A new study by the Milken Institute found a strong relationship between a well-educated population and a region’s economic performance.¹ Though it’s common knowledge that well-educated workers often make more money and have better jobs than less-educated workers, this study stands out in that it also found that just by their geographic location, less-educated people can make more money if they live in the same area as more-educated people.

Other key findings from the report include:

• Education increases regional prosperity. Adding one year to the average years of schooling among the employed in a metropolitan area is associated with an increase of real GDP per capita of more than ten percent, and an increase in real wages per worker of more than eight percent.
• Better educated = bigger benefits. The better educated the worker, the greater the benefit of additional schooling, to both the worker and the region. Add one year of college to a region’s workforce, for instance, and GDP per capita jumps 17.4 percent.
• Clusters count. In metros with clusters of high-skilled occupations, the share of workers holding at least a master’s degree is much higher than in metros without significant clusters, perhaps because of the intense competition for employment.

 

In order to use the findings to improve the economy, one recommendation by the institute is to increase the number of college graduates. As we all know, this is easier said than done. One of the greatest barriers that stands between a student and graduation is unpreparedness. This unpreparedness can start as early as preschool, and if not addressed, will stick with the student until graduation day, if they are lucky enough to make it there. Many of today’s students and high school graduates understand the need for some form of higher education in order to have real career options in the 21st century. However, many students today get left behind in K-12 and enter college unprepared, often taking developmental (or remedial) courses before they can enroll in a college-level course.

If you read my blog earlier this week you know every year 1.7 million 4-year and 2-year students will enroll in a remedial course. The vast majority of these students will not enroll in a college-level course.  Today I am leading the session Professionalism for Developmental Students:  Workplace Mindsets for Classroom Success at the NADE conference. I’ll be answering questions like: “How Does Lack of Preparation at the College Level Impede Employment?” and “How Can Faculty Set Expectations for Professional Success in Your Developmental Class?” Today’s students — developmental or otherwise — need to be held accountable for coming to class, doing the work, and passing the course. Today’s educators need to get an investment from their students and make a choice to show how the skills they are teaching will impact the student’s future prosperity. Not until we have accountable students and educators will we begin to have the graduation rates we desire.

This is LifeBound’s last day at the NADE conference. If you haven’t stopped by our booth, come say hello and learn more about becoming an academic coach for your students. You can also visit our coaching website at www.lifeboundcoaching.com.

¹“Better Higher Education Leads to a Better Regional Economy, Report Says.” The Chronicle. <http://chronicle.com/blogs/bottomline/better-higher-education-leads-to-a-better-regional-economy-report-says/>
²A Matter of Degrees: The Effect of Educational Attainment on Regional Economic Prosperity.” The Milken Institute. <http://www.milkeninstitute.org/publications/publications.taf?function=detail&ID=38801395&cat=resrep>

Students’ lack of college and career preparation takes on many forms beyond academic deficits.

It shows up with them not knowing what to expect from college, not knowing how to anticipate challenges and obstacles, and not having the grit and determination to succeed. It shows up with their lack of follow through skills, and their not knowing how to take advantage of resources to craft a college experience that will deliver the abilities and connections to launch a successful career.

Adams County is helping high school students make the connection between high school, college, and career with their program Experience 9 to 5. Students choose to explore a career, ranging from agriculture to health care to communications, and meet with professionals in their chosen field to see if it is the right fit for them. Professionals will provide students with hands-on experiences in the field, share the ins-and-outs of their career, and take any questions about how high school students can go from a high school graduate to a new professional.

This year LifeBound is excited to participate in this experience. We are looking forward to having as many as 10 high school students in our office learning more about the day-to-day work as a writer and publisher, including blogging, editing, networking, and brainstorming with a team. We will share the student blogs on the LifeBound website at the end of the session.

If we want higher high school graduation rates, college entrance rates, college completion rates, and employee success rates, it’s essential we start bridging the gap between education and the world of work for students before they get to college. Through a program like Experience 9 to 5 students will learn they found their path, they need to keep searching, or that they are more interested in another aspect of the same profession. We can’t wait to meet these career seeking students and help guide them toward any profession.

Learn more about Experience 9 to 5, and don’t miss the interviews of participating professionals speaking about how they got into the profession and what benefits students can get out of attending their session.

Over the next 10 years, more boomers will leave the workforce and need new skilled workers to take their place. Not only will the next generation of workers inherit careers over the next decade, the BLS predicts there will be more growth in jobs that require an associate’s degree, while jobs that require long-term on-the-job training will diminish.

With the 2012 average national unemployment rate ranging from 8 to 9%, and a threat of a returning recession, we must focus on what drives employability in this market. Young adults were among the hardest hit in the recession with only 54 percent of Americans ages 18 to 24 finding employment in 2012. Unemployment in young adults can cause many lasting problems for the economy:

• No additional financial help for struggling family.
• May dropout of high school or college for a working opportunity.
• Won’t gain transferable working skills at low-skill jobs.
• Delayed independence, marriage, and large purchases and investments.

In 1984, when I graduated from college into the country’s last bad recession, I was one of the fortunate and the few to find a job at the time. I began working two days after I graduated from college while other people I knew left for Europe, graduate programs, volunteer opportunities like Peace Corps, or took jobs beneath their education level until the economy turned around. One of the only reasons I was hired, being a hard-working graduate from a state school, is because in college I held two unpaid internships in both Washington, D.C. and New York City. I waited on tables those summers to earn my way. What I learned on those internships would be invaluable to me as I began my first job.  The insight that I gained from juggling a white-collar job by day and a minimum-wage job by night showed me two worlds. One was where I was going with my education, know-how, and ambition. The other represented a world where, no matter how hard you worked, it would be hard to make ends meet.

Today, we are quibbling over paid or unpaid internships. My unpaid internships were the best financial investments I could have made. At age twenty-six, I was promoted to assistant vice-president and Director of Marketing and I was the first female to hold the position in an industry, which, at the time, had mostly men in higher positions and mostly women as assistants. Students in America need internships –for college credit or for no pay.

Students need an education outside of school to give a context for learning. Success in college, career, and life can only be gleaned through making seemingly unrelated connections.  If students don’t risk to do and to fail, how can they know what they might really achieve? It’s not just about what students know in the 21^st century, it is also about what they know how to do. If we don’t all wake up to that reality, we will continue to fail students and fail ourselves.

When employees don’t feel like their abilities are being used to their full potential, work is “frustrating” and “exhausting,” according to a study that asked subordinates to rate the percentage of their intelligence they felt their higher-ups were tapping into. These questions lead to researchers defining two types of leaders in the workplace:

1. “Diminishers”: A leader who is set on their own ideas and doesn’t use the intelligence from their staff to expand on ideas.
2. “Multipliers”: A leader who uses and amplifies the intelligence around them.

In her article, “Smart Leaders Get More Out of the Employees They Have,” Liz Wiseman explains leaders identified as “diminishers” were rated as only using 48% of an employee’s intellectual capability. “Multipliers” were reported as using 95% of their intellectual capability. Data from this study, along with additional research after publication, found employers are only using 66% of their employees’ capability.

“[Companies] spend their time and money ‘grocery shopping’ for talent,” says Wiseman, “when they can simply look inside the already well-stocked refrigerator.”

Leader is a verb not a noun. An effective leader is one who can stand at the helm, while also taking full advantage of the crew’s individual talents. However, employees also have the responsibility to show their strengths to their employers and vocalize that they have unused talents.

Recently, in his article “Youth Unemployment: Is It the Bad Economy or Inability to Overcome Adversity,” Don McNay poses a relationship between today’s high youth unemployment rate and the lack of ambition and tenacity he’s seen firsthand from youth. He tells the story of one young person he knows who looked for a job for several months, then without any offers, gave up and started working in fast food. Another young person he knows seems to be waiting at his mom’s house for someone to come by with a job offer.

McNay reminisces about  leaving grad school and working for a candidate in Congress directly out of school. However, the candidate lost and McNay was on the street. His next job was on the cleanup crew at the Kentucky Horse Park. The experience showed him he needed more stability and to be his own boss, and illuminated his ample supply of tenacity and ambition. “If young people have been sheltered from overcoming failure, they may not understand that adversity ultimately leads to opportunity,” he says.

Yes, the unemployment rates are real and they are tragic. But progress takes action. Employers can work with the employees they have and employees can show their employers they are underused. If employees or employers feel stuck with what they have, they need to take action. Become the verb and not the noun.

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Sources:

“Smart Leaders Get More Out of the Employees They Have,” by Liz Wiseman. 20 August 2012. Harvard Business Review. Accessed on 22 August 2012. http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/08/smart_leaders_get_more_out_of.html

“Youth Unemployment: Is It the Bad Economy or Inability to Overcome Adversity?” by Don McNay. 18 August 2012. The Huffington Post. Accessed on 22 August 2012. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/don-mcnay/youth-unemployment_b_1803153.html

The Class of 2012 has reason to celebrate. They’re among the 56% of college students who stuck it out and finished a college degree in under 6 years,¹Â they found their calling, and they are prepared to make an impact on the world. However, with rising student debt, a volatile job market, and an overall uncertain economic future, many students may also be leaving with anxiety about entering the workforce.

Graduation, whether in 1960 or 2012 or in an up or down economy, can bring a mixed bag of emotions. Our evolving society provides each generation a unique perspective as they leave the comfort of academia, but we all have common emotions, thoughts, and questions as we step into a new environment that possesses some level of uncertainty. Change is a dichotomy. This exciting time full of parties, toasts, friends, and family can also bring pangs of sadness.

The world of work is changing, and whether it scares or excites you, one thing is for certain: you shouldn’t be surprised if your job doesn’t exist in two decades. Many people are fearful of the changing workforce because it means uncertainty, foreign technology, and possible unemployment. However, the recent Fast Company article “The Career of the Future Doesn’t Include A 20-Year Plan. It’s More Like Four,” shows change can be positive, and something you should expect more of in your career.

In the article, Anya Kamentz profiles three different kinds of professionals who have held a variety of positions, and predict more in their future. Adam Hasler, 28, has moved from taking over a coffeehouse to learning programming and applying to MIT over the last 5 years. Cheryl Edmonds, 61, received her avionics training for an Air Force reservist in 1976, was an engineer at IBM, taught English in China, and now works at a non-profit. Stacy Brown-Philpot, 36, earned her undergrad in economics, worked for Goldman Sachs, got her MBA from Stanford, worked with startups for free, and ended up at Google. All three of these workers have the same attitude about their careers: they want to keep learning and growing.

But, you might wonder, isn’t it a liability to have multiple spurts of short-term employment on your resume? Not necessarily. New employers are considering short-term employment a benefit if it falls in one of two categories, according to Judy Gilbert, director of “people operation’s” at Google’s YouTube: One, the change is due to them being promoted within the company, or two, the change shows an intention behind their leaving a job, such as they grew out of the company because they needed a challenge.

The professional of the past might have looked for a comfy position they could be in until retirement, but the new professional has the following skills to make them more movable and desirable:

• Transdisciplinary: A “T-shaped” person with both depth in one subject and breadth in another can be hirable in multiple jobs. For instance, Adam Hasler is fluent in Spanish and has strong computational skills.
• Synthesizing and collaborating: These people can take their knowledge from multiple areas and collaborate with a team to learn even more.
• Dynamic: Because the jobs of the future don’t exist yet, employers want to hire people who can adjust to new tasks.

Much of the change and uncertainty in the careers of the future will be due to technological advances, but it’s not quite the time to worry about a computer taking over your job. The advantage humans still have over computers is social intelligence, and these are the skills the employers of the future will be looking for. “[In the future,] everything that can be routinized, codified, and dissected will eventually be done by machines,” says Marina Gorbis at the Institute for the Future. “Social and emotional intelligence is what humans are uniquely good at–at least for the next decade or two.”

• How can you be an agent of change for you own interests and abilities? How can you create your own career opportunities?
• How can you be flexible and embrace work which is both difficult and personally challenging?
• How can you be an academic and career coach for others based on what you yourself have learned?

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Source:

“The Career Of the Future Doesn’t Include A 20-Year Plan. It’s More Like Four,” by Anya Kamentz. 9 January 2012. Fast Company. Accessed on 11 January 2012. http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/162/average-time-spent-at-job-4-years