Tag Archives: career planning

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

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about university graduation as a general purpose ticket to the good life and a rosy future that are 20 or more years out of date.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 21^st 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?

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 21^st 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 21^st 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.

Retailing higher education — yours

Leave a reply

Raphael’s painting of the School of Athens captures the essence of what some people would like to think university still is: scholars deeply engrossed in thought, debate and dialogue.

Raphael: The School of Athens. “Sanzio 01” by Raphael – Stitched together from vatican.va. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Most people tend to think of it the way the U.S. Department of Labor and Wikipedia see it…

Is it any wonder that parents insist on spending money on higher education at any cost? Why wouldn’t they? But there’s a fly in the ointment. Actually, it’s more like sand in the crankcase and sugar in the gas tank: the charts apply only to people who have jobs.

Here are two stories. Both are true.

Story 1

The instructor walked to the front of the room, a small lecture theatre, really. The floor swept gently upward from the podium. Instead of individual seats, each of the 4 tiers featured 2 very long desks separated by an aisle with 6 seats per desk. The 20 of us who made up this particular sales class would spend the next 6 weeks together.

The lecture theatre was one of 2 on the ground floor of a 3-storey building in Princeton, New Jersey. IBM rented the ground floor and the subfloor where the demonstration and presentation rooms were located. Parents and children who rode the elevator up to “3” were there to see the dentist whose building this was.

The class consisted of 17 Americans and 3 Canadians. One of the Americans was Rob M., a former U.S. NAVY fighter pilot from Texas, and he looked the part. That included the naval aviator sunglasses: government issue and very macho. You couldn’t buy them anywhere. We learned the expression “cool your jets” from him. Three of the others and I were newly minted university grads. The rest had fulltime working credentials.

Al E. was the instructor. Football player type. He was wearing a dark blue, 3-piece suit, starched white shirt, “sincere” tie and wing tip shoes otherwise known as brogues or sodbusters. It was clear from the way the rest of us were dressed that we were with Al.

Al led off with a question: “How many of you would rather not be called salesmen?”

My hand and several others went up. Our reasons for raising them were very similar: sales people were smooth-talking glad-handers with loud ties, expense accounts, slacks and houndstooth sports jackets. At IBM, selling was and still is a profession, consultative selling to be precise. At the end of our 6 weeks, we all understood why. No gimmicks, no glad-handing, no back slapping, no smooth talking. Just hard work with emphasis on understanding what the customer needed, lots of emphasis. And on being able to communicate how we were going to use IBM products to address them.

Contrary to popular belief, IBM sales reps did sweat. More than most as it turns out. No more raised hands.

The predicament in which many of the graduates with one or more degrees and no work to show for it find themselves is very reminiscent of the lessons that came out of that IBM sales school. Our business cards were like university diplomas. We were proud to carry them and we were proud to present them. But there were other people out there with business cards and they were good. It’s just that customers expected something extra and better from the ladies and the gentlemen in dark blue suits.

There’s a name for that: value added. It’s what differentiated IBM from the competition.

Universities don’t offer courses in professional, consultative selling. Maybe they should for a modest fee before parents and students commit to 4 or more years. But that’s not going to happen because universities are businesses. First they sell the seats. Then they sell the education wholesale. Graduates have always had to find ways to sell it retail. What makes the job that much more challenging is that, in the eyes of customers, all degrees from the same university are the same and they stay that way until the graduate demonstrates otherwise.

Story 2

I recently attended at a meeting in which an employee with 25 years service with a consumer packaged goods manufacturer was released because the local function the employee headed up was being outsourced and off-shored. The employer explained that they were late moving in this direction vis-à-vis their competitors.

We recalled how Canada Post had been one of the first major corporations in the country to jettison its IT function in the 1990s. In Canada, Data Crown and CSG were laying the groundwork for that decision and others like it. The rationale was that the corporation wasn’t in the computer business: it was in the business of moving mail.

This is the part where the consequences of not understanding the needs of the customer kick in. You’ll see it in these CBC stories: Canadian job skills mismatch: truth or science fiction? Unemployment dips to 7%, most new jobs are part time. Where Canada’s job vacancies are—and aren’t. Loonie tumbles amid huge miss in jobs data, expectations, geopolitical worries. Then there’s Frazier Fathers with his undergraduate degree, two master’s degrees and unemployed in Windsor, Ontario.

Employment and Social Development Canada’s Canadian Occupational Projection System (COPS) predicts that growth in industrial GDP [will] improve in the primary and manufacturing sectors between now and 2020, driven mainly by foreign demand. This should come as welcome news for anyone who plans to graduate with a postsecondary education before the end of the decade.

The free trade agreements into which Canada is entering—including the Canada EU Trade Agreement (CETA), details of which will be released shortly—will change customer behaviour. How will they change employment prospects? What is it going to take to win?

In my 7 years with IBM, I saw “THINK” and “There’s never enough time to do the job right, but there’s always enough time to do the job over” in close proximity to each other more than once. It’s not so easy to do the job over when your first degree involves stocking up on education nobody wants to buy.

If the education system were more about education and less about politics, it would be providing up-to-the-minute information on which to base decisions about advanced schooling. The media are much better at it. So is the price they charge.

Rob Kelly defines gap analysis as “a strategic planning tool to help you understand where you are, where you want to be and how you’re going to get there.” High school graduates must understand that where they and their parents might want them to be and where they may have to be could be two very different places.

The day newly minted graduates receive their diploma is the day they become unemployment statistics—unless they have a job to step into. We have enough statistics. Most of them have dollar signs in front of them: $1.2 trillion owing in student loans in the U.S.; $25 billion to $50 billion in Canada. At least 7 million U.S. students have defaulted on their loan payments at least once.

We need as many gainfully employed graduates as we can produce. For their sake and for the sake of the country.

Risk is free, risk-free costs

Leave a reply

Enough said.

Designing Your Work for Dummies

Leave a reply

If you peruse the online booksellers, or wander into a bookstore, you’ll quickly find volumes from one of two series, labelled either “(whatever) for Dummies” or “The Idiot’s Guide to (whatever)”. These two lines — which started as a way to produce manuals you could learn from rather than the incomprehensible ones delivered with computer products — now cover everything from cat care to knitting, fixing outboard motors to baking.

So, with chapeau doffed in admiration to the concept of making complicated things simple, let’s talk about designing your work.

Notice I didn’t say “find a job”. It may be that the design you come up with leads you down that road (it’s hard to be in certain roles without fitting into an existing societal structure). But if you start by thinking about your future in terms of designing around the work you’ll do, you will have a lot of the thinking necessary to consider creating your own job.

The person who is employed by someone else can find themselves out of work because of external events that cause the enterprise they’re a part of to cut back or fold — or they can be on the street (or never hired) because of the pique and incompetence of a manager (as sketched daily in Dilbert by Scott Adams). The person who creates their own situation is still at risk of the first — but is unlikely to fire themselves in a malicious way.

The tool I’d like to point out to you is called a business model canvas. The million-copy seller for designing a business is Alex Osterwalder’s Business Model Generation. Its counterpart for designing an individual’s life-work plan is Tim Clark’s Business Model You. The latest improvement to the concept is Antony Upward’s “Strongly Sustainable Business Model Canvas”, built around triple bottom line concepts (Antony has a number of interactive presentations, YouTube videos, and a LinkedIn group available on the web; the process of turning his dissertation into a friendly book is underway).

All you need is a hunk of wall. Some people draw the canvas outline on a white board, others tape up butcher paper. Get some post-it notes.

What the process of working with a canvas asks of you is to identify the answers to questions. When using it to design your life’s work, you can start with what you’re good at, or needs you’ve seen that could be fulfilled, or connections you have. When you use a canvas to design an enterprise (creating your own job), you do the same questions but with more business-like terms such as customer segments, value propositions, key partners, and the like.

It’s decidedly simple stuff, but powerful. Four people gathered toward the end of February to think through the creation of a new not-for-profit organization to promote local business webs in a major city. None worked in the field (although all were running their own enterprises). None had training in the use of the canvas. Two hours later, the wall was absolutely covered in post-it notes, real reasons why people would pay to join such an organization had been identified, its staffing needs had been uncovered, and so on.

If you take away the right conclusion from that — hey, I don’t have to be an expert on business to do this — good for you. You don’t. Which means you could work on your canvas with friends, with family, with anybody. You move the post-it notes around, you throw some out, you add some new ones. Collectively, they tell a story about what would work for you — or how this new business would feed you.

Although Tiffinday wasn’t built using one of these canvases, it was thought through the same way. Tiffinday is a company that delivers hot, fresh lunches in Toronto’s financial district. The containers are reusable. The food is prepared by mothers with children in school. It’s put together in the mornings using a parter — an evenings-only restaurant whose kitchen was free (there are laws about food preparation). A bicycle courier company delivers the containers, then picks up the empties after lunch for cleaning. Everyone’s home again in time for the kids to come from school.

Would you have thought to provide an ever-varying menu to workers in cubicle land, employ people who would likely not work because they’re only available between 9 and 3, partner to use underutilized resources and avoid having to capitalize your own using all the traditional “follow your passions” business development advice? Canvases can see all sorts of opportunities that traditional methods don’t.

This is just one of the way Personal Due Diligence advisors work with clients to expand their opportunities. Are you ready to expand yours?

The multiple-career lifetime bamboozle

Leave a reply

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”

― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

The multiple-career lifetime is a bamboozle. It’s neither a substitute for vision nor a substitute for planning. In a not-so-bygone era, a career was something we had for life: one function, one industry, one profession. Fifteen or so years ago we started hearing predictions about the 5 careers we could expect to have before we retired. Because they didn’t know, the people making those predictions couldn’t specify what those 5 careers might be, only that there would be 5. That number has since risen to 6 or 7, along with the retirement age and eligibility to begin drawing full CPP and OAS benefits.

For the record, the people making those predications treated a career change as a response to losing a job voluntarily or involuntarily.

In what by current standards now looks like a steady state employment universe, most people paid lip service to the notion of career planning. They could afford to then because the risks were lower. Not any more. The fly in the ointment about multiple-career lifetimes is that, unless they’re planned very carefully, each career move has the potential to mean starting over from scratch in terms of earnings, seniority, suitability for promotion and lifestyle—assuming there’s a position to be had in the first place.

Our children run the risk of living the equivalent of crossing a lily pond by hopping from the head of one alligator to another. To cross that pond they’ll need the right number of alligators, flawless agility and impeccable timing. With each hop, they’ll be that much older, that much more expensive and, unless they play their cards right, that much more obsolete.

The generation about to embark on postsecondary education is the first one to observe the phenomenon that we thought would be confined to blue collar jobs as it continues to spread to white collar jobs. Serious questions need to be asked about which industries are most likely to be in existence in 10 years time. How dependent will they be on technology or specialized training? Where will the training and education for those industries come from? How much will those positions pay? What will the future of full time employment with benefits be?

Significant changes in the way things are done often result in unanticipated consequences. The idea of increasing the free flow of goods and services between countries by lowering trade barriers began to gain traction in the mid-1980’s. In 1994, Canada, the U.S. and Mexico implemented the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). At first blush, Canadians were ecstatic because they were convinced that this would mean lower prices for automobiles and other manufactured goods. It’s almost 20 years later and we’re still waiting.

We didn’t anticipate that, in the global push for trade without borders, manufacturing in Ontario would be obliterated and university undergraduate and postgraduate degrees marginalized.

We had no Plan B. We still don’t. We had no visionary leaders. We still don’t. Except for the European Union where citizens of a Eurozone member state are free to live and work in any other Eurozone state, borders are porous when it comes to the movement of goods, services, money and jobs—but not to the people who populate those jobs.

To its credit, Alberta had the foresight to create the Heritage Fund as a hedge against the depletion of its oil assets. They still have those assets. What’s missing is the demand for them.

PDD believes in our young people. In every conceivable sense of the word, they are Canada’s future. PDD can point them at resources that will help them identify and exploit the opportunities our generation missed because we didn’t have those resources or the need to use them. If we can do that, they’ll be positioned to anticipate the future so that they can prepare for it.

Sagan says we’re no longer interested in finding the truth. Maybe that’s because things have become too easy and we’ve become too intellectually lazy. As a species, we’ve always been at our creative and collective best when the chips were down because we’ve had to be. The chips are down now.

Personal Due Diligence is in the business of showing parents why it’s critical that they change the way they think about buying and using education. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. Any answer that benefits the person hearing it will be the right answer.

P.S.: On February 1st, 2013, I began monitoring print and electronic media to see how many times 4 topics were mentioned. These are the results as of 5:31 p.m., Wednesday, April 3, 2013.

Economy: 95
Work related stress: 57
Household debt: 14
Management stress: 11

When was your wake-up call?

Leave a reply

I like to think I found the best first job as a professional engineer. It was in my field of expertise and in an area where I always wanted to be. It also meant some travel and to make it even better, my company was investing heavily in me.

My first job meant going through six months of classroom training of which the second half was in my company’s headquarters. Accommodation fully paid, plus extra cash for other basic expenses. Upon completion, guess what: another six months of “on the job” training.

A year later, I transitioned into a new role. When I met my boss, he gave me my “career plan” for the year, which essentially said where they wanted me to be and which courses they wanted me to take. About eight in total. Not too long ago (unless you ask my kids, of course) organizations were “career parents” and as employees, we were, to a great extent, their “children”.

A few years after, I was in a meeting with our Regional Vice President. As a way of offering a vision for our company, he said we should not expect much more training; in fact, we should actively seek alternate ways to keep our skills current.

That was my wake-up call. While it felt great to have someone else plan, fund and support my career, I had to adjust to the new normal. In a very short time, I became a “career orphan” and had to take control of my own future, making me a “career owner”, as it should be. A year after this meeting, I began my executive MBA to acquire the tools I would need to support my career goals.

Though I spent the first half of my career in an environment with a 20% unemployment rate, I have seen the most significant changes and instability in the second half: I have lived through two mergers, one of which became a “de-merger”. While my wake-up call happened fifteen years ago, I’m still surprised that so many of the professionals I run into have yet to receive theirs.

People say times have changed, but very few translate that into action. Let me be more specific. One day someone I know called to tell me that, after a lengthy search, he had found a new job. It was a contract position, but he was back on his feet, a good position to be in if the job became permanent. I advised him to build an internal network of allies so that he’d be visible, desirable and aware of how goings-on inside the organization might have an impact on him. But he didn’t follow through. A few months later he found himself looking again. This situation repeated itself twice more under very similar circumstances.

In a subsequent conversation with him, I discovered this person had very little knowledge of networking. Limited use of networking tools and techniques and a small internal network relegated him to a pool of other look-alike potential candidates from whom he had failed to differentiate himself. By not raising his profile he diluted himself, his brand and his unique credentials and attributes in the eyes of the organization. He still thinks he was making himself visible so he could be discovered. The organization thought otherwise.

Getting a hold of your career is much more than pressing the “apply on line” button. It means having the ability to read the industry, key players, roles, colleagues, potential bosses, related extra-curricular activities and a plethora of other skills to anticipate where the puck will be. Unfortunately, like this person, what many fail to see is that career building may have a start, but rarely an end.

Rate this:

Share this:

Rate this:

Share this:

Rate this:

Share this:

Rate this:

Share this:

Rate this:

Share this:

Rate this:

Share this: