Dan Erwin

Predictive Algorithms Actually Start Out as Historians

Historians are a lot better explainers than algorithmaticians. (Is there such a word? If not, I just made it up.) Let me argue my case.

Harvard’s Jill Lepore, one of the most fascinating and truly humorous historical writers, has superb explanatory insight on algorithmic prediction. That’s not a surprise. She approaches history from perspectives that have never crossed this historian’s mind--and does it with a lot of verve. She’s one of the few with a steady hand when the rest of us are lurching around with churning stomachs about artificial intelligence and moronic politicians.

With two talkative algorithmic geniuses in my own family, a son-in-law from Harvard and a recently minted Carnegie-Mellon data-scientist grandson, with whom I spend hours listening and making sense of their conversations, Lepore is an absolute delight at simplifying algorithmic insight.

She regularly seems to have the ability to condense an entire discipline, the whole shebang into a single readable paragraph. Here’s the first paragraph from her New Yorker article, entitled simply “Unforeseen.” Prophecy is a mug’s game. But then, lately, most of us are mugs. 2018 was a banner year for the art of prediction, which is not to say the science, because there really is no science of prediction. Predictive algorithms start out as historians: they study historical data to detect patterns. Then they become prophets: they devise mathematical formulas that explain the pattern, test the formulas against historical data withheld for the purpose, and use the formulas to make predictions about the future. That’s why Amazon, Google, Facebook, and everyone else are collecting your data to feed to their algorithms: they want to turn your past into your future.

What Are You Reading? Here Are Five for the Intellectually Curious

George Packer at the New Yorker on Black Friday and the Race to the Bottom. Why did Black Friday, beginning on Thanksgiving Thursday this year, and continuing into Shopaholic Saturday and Sunday poop out so badly? And why, with the usual brawls over towels and TVs reported on YouTube, did retailers like Walmart and Target take a total hit of more than $1.7 billion less than last year? Packer answers the question and wonders why, with too many Americans now working low-paying jobs stocking inventory and ringing up merchandise, those same stores don't understand that their workers are too poor to buy the products in the big-box stores. You'd think those same firms would be leading the protests for higher wages. Why, when moderate Southern businessmen spoke up for higher wages during the civil rights era, do you not hear that rhetoric today? It may be that America is still waiting for the first retail C.E.O. to see what’s in front of his nose.

Morten Hansen at HBR.org on How John F. Kennedy Changed Decision Making for Us All.  Many of us know that the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba was a fiasco, probably the worst decision he ever made in . . .

How to Get Relegated to Page 7

Certain kinds of issues, though exceptionally definitional and useful, inevitably get relegated to the back pages of the newspaper. Research data in its initial stages doesn’t get near the front pages unless it’s about popular conflicts, related to widely held concerns and fails to challenge blameworthy voters. For example, the data supporting the notion that parental support of their kids’ education may be the most significant factor in personal success took a long time to get to the front pages. Maybe that was just repression, denial or ignorance. Obviously, the red meat about poor teaching, corrupt unions and government failure is a lot more interesting, though often irrelevant.

So research that reveals that American adults are, at best, in the middle of the pack of nations when it comes to problem solving in technology-rich environments is relegated to page 11 in the New York Times and page 7 in my local Minneapolis Star Tribune. If you’re an astute HR person, senior exec in one of our better companies or young parent, the information just might be very useful. At the least it would tell you what to focus on in recruiting for better decision-makers and what to do about your kids' education.

After all, you can’t problem solve very well until a problem is well-defined. And it could make you very cautious about the quality of employee intuition and their ready inferential, opinion-based chatter. After all, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan pointed out years ago, you are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.

The data
The comparative research was based on new tests developed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a coalition of mostly developed nations. The tests focused on literacy, facility with basic math—numeracy—and problem solving in “technology-rich environments.”

Japan ranked first in all three fields with Finland second in average scores with the Netherlands, Sweden and Norway near the top. And Spain, Italy and France near the bottom. Just 9% of Americans scored in the top two of the five proficiencies. The biggest lag in Americans was among younger people. Among 55-to-65 year olds, the US fared better than its counterparts. Among 45-to-54 year-olds performance was average. Once more: the performance was most behind among younger people. 

Why is the US so rich?
If you feel defensive about these stats, you’re probably asking why, if we’re so dumb, are we so rich? Anthony Carnevale at the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workplace said that the answer is four-fold: higher skill levels at the top, being big, being more flexible than other economies, and being able to attract other countries’ most skilled laborers. “But that advantage is slipping.”

This really, really needs to be on the front page to stir up the hoi polloi, get the politicians focused clearly and get the public going on the necessary changes. That is, if we can look beyond the end of our noses.

Flickr photo: fishbel

The Personal Power of Strategic Dithering

“Hold your fire,” “bumble,” “muddle along,” and “don’t be in a hurry to make that decision” is choice terminology. Or, negatively, as in Maureen Dowd’s commentary, dither: “Amateur hour started when Obama dithered on Syria and failed to explain the stakes there.” Any number of commentators have fired off missiles about Obama’s dithering on Syria and all the trouble it gets us into. Maybe, maybe not.

Of course, knowledgeable readers are well aware that dithering, hesitating and being undecided, drives journalists nuts. They’re paid to get the news out and when a politician is holding his fire, they’ve got no news to write about. So dithering becomes an expletive readily applied to slow decision makers. Take it all with a grain of salt.

Dithering can be a highly useful personal strategy. 

Best Thinking: “You Can’t Make a Mistake Before You’re 30,” and. . . “Undermining One of Civilization’s Greatest Social Constructs”

Once in a while a column yanks my interest away from my normal agenda, causing my gray matter to work overtime, engaging me at the level of “god, I never thought about that before.”

That happened twice this week.

First, with the Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus reflections on graduation and her own experience. It was a grizzled reporter who commented to her shortly after college graduation that “she couldn’t possibly make a mistake before she was 30.”

 Although I questioned her advice from the piece, I recognized rather quickly that in the age of Tiger Moms and Helicopter Parents, the counsel was underemphasized.

Marcus relates a recent lunch with Stanford President John Hennessy where she asked him what worried him most about students. “Stress is an issue,” he said. “We have kids, most of whom have never seen a grade on their report card that had a rounded curve. . . . Everybody’s expectation is that they’re going to the moon.” Then they encounter chemistry of another challenge, and “they’re shellacked.”

Whether parent or recent grad, this is one you’ll want to devour.

Second, with the Slate blogger, Matt Malady (I guess that’s his real name and not a pseudonym) writing in the NYTimes Magzine “About the undermining of one of civilization’s greatest social constructs:” the simple line that we stand in at least once a day at the coffee shop or the store.

Sadly, Malady points out that all is not well in the world of lines. In fact, this form of social ordering seems to be going sideways.

The article reminded me of a friend of mine, a young med student, who migrated from New York City for UMN’s medical school. After the first week of school, while still boarding at our house, he commented with some frustration that he’d never seen such orderliness in New York, with people lining up for all kinds of service. “It’s German orderliness,” I said. “But you ain’t seen nothing, yet. Before I drop you off tomorrow morning I want to take you to the Pillsbury foyer.”

It was about 7:45am and the elevator lines snaked out of the Pillsbury foyer into the main area with about 75 to 100 people in each line for each of the dozen elevators. He was actually shaken. He told me that in New York, it would have been a madhouse, rather than the quiet line of folk, standing, reading their newspapers or even knitting, waiting for their turn at the elevator. So much for Manhattan!

Well, I’ve never thought about some of the issues of ethics and orderliness that Malady brought up in his article. And I fully suspect you’ll find them intriguing also.

Enjoy!

Rethinking the College Visit

A common work conversation this time of the year is about your kids’ college choices. So, choosing a college is one time when doing your homework really matters. Over this past Easter weekend, I was visiting in Washington, D.C. and spent time at the Capital Mall and its resources, as well as making an overdue trip to Mount Vernon. Mount Vernon reminded me that the European aristocracy had little over the American aristocracy. But among the many visitors at both places were parents with their high school juniors who were also visiting potential colleges in the D.C. area.

The college visit is not something to be taken lightly. In today’s world, with Harvard accepting just 5% of its applicants and Chicago just 8%, our kids are going to need several backups. And some of you will end up spending $300,000 for your kid’s education.  I recently updated my kids’ college costs to this year’s money. I don’t even want to think about how much it cost. So you’re going to need to be very thorough in researching potential colleges if you want to get your money’s worth of education for your kids.

But what’s the right way to choose a college? 

Krauthammer and Michigan's Unions

I read Charles Krauthammer faithfully. Half the time, I want to vomit, but still I read him. It’s because he’s often correct in his analysis. And, I very often learn more from the people I disagree with than from my own tribal members.

So today’s column, The right-to-work dilemma, is instructive. Note that the interpretive title of his article is correct: this is a dilemma. It’s not a clear-cut, obvious decision, in spite of the fact that Michigan’s governor and his colleagues were more than a bit unscrupulous in their decision making.

The best information in columns is usually in the middle—and the middle of the column is usually the writer’s agenda. Dead-center of the column, Krauthammer reminds us that Obama calls the right-to-work law a race to the bottom. Or, as another writer paraphrased Obama, the right-to-work law is the right for business to pay you a lower salary.

But Krauthammer is quite correct: It’s a race to a new equilibrium that tries to maintain employment levels, albeit at the price of some modest wage. It is a choice not to be despised.

But here is Krauthammer’s admission of truth, a truth rarely admitted by the hard-right: I have great admiration for the dignity and protections trade unionism has brought to American workers. I have no great desire to see the private-sector unions defenestrated. . . .

One of the more intriguing, though wrong, conclusions about the work of unions came from the Nobel Prize economist, Gary Becker, who opined that labor unions are slowing the US’ economic recovery and making it harder for the country to compete overseas. The fact of the matter, as economists Richard Freeman and James Medoff have calculated, is that in 1980, when a quarter of the work force was covered by collective bargaining agreements, organized labor reduced the gross national product by just one-fifth to two-fifths of one percent.

It should be obvious that the social and economic benefits of unions outweigh those costs. Unions equalize pay within companies. More importantly, they also improve pay outside their own workplaces. Furthermore, highly unionized states have higher minimum wages and more generous welfare benefits, and—uniquely—spend more money on education. That’s all terrifically important in a world where our deficits are not only financial. But they’re also the deficits of education, infrastructure and innovation.

Growing up in Detroit, I am very aware that the middle-class was the creation of the auto industry. I’m also aware that growing up in Detroit in the ‘40s and ‘50s was the gift of the gods. Everything anyone wanted was available to nearly all, sports, the arts, education, etc., etc. And let’s get personal: my college education was the result of union power. Those days are dead and gone. So now, I fear for the children of union workers. Especially since education at a top school can cost upwards of $65,000 a year. Let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater. The union dilemma is not merely fiscal, it’s primarily political.

The Six Key Competencies for Career Success in the 21st Century

Dissect America’s corporate strategies and needs throughout the past 12 years, sort through the business-related research and anecdotal material, engage executives and entry-level employees, study the best journals and books, engage the top consulting firms and storied business school faculty and you’ll find a phenomenal consensus on the needed competencies for career success. Though these competencies are oriented to parents and college students, they also provide a relevant perspective on learning and career pathing for those already in the workforce.

 

Reduced to the most basic elements, here’s the list of key competencies: 

1.    A technology background or related expertise in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) majors. You want to major in a liberal arts program outside those technologies? Excellent, but make sure you get four to six STEM courses. (Major in sociology, but add statistics, computer science, etc. Or, major in English lit, dance, German studies, or archaeology, but pick up some STEM background along the way.)

The actual value of the STEM competencies is that they provide the primary means for innovation for both business as well as the nation. They are our ultimate competitive advantage in the global marketplace. In short, without a robust STEM workforce, we will become less competitive in the global economy. However, without the broadly educated liberal arts grads, including those with liberal arts STEM majors—not mere technicians--we lose much of the creativity and intuition crucial in the workplace where fuzzy issues and dense problems, clashes of ideas and deep-seated ambiguities are the status quo.     

 2.    Complex thinking and problem solving. If the faculty in your college major is half-way decent, the subtext, often unstated, is that your major discipline works on the basis of a specific set of cognitive models. My undergrad history major forced me to think big picture, look closely at data and analyze potential causes underlying historical events. Applied to business, I found myself with superb analytical, tactical, cause-effect and strategic competencies. Translated into business categories, here is what one English major learned. In the global marketplace, however, these are merely foundational competencies. You’re going to have to constantly build upon thinking skills. That will include the ability to evaluate evidence, to see patterns in recurring problems, to draw adequate inferences and conclusions, to think metacognitively and to use relevant vocabulary.

3.    Written and oral communication. The demand for communication competencies in the 21^st century profoundly outpaces that of the last century. It’s not merely the multi-lingual nature of a diverse global world or the emphasis upon service economies and face-to-face relations. At bottom it’s the flattened hierarchies with individual responsibilities for every person. Thus, success now requires the ability to use communication to bridge gaps between interdependent groups, to build and use networking intelligence, manage relationships, and create a motivational environment that will inspire the cooperation and contribution of others.    

In this new economy, the majority of more experienced, older workers struggle to communicate effectively. But Gen-Yers seem to have special needs at this point. As a warning, Arthur Levine, former president of the Columbia Teacher’s College and now president of The Woodrow Wilson Foundation, puts it this way: This generation is not very good at face-to-face relationships. The image that comes to mind is two students, sitting in the room they share, angrily texting each other, but not talking. They all want to have intimate relationships, they want to get married and have kids, but that’s hard to do if you don’t know how to talk with another person.

4.    Adaptability, which includes the abilities to respond to and manage change, and know how to learn. Few companies have a career ladder and few careers are linear. Instead, employees will need to adapt to a market which is a dynamic, evolving system in which the further you try to assess the future, the more difficult it is to predict the outcomes. At its heart, adaptability is about the skills of change. It implies the ability to get from where you are now to where you want to go--and along the way, deal competently with the miserable middle between now and then. It also implies focus, constant learning and political smarts.

Adaptability is built upon the recognition that our world never stays the same, that dynamic change, not stability and permanence, is constant. Adaptable people understand that experience and work are chaotic, fragmentary, deviate from cherished values and is given to imponderable ambiguity. Adaptation, itself, comes out of encounters with novelty that may seem chaotic. In trying to adapt, we often have to deviate from cherished values, behave in ways that we’ve barely glimpsed and seize on clues that are merely fragmentary.

5.    Creativity. Most people tend to think of creativity as beautiful designs such as great art, architectural masterpieces or the Apple iPad. The fact of the matter is that though business always needs creative masterpieces, business needs far more creativity and innovation in mobilizing talent, allocating resources, developing processes and building strategies.

 But the most important fact about creativity is that at its heart it is a highly collaborative enterprise, not the lone genius in his/her workroom. The unifying idea about creativity, which debunks a mile-high stack of creativity myths, is that even seemingly solitary artistic pursuits involve improvisation, collaboration and communication. The surprising reminder for many is that nothing is perceived to be creative unless people can communicate that insight to others. One of the more fascinating insights I gained from consulting at 3M, one of America’s greatest creative firms, is that a creative team often searches for others who can communicate the value of their creation. Otherwise, their work is dead in the water. Surprisingly, the keys to creativity are going to be collaboration and communication, making this competency available to anybody who’s willing. Once more: the eccentric, lone genius is the exception, not the rule.

6.    Entrepreneurialism. The first thing most think about this subject is of a business person who builds a business from scratch. That’s merely one very minor reflection of an entrepreneurial, adventuresome spirit. A more generic perspective of entrepreneurialism includes the ability to take initiative and risks in order to put new ideas into play. In short, it’s finding useful and/or profitable solutions to problems. Furthermore, in today’s world the entrepreneurial person regularly rebuilds his job and career in order to adapt to business needs or change jobs.

Entrepreneurialism is tightly related to creativity, especially to its communication side. A study by Hargadon and Sutton showed that the entrepreneurial process was remarkably similar across all companies. It included the ability to capture good ideas, keep the ideas alive, imagine new uses for old ideas, and put promising concepts to the test. One of the fascinating things we know about entrepreneurs is that they are good “noticers.” The Wall Street Journal’s Shellenbarger, for example, writes that entrepreneurs notice “unmet needs and ways to fulfill them.”

What’s most obvious about this new competency set is that a high school degree gets you nowhere, that a bachelor’s is merely foundational and that success in the new economy will require constant learning and growth. Initially, you might think the academic portion of these demands to be a bit much. I’ve found that a typical liberal arts bachelor’s degree, requirements, major and all, provides space for meeting these basic expectations. However you read this blog, don’t miss the point that these competencies form the backdrop, indeed, the new normal for career success. So, go on about the business of acquiring and honing these skills, regardless of where you are in your career.

Flickr photo: city college

Once More on the "What Are You Going to Do With That Major?" Question

Since everyone and his brother believe this dumb-ass question is both important and intelligent, one of my missions in life is to put the lie to it. As a former university professor and long-time management consultant, I can’t emphasize enough how limiting and actually harmful this question is. The notion of a linear career relation between college and work is false from the get-go.

But first, a caveat. If you or your kid majored in sports rather than academics, I recommend you skip this blog. I seriously doubt that more than 5% of those who majored in sports, instead of viewing it as merely a recreational outlet, do well in academics. And if you or your kid fits in the sports major group and failed to develop academic tools, then go ahead and major in a subject focused on gaining immediate entry to the current job market. Of course, you’ll quickly learn that won’t provide much more than an entry-level salary for most of your life. But them’s the choices.

Understanding the question’s power
Fortunately, just this year a thoughtful piece of research by Daniel Lair and Stacey Wieland addressed that dumb ass colloquialism, finding that though it is a near all-powerful ideology, it understands neither work nor education. The research confirmed the pervasiveness of the question--more than ever in today’s economy—and that it is widely recognized by all students. On top of that, it is inevitably an emotionally charged question—and nearly half the time negative, functioning as a judgment about the choices a person is making about the relationship between work and his or her education. As a consequence, students readily recognize that their ability to answer the question is high-stakes and anxiety-producing. They also know that it is about whether a major will provide merely a sufficient or a substantial income. The obvious implication of the question that the major a person chooses is tightly coupled with the selection of a job.

Wrong about work
What’s clear from the research is that students and the public ground their belief in a linear career model: this major, for example, will make possible this career. The fact of the matter is that those implications simply do not align with the realities of the global economy.

First, the shelf life of a linear, vocational degree is no more than five years. Furthermore, there is no longer a social contract between employer and employee, and neither expects that relationship long term. That means that there’s a very high likelihood that what got you a job right out of college will be completely obsolete within five years. On top of that, people will be changing employers and careers many, many times over their lives. To a surprising degree, those changes are becoming more and more true of even the so-called permanent vocations in engineering, law and medicine. To quote the researchers: The permanent view of career that is perpetuated through the colloquial question, “What are you going to do with that major?” conflicts with what students are likely to experience post college.

Wrong about education
The consequence of this wrongheaded ideology is that it keeps students from approaching higher education in a way that will equip them better for the long term. The ideology forces students and their parents to focus on college education, narrowly, and solely from the job perspective. No question that business loves this and emphasizes this approach. But the business approach to college is like a stock market approach: it’s liable to be valid no more than three or four quarters. And sadly, in my work with leading executives around the country, I’ve experienced few who think about education on a long-term basis, and outside the stock market box.

So, given that jobs, employers, careers and professions are going to be changing many times in our lives, how should we look at education? What should students really gain from a college education? The answer is straightforward. While education plays a role in equipping the student for career, students need to also wrestle with questions of how to live a meaningful life. Specifically that includes questions about the roles they will play in society, such as citizen, parent, partner, volunteer or community member.

So what’s an intelligent student to do?
Given the realities of our world, we need a holistic perspective on the role of education and the recognition that the decision about what to study and what to do with one’s life has no unique permanent answer. The competencies that the best organizations are asking for are the same competencies that students will need for all of life: creative thinking, managing complex problems, making informed decisions, learning, adapting and maintaining an open entrepreneurial, adventuresome relationship to life.

What a career edge implies for students is that they ought to at least make space for a couple courses in technology, economics and communication--and learn how to work social and organizational systems that are hierarchical and authoritarian. In today’s world they’re liable to be creating their own jobs, even inside the company, and viewing learning as a life-long process. That also means that they will need the oral and written smarts to get around the recruiter’s template when they set out for the next job. With that background most any liberal arts major will work just fine. The current mayor of Chicago, for example, holds an undergraduate liberal arts degree in dance from Sarah Lawrence College.

In sum, the “What are you going to do with that major?” question is typically insulting, demeaning and stupid.

Lair, Daniel J. and Stacey M.B. Wieland, "What are you going to do with that major?" Colloquial Speech and the Meanings of Work and Education, Management Communication Quarterly, 26(3), 2012, 423-452. 

Flickr photo: Waad Alsulaim

"Don't Waste Your Time on Liberal Arts"??

“Debates about the nature of higher education are often framed by the question of whether vocational elements or liberal arts elements should dominate in the curriculum.  This is a mistake.”

If you’re a business exec or even a parent thinking about your kid’s college experience, what kind of recommendations do you have for high schoolers? Surprisingly, human resource people in the best companies have also been thinking about this issue--through the lens of the “talent wars”.

One of my long-term clients, a senior exec at General Mills, tells me that they’re engaging high schoolers so they’ll be potential hires after college. They have to deal with some heavy competition in the Twin Cities—Target, 3M, Best Buy, Cargill, US Bank, Medtronic, Ameriprise, etc.—to get the best talent. So what recommendation really, really, really makes for the best talent and best education? Until now, there’s been no easy answer to that question.

Of course, there’s a lot of warring in the blogosphere about college majors. Which major makes the most money? Which major is a death sentence? Should you waste your time in liberal arts? What are labor suppliers recommending? Well, tongue in cheek, there’s only one obvious conclusion: if the kid is devoting more time to sports than to academics, there’s a 95% chance that his/her future is in jeopardy.

Thinking about my thinking
When there’s a lot of “‘tis, ‘taint” arguing over an important problem, and if there are some strange “outliers” on the subject, be very careful about drawing significant conclusions. The best way to make sense of all that is to try to understand the “argument field,” those things the various actors take for granted, their self-evident truths. Typically, I try to identify all the possible approaches in the field, approaches that are all over the map, check out the reasoning, the “knowables,” search, work on or wait for a resolution of significance. That does not mean I’m just looking for balance or a middle ground.

The argument field for effective higher education is all over the place. One crazy on the subject of education recommends that students skip college and let the firm educate them. That notion is not worth dignifying with a response. Another short-sighted approach comes out of the Florida community colleges: create a curriculum in vocational specialties that labor demographers identified as undersupplied in a given location. (Someone needs to remind Florida that the shelf life for most jobs is only five years. After that, what’s a student to do?) On top of all the outlying and conventional recommendations within the argument field, I want to learn what it is that I don’t know that I don’t know. That’s tough and often takes a lot of time—and sometimes it never happens.

Lastly, I attempt, sometimes unsuccessfully, to check my bias at the door before trying to resolve problems. If you’ve read my blogging much, you know my bias: the liberal arts. But that approach has a number of caveats. There’s no direct line between a liberal arts major--except for engineering--and a job. Liberal arts teachers as a rule don’t know how to prepare their arts majors for the job market. UTexas, Austin provides a superb exception to the rule.

Best Approach  
Although the recent Georgetown University report, STEM, is an excellent start on the issue, the problem is now resolved far, far better. In an absolutely brilliant, big-picture integration, Danielle Allen resolved the issue for business, family, school counselors, potentially bankrupt parents and students, and the media. With impeccable credentials, Allen comes to us from Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, and serves on the boards of the Mellon Foundation, Princeton University and Amherst College.  

Allen’s recommendation, Helping students find their place in the world, focuses on the big-picture problem of individual development. Her conclusion is strategic, readily operationalized and in most institutions of learning possible to a greater or lesser degree. Some of the better K – 12 schools, colleges and universities make it possible. However, the intentionality which her focus brings is often absent. But here in thumbnail is her approach. Human beings, she argues, need to foster their development in four dimensions: 

• Prepare themselves for bread-winning work. In kindergarten through college years, smart people begin to understand how the job-world works and what, typically, it takes to get ahead in any vocation. As the STEM report suggests, that implies some background, perhaps a college major, in science, technology, engineering or math. But, as Allen comments, from a bird’s eye view it’s important to enhance people’s freedom to determine what they’re going to do, not bowing to the market’s focus upon efficient matching of human capital to the labor market.
• Prepare themselves for civic and political engagement. I doubt that this is on the table nearly enough in today’s K through 12 programs. But former Supreme Court Justice, Sandra Day O’Conner has driven the development of a game-oriented civics program that is having great success. Some history or political science ought to be a given.
• Prepare themselves for creative self-expression and world-making. Just as schools emphasize how to prepare students for vocation choices, understanding oneself and one’s creative desires to contribute to the making and remaking of their world is part of being fully human. And that emphasis has become even more significant as a result of the lengthening life-span.  
• Prepare themselves for rewarding relationships in spaces of intimacy and leisure. Self-knowledge married to relationships of significance is of high importance for a sense of personal fulfillment—and vocational choice. That emphasizes communication, psych and sociology competencies.

Danielle Allen’s conclusion is spot on: Our contemporary situation demands that we help our young people find their way by marrying the cultivation of self-knowledge to a worldly capacity to see practical opportunities. This requires a curriculum that unifies liberal arts and vocational elements at all levels.

Some references:

Danielle Allen, Helping students find their place in the world, Washington Post, September 23, 2012. This is the original article from which I’ve copied extensively. 

Cal Newport, Follow a career passion? Let it follow you. New York Times, September 29, 2012.

Cal Newport, So good they can’t ignore you: why skills trump passion in the quest for work you love. (New York: Business Plus), 2012. A new book, terrifically readable, spot on with great advice by the Gen-Y blogger of Study Hacks (easily the best recommendations for becoming successful students).

Anthony Carnevale, Nicole Smith & Michelle Melton, Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics (STEM). Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University.

Liam O’Dea, Liberal Arts and Business: A Power Tool for Success. August 11, 2009, my Gen-Y protégé’s superb blog on the application of liberal arts to vocation.

Flickr photo: school lockers by hans s

The Skills Gap Is Bunk

You name the business pundit or educator. They’re all saying that the US labor market has a skills gap, a gap that has a heavy impact upon the unemployment rate. But how accurate, really, are those statistics. And more significantly, when you drill down into the jobs data what does it reveal?

The basics are scary. Four years after the start of the Great Recession, US business is making record profits. But we have a “jobless recovery” with unemployment stubbornly high. Two-thirds of manufacturing employers decry the lack of qualified applicants. Fast-growing companies say that finding really qualified candidates is a huge impediment to growth.

On the flip side, there are stories about employers who can’t find qualified applicants. Here’s one intriguing story from Peter Capelli: One of my favorites is a job ad for a cotton candy machine operator—if you’ve never seen cotton candy made, it is not rocket science—where the requirement for applicants was demonstrating prior success operating similar cotton candy machines. To test whether his company’s hiring standards were too high, a Philadelphia-area human resources executive applied anonymously for a job in his own company. “I didn’t make it through the screening process,” he notes.

I learned years ago that nobody, but nobody, understands the work marketplace from a macro/micro, employer/employee perspective better than Peter Capelli, Wharton’s GW Taylor Prof of Management and codirector of the National Center on the Educational Quality of the Workforce during both Bush and Clinton’s administrations. The statistics and the story above are from his brilliant, 100 page, readable analysis of what’s actually going on in the marketplace, Why Good People Can’t Get Jobs: The skills gap and what companies can do about it. If you’re in HR or a corporate exec, I recommend that you don’t let the sun set before you pick up your copy. You can read it in two hours.  Use your red pen, but be ready to find yourself more than a little unhappy with what he has to say about companies, execs and HR departments. Nobody comes out unscathed. Obviously, I’m going to have to revamp my thinking and some of my approach.  Aaargh!!

So why can’t good people get jobs? Among the conclusions which Capelli draws from his in-depth analysis of the data are the following:

• Higher productivity is a culprit. The simple math is that productivity was 6.7% higher at the beginning of 2012 than it was in 2008. Some of that is because companies work people harder—which has its limits. The new normal is partially impacted by higher productivity, which reduces employee need. And that's structural. 
• Population and workforce keep growing. US population is 4% (140,000 new people per month) higher now than in 2008. Fewer jobs and more people aren’t in sync.
• Employers are unwilling to pay the market wage. They shop around to see who’ll do the work for a lesser wage.
• Employers are defining job requirements in such a way that applicants have to have done the job previously before they can get hired. This is a distinct departure from the past, getting past the HR folk because of the downsizing of HR groups.
• Employers ask employees to move geographically to get a new job, but they won’t/can’t guarantee the job will last. Put yourself in the employee’s shoes. Who wants to relocate when the job may not last long, and up jobless in a community with no contacts?
• Hiring software sucks.  Really bad stuff. As Capelli’s anecdote above reveals, not a chance even in your own company.
• Employers now expect the feds, the states and the schools to do the training. In 1979, young workers on average received about 2.5 weeks of training with the company. By 2011, Accenture found that only 21% of employees had received any training whatsoever in the past five years. A huge proportion of training also used to be supplied by unions, but you know what business has done to the unions. 

So overall, employers can afford to be picky, applicants need to be overqualified, and employers focus on the skills associated with work experience, not education.

In sum, software driven hiring is a mess. And employers are unwilling to do the training that they once took for granted. It's a training gap, not a skills gap.

Capelli’s recommendations
This is too important a book for me to tell you everything Capelli has to say. Check the book list on the side of my blog to purchase it from Amazon.com. Capelli has built-in recommendations (very practical and feasible) for employers. And some very strategic recommendations for those in the job hunt.  

Capelli's little monograph grew out of a Wall Street Journal article where he ruffled more than a few feathers (441 comments, but thankfully, not all negative) by saying rather bluntly, “The real culprits are the employers themselves.”  So don’t pay too much attention to the business pundits or company representatives—about jobs or education.

Flickr photo: by Pat Rafferty