pay and mouths to feed.

The future they predicted is here, but with a twist. Twenty-five years ago, university was a lot more affordable than it is now. Incomes were more predictable and more secure. So were pensions.

The mounting cost of sending children to university is becoming more and more painful for more and more families. Which makes RBC Future Launch’s candor so refreshing and so necessary:

“Canada’s youth are set up to fail in the new economy. In fact, today’s generation is at risk of ending up poorer than their parents.1 Failing to close the gap in unemployment rates between Canadian youth and people of prime-working age would mean missing out on a nearly $30B lift to our economy.2 Young people deserve a chance, and that’s why we created Future Launch. If youth fail, we all fail.

 “In the coming decade, half of all jobs will be disrupted by technology and automation. Some will change dramatically. Others will disappear completely, replaced by jobs that are yet to be invented. We are living through an era of radical change, with the latest advancements in artificial intelligence and automation transforming the way we work, even in unexpected fields such as law and customer service.”

What RBC proposes is commendable. But its target market is university students and graduates who’ve already put their money down. Many of them may already have limited their employment and career options. They invested in a future relationship with an employer in a context called the labour market inside another context called an economy. They understood little or nothing about either.

What they chose to study was up to them. What the labour market and the economy will have to say about that will be up to someone else. We don’t teach our children that. RBC is proposing a cure to a problem that already exists. Kudos to them. But we need something concrete to prevent the problem in the first place. Personal Due Diligence is that something.

We’re told that the more graduates we produce, the more graduates we’re going to need. But parents and their children need to know where the jobs will be before their first tuition cheque comes due. Our governments are showing no signs of preparing lists with timetables of occupations that have been earmarked for disruption or obsolescence, let alone notes about how it’s going to happen and when. That’s something families will have to do on their own because once size does not fit all.

While we’re at it, we may want to pay special attention to what it’s costing financially, physically and emotionally to send our children there. ‘Hunger And Homelessness Are Widespread Among College Students, Study Finds’ is the title of a National Public Radio report about a survey done by Temple University in Philadelphia and the Wisconsin HOPE Lab in Madison.

We can’t hope our way to a solution. We have to build one. In an address on September 3, 2008, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani said, “Change is not a destination, just as hope is not a strategy.”

On January 23, 2009, CBS NEWS posted an open letter to President Barack Obama from Dr. Benjamin Ola Akande. Dr. Akande is an economist, scholar and Dean of the Business School at Webster University in St. Louis, Missouri. The title of his letter was ‘Hope Is Not A Strategy.’ You can find the full text by clicking here. This is an excerpt:

“Yet, the fact remains that hope will not reduce housing foreclosures. Hope does not stop a recession. Hope cannot create jobs. Hope will not prevent catastrophic failures of banks. Hope is not a strategy.”

Our youth must win so that we all can win. That’s why Personal Due Diligence exists.

Neil Morris
Founder & President
Personal Due Diligence

+1 905.273.9880
info@personalduediligence.ca

Three articles, our children, and food for thought

Leave a reply

 

A recent Bloomberg Businessweek article entitled, Is Your Job About To Disappear?: Quick Take, said this:

“Throughout much of the developed world, gainful employment is seen as almost a fundamental right. But what if, in the not-too-distant future, there won’t be enough jobs to go around? That’s what some economists think will happen as robots and artificial intelligence increasingly become capable of performing human tasks. Of course, past technological upheavals created more jobs than they destroyed. But some labor experts argue that this time could be different: Technology is replacing human brains as well as brawn.”

In his review of “The Golden Passport” in the April 10th New York Times, Andrew Ross Sorkin wrote, “The book is a richly reported indictment of the [Harvard Business School] as a leading reason that corporate America is disdained by much of the country … Citing a report from the Aspen Institute, [the book’s author Duff] McDonald explains that “when students enter business school, they believe that the purpose of a corporation is to produce goods and services for the benefit of society. When they graduate,” he continued, “they believe that it is to maximize shareholder value.”

The Real Threat of Artificial Intelligence appeared on the Opinion page of the New York Times Sunday Review dated June 24, 2017. It was written by Kai-Fu Lee, chairman and chief executive of Sinovation Ventures, a venture capital firm, and the president of its Artificial Intelligence Institute.

Clearly the debate is heating up. At some point, someone or a group of someones will decide the winner, if there is a winner. Others will hand down a verdict on whether or not the Harvard Business School should take the credit or the blame for how enthusiastically business has embraced technology.

Families about to engage with their children in discussions about post-secondary education might want to answer these questions: Will there be 40-hour-a-week jobs with benefits and retirement pensions? Where? What kinds of jobs will they be? What education will it take to qualify for them? It’s a start.

Riding madly off in all directions

Leave a reply

If there are days when it feels like the world is riding madly off in all directions, it probably is. Change is the culprit and it’s never happened this fast or in so many places at the same time. Nothing in our experience has equipped us to deal with it.

Parents who are sending their children to university in the current economic and technological climate expect that when their children graduate, the jobs they’ll be applying for will be as traditional and as plentiful as they were in their parents’ day. They may be in for a surprise.

Employment relationships aren’t what they used to be. Corporate tastes in university degrees have changed. We have to factor that into how we think about the role higher education is going to play in the life of our children and what their options are going to be. Change is a fact of life for real companies and organizations with real names. Our kids need to know which companies and organizations they are or are likely to be.

We also have to bear in mind that the cost of tuition has risen 40% in the last 10 years. That will continue. Over 50% of all jobs are now precarious. Over half of those jobs will be automated in the next 10 years. That, too, will continue.

The links in what follows will take you to articles and reports about the current environment and how it will impact on your young people and those of people you know. They feature GE’s Jeff Immelt (#4), MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson (#12), McGill’s Suzanne Fortier (#12) and Google’s Sergey Brin (#16), among others.

  1. September 1969 — The first node of ARPANET installed at UCLA
  2. August 12, 1981 — IBM introduces its first personal computer
  3. July 15, 2014 — “Apple and IBM Forge Global Partnership to Transform Enterprise Mobility”
  4. August 4, 2016 — LinkedIn interview with GE CEO Jeff Immelt: “Culture is not just apps. It’s a combination of people and technology. If you are joining the company in your 20s, unlike when I joined, you’re going to learn to code. It doesn’t matter whether you are in sales, finance or operations. You may not end up being a programmer, but you will know how to code. We are also changing the plumbing inside the company to connect everyone and make the culture change possible. This is existential and we’re committed to this.”
  5. September 2016 — Deloitte survey “Transitioning to the Future of Work and the Workplace, Embracing Digital Culture, Tools, and Approaches”
  6. October 22, 2016 — Finance Minister Bill Morneau offered this advice at a Liberal Party gathering in Niagara-On-The-Lake: “Get used to the ‘job churn’ of short-term employment and career changes.”
  7. December 17, 2016 — Morneau’s advisory council on economic growth predicts that: “Fully half of all jobs will be automated during the next decade, making massive retraining a social and economic necessity.”
  8. January 14, 2017 — “Innovation key to achieving Trudeau’s resourcefulness.’” In order to move Canada’s reputation away from resources to resourcefulness, PM must break the mould of linear thinking.
  9. January 12, 2017 — World Economic Forum report: “The jobless world and its discontents, How can we prepare for a future where drones, 3D printing and automation replace jobs?”
  10. January 14, 2017 — The Economist: “Lifelong learning, How to survive in the age of automation” (Cover story and Special Report)”
  11. January 16, 2017 — “As Robots Take Jobs, Europeans Mull Free Money for Al
  12. January 19, 2017 — Davos 2017 – Issue Briefing: Jobs and the Fourth Industrial Revolution
  13. February 2017 — Maclean’s print edition: “When robots steal your job”, The real driver behind re-shoring is automation. Robotic jobs, not human ones, are coming back.
  14. February 2017 — Automa-nation: Will robots take your job? A new report suggests 42% of the Canadian job market is at risk.
  15. January 17, 2017 — IBM THINK Blog, IBM Cognitive Principles
  16. January 19, 2017 — World Economic Forum, Davos 2017: Google’s Sergey Brin on AI

We’re told that we’re in the midst of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. We may not know how the story ends, be we do know that it will probably involve some form of advanced education. Our children have to be prepared.

 

 

Is this why we’re spending money on higher education for our children?

Leave a reply

Q: What do you want to be when you grow up?
A: Employed!

How are you going to explain that this isn’t your grandfather’s economy?

If deciding what university or community college or trade school your child is going to attend is starting to keep you up nights, you’ve probably visited more than a few of their websites. You’ve looked at the pictures of smiling faces, viewed the videos and read the inspirational language intended to convince you to spend your money, and, possibly, your child’s future, with the people on whose behalf those websites were created.

By now you’ve noticed that (a) you’ll have to do some digging to find any mention of tuition, fees and expenses because it would be in poor taste to publicize them on the home page; and (b) every one of those institutions is looking for a donation.

There are some who consider it gauche to have the words “money” and “university” in the same sentence. They would argue that higher education isn’t about money: it’s about introducing young minds to new ideas and new ways of looking at the world and themselves. It builds networks that include students who sit next to one another in lecture halls but live half a world away. Then there’s the benefit that comes from learning to fend for oneself away from home. This is the point where laundry and groceries enter into the discussion.

Those people would be right—to a point. But when the last glittering speck of that pixie dust that university websites magically create settles gently to the floor and the cool breeze of reality wafts through the room, the fact of the matter will be that nothing about attending an institution of higher learning is free. Once a child reaches the end of the taxpayer-funded, kindergarten/primary school/high school conveyor belt, decisions have to be made about the need for post-secondary education altogether. (P.S.: Taxpayer dollars pay for that, too.)

Even if his or her degree were paid for in full before the first day of lectures, the newly minted undergraduate or postgraduate is going to have to earn a living, especially if he or she is among the 40 million students south of the border who have US$1.2 trillion in student loans to repay, or the Canadians who owe between C$25 billion and C$50 billion. That money is going to have to come from somewhere. What about the cost of living? Will there be a new home or car to finance? Will there be enough money to pay the rent or buy food?

Finding work to pay for those things is the elephant in the room. Regardless of how many organizations the new graduate may have joined or voyages of self-discovery he or she may have gone on, if the résumé intended to support his or her application for that first full-time job is rejected by applicant tracking software for lack of key words and phrases, we have a problem. If the problem can be traced to a poorly executed résumé, the oversights can be corrected. But if the academic qualifications are wrong and creativity falls short of compensating for it, the only cure may be to spend 4 more years earning an education that will sell, but only after an in-depth reassessment of personal goals and what the economy needs.

As a country, we can’t afford scenarios like that because a mind is a terrible thing to waste (©UNCF). If you read or listen to nothing else today, please click on and ponder Robots Vs. The Middle Class (Bloomberg Businessweek, May 25 – May 31, 2015) and listen to Terry O’Reilly’s The Internet of (Marketing) Things (Under the Influence, CBC Radio One, Saturday, May 30, 2015). You’ll want to pay particular attention to O’Reilly’s thoughts about the Apple Watch.

How different is today’s economy from your grandfather’s economy? Well, did you ever doubt for a moment that your first job would be full-time with benefits? Are you doing now what you were planning to do then? Are you employed full-time? Have you been unemployed as a result of downsizing or outsourcing? Knowing what you know now, what would you do differently?

Would your grandfather recognize a world in which China is the world’s manufacturer, where 50% of working Canadians of all ages are not employed full-time, and where the price of post-secondary education is higher now than at any other time in history? What about a Canada where manufacturing has been decimated while employers continue to complain that they’re hard-pressed to find certain kinds of workers yet most of them refuse to train? What would he say about a Canada where $500 billion is sitting idle while vote getting corporate tax breaks underwritten by your tax dollars and mine go unused?

The North American work force is resolving itself into two camps: the one that recognizes that this isn’t your grandfather’s economy and is adjusting its expectations accordingly, and the one that doesn’t. One refuses to take career and labour market information at face value until they’ve confirmed it independently with multiple sources with their own eyes, not once but several times. The other doesn’t. One studies industries, market trends, the impact of technology and the performance of employers because they recognize that large numbers of dollars are at stake, not only the ones they’ll spend acquiring the necessary education, but the also the ones they risk not earning by failing to do their personal due diligence. The other doesn’t.

The economy is the financial air we breathe. We ignore it at our peril. Since 2001, I’ve met face-to-face with 2130 working people who, five minutes before I walked into the room, lost a job they thought wasn’t at risk. Most of them believed that where the world is going didn’t apply to them. They were mistaken.

F. Neil Morris
President & Founder
Personal Due Diligence
+1 (905) 273 9880

A riddle with a twist

Leave a reply

What costs $24,000 or more; takes 4 years to deliver; can’t be insured; has no cash surrender value; can’t be returned or exchanged; comes with no performance commitments and is covered by the two-word guarantee: caveat emptor?

An undergraduate degree.

Such is the mystique surrounding universities that otherwise perfectly rational human beings line up like lemmings to press hard-earned money into the palms of people who work in registrars’ and admissions offices. This in spite of media coverage of the plight of university graduates who’ve watched employers devalue and demean their diplomas and the four years of work that went into earning them by offering unpaid internships, short term employment contracts or permanent part-time engagements. No benefits, no stability, no prospects. The labour market in Canada and elsewhere is awash in undergraduates and post-graduates who are free to sell their services at whatever severely depressed prices the market dictates, or run the risk of earning next to nothing or nothing at all.

Employers are playing the game according to the rules of supply and demand in pursuit of profit and positive return on investment. The question is, by what rules are parents playing that we’ve arrived at this point? How much damage is inadequate decision making going to do to the financial future of our children and, quite possibly, the country, before we accept that we’re in a buyer’s market for certain kinds of education. The university degree is a commodity and it’s in oversupply in certain disciplines. Every new diploma in those disciplines that hits the street and has no takers drives down its own value and the value of diplomas like it.

Parents who choose to sleepwalk through these economic times when it comes to choosing post-secondary education are bringing about precisely the outcome they spent so much money trying to avoid. Absolute trust in the inevitability of work for all bearers of all university diplomas is out of place in 2015.

‘Management training: Keeping it on the company campus’ and ‘How to join the 1%’ are two articles from The Economist that show just how quickly some in the business community adapt to new ideas. And if those ideas don’t pan out, there are always new ones waiting in the wings.

I’m a firm believer in the need for healthy, affordable universities. My children and their spouses are now established undergraduates and post-graduates. Where else are the people we’re going to need to get on with the rest of our life going to come from if not from universities, community colleges and technical schools? I’m not just talking about medical and other professional people. I’m talking about people who’ll come up with better ideas than the ones we have now about climate change, air pollution, land use, R & D, manufacturing, natural resource extraction, inadequate transit and drought in key food-producing regions of the world, just to name a few.

Those temp jobs that always seemed to be there for anyone who needed a little spare cash every now and then have morphed into the new normal for 50% of working people of all ages, yourself included, dear reader. And not only in Canada.

Head-in-the-sand attitudes, not mass hypnosis, are responsible for the outbreak of PEV (precarious employment virus), aided and abetted by vote-buying tax breaks paid for with taxpayer dollars that were supposed to generate work for Canadians but instead have accumulated to the tune of over C$500 billion in dead money according to former Bank of Canada and now Bank of England governor Mark Carney:

“Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney has taken a rare swing at corporate Canada, accusing companies of sitting on huge piles of “dead money” that should be invested productively or returned to investors. ‘Statistics Canada numbers show Canadian non-financial corporations with a cash hoard of $526-billion at the end of the first quarter of 2012, an increase of 43 per cent since the recession ended in 2009.’”

Universities cater to the demands, not the needs, of the students who make up the bulk of their clientele. What students need is a strategy to deal with employers who won’t offer full-time employment. One way to deal with them is to not plan to work for them. Would you approve a mortgage or car loan for someone who can only find part-time work? Wouldn’t it be ironic if we reverted from being a cashless society to a cash-only society? As PEV continues to spread and economics forces more and more families to consider options other than university, employers will have to raise salaries, train, and revert to the full-time employment model to attract the talent they need. But that won’t happen overnight, if it happens at all.

A review of the literature dating back to the early 2000s will show that many universities are struggling to cope with reduced government funding, declining enrollment and the impact of technology. You might want to read what James Duderstadt, President Emeritus of the University of Michigan, had to say about the subject in the ‘Emory Report’ dated March 20, 2000.

The era of ‘you pay your money and you take your chances’ is drawing to a close. Forty million Americans owe US$1.2 trillion in student debt. Seven million have already defaulted on those loans. Many of them haven’t or won’t complete their programmes. Still, universities have no incentive to scale back their student intake based on the demands of the economy when they can collect 100% of their ‘fee’ from each graduate they produce regardless of whether that graduate finds work or not. It’s that intake that attracts government funding. Why does the buying public accept that?

According to The Guardian, the Bank of England believes that contract work is here to stay. Parents and their children may not agree with that assessment, but due diligence demands that, at the very least, they take all reasonable steps to assess its implications.

If you have questions, PDD has answers. I invite your inquiries and your comments.

Sincerely,

F. Neil Morris
President & Founder
Personal Due Diligence

+1 (905) 273 9880

A 5-minute survey on hopes, dreams, tuition, precarious employment and post-secondary education

Leave a reply

Higher education is the single largest investment most people will make in their lifetime, after a home

— Neil Morris, Founder & CEO, the Personal Due Diligence Project (PDD)

Saturday, April 18, 2015

 

Conventional wisdom and statistics have traditionally maintained that an advanced education is one of the better ways to protect children from an uncertain economic future. In some cases it still is, but in a growing number of what used to be safe cases, it isn’t.

“Don’t trust anyone over 30” defined the ’60s. “Ich bin ein Berliner” defined the Cold War. Some day, a future historian may paraphrase Stephen Leacock and say that we were living in a world “[riding] madly off in all directions” with an iPhone in one hand, an iPad in the other and (as of April 24th) an Apple WATCH on its wrist.

That all 3 three devices originated with a single company is a fascinating story in its own right, and it’s still being written as you read this. The WATCH is the first all-new product to be conceived, developed and released since the passing of Steve Jobs.

Also evolving is the 140-year-old company that was once considered the antithesis of Apple. That evolution has given rise to WATSON, and, among other things, to a 7-year contract with Apple to develop apps for the iPhone. That company is IBM. You owe it to yourself and your children to watch and THINK about this interview with IBM CEO Ginni Rometty from start to finish (15 minutes). Then there are C|NET stories 1and 2 you can find here. The big story is the evolution of technology. The really big story is how it’s contributed to the evolution of the 7.2 billion people who live on this planet.

All of the companies mentioned in these stories accepted that to survive, they had to leave large parts of their past behind. Now comes the question, “How will our thinking have to evolve so that we and our children can survive precarious employment? It’s because of that question that I hope you’ll take 5 minutes to complete PDD’s on-line survey ‘Hopes, dreams and tuition’ by clicking here. And to ask that you pass this link along to anyone you know who plans advanced education for his or her children. All responses are strictly anonymous. The survey tool does not identify respondents.

Thank you for your interest and your participation.

Sincerely,

F. Neil Morris
Founder & President
The Personal Due Diligence Project

+ 1 905 273 9880

 

Back to the Future: some land, a horse and a plow

Leave a reply

The twenty IBM sales recruits sporting three-piece, dark blue suits with sincere tie, long-sleeved-button-down-collar white shirt and wingtip shoes (brogues) had just learned that we had left the letters on the nameplates in front of us undisturbed for three days, two days longer than normal. Bob Oliver from L.A. became Bobo Liver. Boys will be boys.

IBM 403

The “big blue machine in the corner”

The morning’s delivery of doughnuts and various and sundry hot and cold beverages from the nearby bakery in Princeton, New Jersey was sitting on the “big blue machine in the corner”, an IBM 80-column-card-based 403. We were about to learn how the company’s compensation plan worked.

After what was left of the day’s doughnuts had been cleared away, our instructor asked each of us what kind of car we were driving. Anything less than a Mercedes-Benz would have to be upgraded. Keeping up our car payments would be the incentive to exceed quota. But he assured us that with time, we’d be earning more than enough to make the Benz affordable.

None of us bought the Benz, but the message stuck. They wanted us to stay, they wanted us to perform and they wanted us to succeed. That was in 1968: what a difference almost 50 years has made.

The 2015 that Robert Zemeckis envisioned in the 1989 sci-fi movie Back to the Future Part II makes no mention of precarious employment nor of the corporate victory over labour. Neither did IBM in the late 1960s because, back then, no one saw it coming. But it’s here now and it’s impacting on developed and developing countries as this is being written. You can read about the consequences to date in the PEPSO report entitled It’s More than Poverty.

As in most crises or gathering crises of this kind, there’s much discussion about research into the problem, but very little about action. People are at risk and are suffering now. We’re especially concerned about whether parents are factoring this new reality into their plans to invest in post-secondary education for their children, or ignoring it.

As parents in our own right, the position of the Personal Due Diligence Project is that parents must be strategic and pre-emptive in how they approach preparing their children to support themselves. We’ve already begun a survey of parental attitudes about higher education and the extent of their understanding of the implications of just-in-time work.

Not every employer subscribes to this madness. There will be no winners as a result of precarious employment. Driving down the buying power of working people will drive down the demand for the goods and services their employers provide. A farmer looking for ways of conserving money in hard times hit on the idea of cutting back on the quantity of oats he fed to the horse that pulled his wagon. On the day he reduced the quantity to zero, the horse died of starvation.

No one involved with the Personal Due Diligence Project is a Luddite. Far from it. But what we do understand is that machines crave nothing, demand nothing and buy nothing.

As for our governments and business leaders, it wouldn’t surprise us if some bright young bureaucrat came up with the idea of granting unemployed and underemployed Canadians title to 10 acres of land, a horse, some oats and a plow.

Neil Morris
Founder & President
The Personal Due Diligence Project

The 21st century labour market: square pegs, round holes and an unpredictable future

Leave a reply

ballerina

Reality is the starting point on the road from the way things are to the way we’d like them to be.

In his New York Times op-ed piece, ‘College’s Priceless Value, Higher Education, Liberal Arts and Shakespeare’, Frank Bruni used his “most transformative educational experience” to argue for degrees in the humanities and against those who see only dollars and cents when they think of higher education.

Bruni’s passion was unmistakeable and hardly misplaced. But with so many pieces just like it in circulation, the public is becoming desensitized to the real issue: the need to open its eyes and the eyes of its children to the reality of the “employment landscape”.

Parents in Canada and the U.S. have yet to acknowledge, let alone step up to, their responsibility to provide the guidance and discipline that goes with preparing their children to be self-sufficient. They point an accusatory finger at an education system that pays lip service to the subject. And at a corporate and political establishment that does much the same. Then they insist on clinging to ideas about university graduation as a general purpose ticket to the good life and a rosy future that are 20 or more years out of date.

Edward Fiske described the hell that was preparation for university entrance in Japan in his 1983 New York Times article entitled ‘Japan’s Schools: Exam Ordeal Rules Each Student’s Destiny’. It was a hell that was not without its casualties. He started his article by saying: “American students, by and large, take examinations to get out of school. Japanese take them to get in. One result is that once Japanese students get to college, they can relax.”

Admission to university was an automatic ticket to the good life. Attending university was anticlimactic. Things have changed. “Cram Schools” continue to figure prominently in Japan. China takes university admission just as seriously.

The Child Trends Data Bank 2011 Home Computer Access and Internet Use report shows how many children have their own personal computers and smartphones before and during high school, usually at no cost to them and with no strings attached. These devices can entertain and enlighten. Why are they not doing both?

There’s no shortage of information about the economy or the labour market. It’s accessible and it’s free. The combined power of the personal computer and the Internet is out of all proportion to its cost. But we’ve conditioned our children to use desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones as replacements for the family television as North America’s collective, unsupervised electronic babysitter of choice. Children know how awkward their parents are around computer technology so they skate rings around them. They also know that they’re indifferent to how their children are using it. Hackers halfway around the world know more about how children are using those babysitters than the parents of those children do.

China has begun to experience consumers who want everything to be cheap and available now. So says Bloomberg Businessweek’s account of what’s driving Chinese outsourcing in ‘Say Goodbye to Made in China’. If, as Bruni suggests, employers are less than enamoured of graduates with degrees in the humanities, it’s because the times demand it. Shareholders agree. They’re responding as they should to the demand for consumer and corporate technology it takes to run a 21st century country.

Our children aren’t the only ones who aspire to or already have degrees. According to the New York Times (Mr. Bruni’s employer), China’s student population stands at 31 million. In the U.S. there are 21 million. More than 9 million sit for the gaokao (college entry exam) each year; fewer than 3.5 million sit for the SAT and ACT combined. According to the OECD, and as reported by the BBC, there were 129 million university graduates in the OECD/G20 countries in 2010. By 2020, that number will have risen to 204 million. Twenty-nine percent will be in China; 12% in India; 11% in the U.S.; 2% in Canada.

Bruni observed: “It’s impossible to put a dollar value on a nimble, adaptable intellect, which isn’t the fruit of any specific course of study and may be the best tool for an economy and a job market that change unpredictably.” Should we take that to mean that only arts graduates have nimble, adaptable intellects? How would he describe the intellect of the bankers who engineered 2008 and have yet to be charged, let alone tried?

radioshack 2

Fig. 1: Bloomberg Businessweek February 9 – February 15, 2015

The evidence is mounting that parents have no alternative but to work one-on-one with their children to open their eyes to the labour market if they want to have a future. Gone are the days of teaching them that the best way to deal with preparing for work in the 21st century is to put off confronting it by ignoring it altogether and hoping for the best. We hear the evidence every time a graduate says: “I can’t find work in my chosen field.”

Our children aspire to pictures of the rosy future their parents painted for them based on out-dated experiences. They’ve bought into the notion that universities are places where young people go to “discover themselves”. If that discovery process were working, there would have been no need to write this.

Oxford Dictionaries defines “reality” as:

The world or the state of things as they actually exist, as opposed to an idealistic or notional idea of them

A thing that is actually experienced or seen, especially when this is grim or problematic

Dealing with reality is daunting, but some have dreamed of and succeeded in changing it. The list includes, but is in no way limited to:

Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa, Grace Murray Hopper, Malala Yousafzai, Oprah Winfrey, Roberta Bondar, Susan B. Anthony, Pearl S. Buck, Helen Keller, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Thomas Edison, Guglielmo Marconi, Alexander Graham Bell, Dr. Jonas Salk, Dr. Christian Barnard, Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz, Orville and Wilbur Wright, Marie and Pierre Curie, Frederick Banting and Charles Best, Johannes Gutenberg, Albert Einstein, Craig Kielberger, Galileo Galilei, Sir Isaac Newton, Jennie Trout, Coco Chanel, Sandra Day O’Connor, Rosalind Franklin.

The ballet slipper on the right in the Huawei advertisement (top) depicts what many parents see or want to see. The foot on the left says that it takes more than a nimble, adaptable intellect to turn a dream into reality. Career “planning” and career “counselling” imply that the end result will be a foregone conclusion. What’s called for in the 21st century is career prospecting based on hard, verifiable data because there are no foregone conclusions where university degrees are a dime a dozen.

Industries predicated on the humanities aren’t going to roll over and die. There will always be a Broadway, the Oscars, the Emmys, symphony orchestras, the Nobel Prize for Literature, books, poetry, art and philosophy because we will always have a need and an appetite for anything that reflects and talks to us about the human condition. But for the moment, technology, climate change, global warming, the prospect of megadrought, and antibiotic resistant bacteria are beginning to impact on that human condition and they demand our attention.

Without the humanities there would be no: oil paintings, watercolours, sculpture, pottery, blown glass, music, poetry, literature, philosophy, tapestries, television delivered to smartphones and tablets, movies, Oscars, Grammies, Tonys and Clios and pondering of the human condition.

That is a given and it will never change. But for now, the pendulum is swinging in a different direction and we have to give it its due.