Right Recruiting Education White Paper A Right Recruiting Newsletter, 3/2011
It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. Originally written about a different topic over 100 years ago, those words also apply to today’s employment market. Some people can’t find a job and some employers can’t find a candidate. Employers tell us they can’t find good people candidates tell us they can’t find good jobs. You would think that it would easy to match the two and make everyone happy. But it’s never been harder. And I know why. Blame it on the PC. It started back in the late 70’s and early 80’s. Yep, it’s Bill Gate’s fault. Since this is our Education White Paper, you might wonder how this all ties in with education. It’s a winding road but every journey has a first step. Two roads will eventually intersect with the results of our survey on the effectiveness of on-line bachelor degree programs. Let’s begin our journey……. Imagine a manufacturer in 1980. The engineering area had draftsmen and engineers. There were real drafting boards and the pace of everything followed the physical movement of paper. Accounting was also paper based. Production and quality were trial and error. Indeed, many companies did not even have a formal quality function. Purchasing and inventory were controlled by 3x5 cards. It was slow.
Let’s use employment as a reference point and take a little trip down memory lane. Imagine a time when you mailed your resume to a company in an envelope. Think for a second about the time and effort involved in typing a resume on a typewriter and every little annoying thing that goes along with that. Did you ever dread typing the last paragraph of your resume because a spelling error meant that you had to start over? Remember carbon paper? Ponder your job without computers, cell phones, faxes, emails and the Internet. It wasn’t till 1996 that I worked at a company that had a voicemail system. My phone messages were written on pink slips and left near the receptionist desk. That was not that long ago. The last 30 years have brought profound changes in business. Use 1980 as a base line. Someone from 1950 who was magically transported to a 1980 office would be comfortable. Other than the copier, what would startle them? Then, put someone from 1980 into an office in 2010. The computer alone would seem like science fiction and your cell phone would be from Star Trek. Try to explain the Internet and available software packages. Show them an IPad with apps. I think you get the point. People often complain that companies are seeking specialists now and that they are too narrow in their job specs. That's nonsense. Professionals now need more general skills and must master more tools than 30 years ago. Job specs aren't any narrower than they were 30 years ago. It’s the infrastructure around the job that’s changed. You need to be your own CFO, CIO, VP HR, etc. Your core functions have not changed. The tools needed to do your job have changed. You are now connected to every part of your company, as well as to clients and vendors. This was unimaginable in 1980. Compare 3 carpenters, one from 1900, one from 1950 and one from 2010. Their jobs are the same. They work with wood to frame a house. The worker from 1910 arrives at a 1950 worksite and recognizes a saw, hammer and drawings. The worker from 1950 gets on a 2010 worksite and sees battery powered nail guns that explode when touched, drawing plans on CAD, laser guided leveling devices, etc. Then try to explain to him the smart phone that allows the owner to see the work in real time from 1,000 miles away. The only difference between these carpenters is the complexity of the tools. Their actual jobs are identical. They all frame houses. The level of sophistication of their tools is what separates them. A phenomenal body of knowledge has surrounded many jobs while we weren't looking. It's astounding once you recognize it. Think about any profession; engineering, sales, production, etc. The specific product knowledge required to sell a product haven’t changed. The tools are different. Writing a good email, logging an order from a smartphone, checking inventory or hosting a GoToMeeting with clients are things that need to be mastered on top of the discipline skill required to be a good salesperson. I remember speaking to a sales candidate in 1995 who complained that it was impossible to sell anything because voicemail made all prospects unreachable. That was a good example of someone who could not master a new tool. As far as I know, salespeople still exist. For most voicemail is a tool, not a hindrance. Over the last 30 years companies have been slowly modernizing specific departments by buying new tools. It has been a rolling process that touched different departments and industries at different times. Years ago a professional, when asked to do a clerical task, would say, "I will have my girl do it", meaning their secretaries. Now, many CEO's don't even have secretaries. Not only are most professionals their own CIO, CFO and VP of Sales, they are also their own administrative staff. A CEO who in the past never even typed a letter now puts together his own multimedia presentations. Engineers and designers were the first affected. As CAD and scientific workstations became cheaper, their tools were upgraded. It was probably in 1986 that I first eliminated a candidate from an engineering job because he did not have CAD experience. He did not lack engineering talent. He just had not mastered a new tool. In the mid-1990’s, the same wave swamped quality departments. Computers and software became cheap and allowed small companies to tap into the same quality tools that Toyota and Honda used. Old line quality departments were phased out and replaced by TQM, the precursor to Six Sigma. Then, companies needed to professionalize production supervision and operations. New statistical quality and planning tools made it more difficult to promote someone from the ranks exclusively based on personal leadership skills. A networked computer on every shop-floor workstation meant that a Production Supervisor needed to master complex tools in order be competent. They needed more than charisma to do their job well. Jobs that used to be filled by people out of the ranks were filled by college grads. The most recent area to be professionalized has been the purchasing function. Just as Toyota demonstrated that a professional quality focus could positively affect the bottom line, Wal-Mart showed that an integrated supply chain could have the same result. Those who couldn’t adjust were phased out. They were replaced by people who could be their own CIO, CFO, etc. A good production supervisor now has more real time sales data at their fingertips than a VP Sales had 30 years ago. A salesperson today commands more computer power than NASA used to send a man to the moon. Buyers identify vendors globally without leaving their chair. Today, employees need to understand more than their narrow day to day tasks. Despite what we learned from Mr. Disney, it's not a small world, after all. The world hasn't shrunk. Our available tools have just made some of us bigger. Today's mismatch in the employment market is directly related to these rolling departmental upgrades. A candidate whose entire career was with a firm that had never upgraded certain functions (a buyer who has never used an ERP system, for example, or a production supervisor who can't understand an Excel spreadsheet) is at a loss when interviewing for a job with a company that upgraded that function years ago. For example, an engineer with no CAD experience would be almost unemployable. Many others are in that same boat now. This is frustrating because most job advertisements focus on the job function, i.e. 5+ years of purchasing experience with an emphasis in commodities. A candidate with only pre-upgrade experience sees the ad and says, "Golly, I have that experience. I fit those specs. Why won't they hire me?" But the job also requires someone who has worked with powerful software and who is comfortable in communicating directly with sales and production to insure proper planning. Someone from a firm that never upgraded purchasing has never been exposed to the tools and systems needed to do the advertised job. The job specifications have not narrowed. In fact, a top flight employer would rather hire a top flight candidate from outside of their industry than someone from within their industry from an antiquated company. The quality of your past employers has become more important. It’s not just what you’ve done-it’s who you’ve done it for. This rolling tide of department upgrades has created a population of unemployed workers but has simultaneously created a need for new workers and skills. Today, you need the right discipline skills as well as experience in the right type of company in your background. If your employer is 10 to 20 years out of date, so are you. In 1980 that would not have mattered. It is catastrophic now. A common criteria used by employers to help them identify solid candidates is a Bachelor degree. Many jobs that, in the past, only required a high school education now require a college degree. Employers believe that a college education signifies that a person can master new tools in their job. Not just today's tools, but tomorrow’s as well. I know many non-degreed candidates fight this concept and find it unfair. Don't shoot the messenger. I did not create this world. We are finally at the education section of this White Paper. Over the last 5 years, we have seen a tremendous increase in the number of resumes we've received from people with on-line degrees from University of Phoenix, Strayer and others. Are they the equivalent of a traditional brick and mortar program? Are they a glorified community college? I needed to know the answer so that I could properly evaluate them. Are these programs a quick and affordable way to build skills? Fortunately, a great source of knowledge is at my fingertips. I turned to the managers and executives in my database. We surveyed over 100 managers at over 100 companies about their experience with on-line educated people on their staff. Are they as good as non-degreed people, no better than a high school grad or somewhere in between? The answers were not surprising but, hidden within them, was a very useful nugget of information. As expected, 1/4 felt they were as good as someone with a traditional college degree and 1/4 felt they were no better than high school. The rest, a majority, rated them as in between. However, we received some surprising unsolicited side advice. Many managers independently added the same comment. They felt that the programs were fine in providing specific discipline experience. But, they thought that the programs did not create people who could work well on teams, especially with people outside of their discipline. I take this as a significant data point because this was a common unsolicited comment made by almost 1/4 of the respondents. The people who made that comment came from a variety of industries and had titles from CEO down to HR Manager to Department Manager. Now, we have reached the intersection of two roads. The first road is the road that comes from employers. That is the road that, over the last 30 years, has created the need for a more professional and better trained workforce. That is not, as many people think, a euphemism for a specialized workforce. Basically, businesses want a flexible, professional workforce that can work with a wide variety of people. Rightly or wrongly, businesses think a college degree signifies an ability to adapt. This led us to the survey comments about the weakness of on-line bachelor programs. Few survey respondents complained about a lack of specific discipline knowledge. Most complained about a general lack of people and communications skills. In other words, the on-line educated engineer had a harder time understanding and communicating with internal marketing people than did the traditionally educated engineer, for example. Since business today requires more and more out-of-discipline interaction, a professional who doesn't understand or appreciate the entire business is a liability. To be your own CIO, VP of HR and administrative support staff, you first need to know what those people do. My survey showed that executives and managers do not believe that on-line programs are providing people with that type of well-rounded background. So far, we have seen how Bill Gates and company gave businesses the ability to become more efficient, quicker and more sophisticated. That, in turn, drove a steady shift to professional workforces in all departments and in all industries. Part of that led to an education requirement for many jobs that was a level or two above what had previously been required. Due to the time and expense required to get a traditional BS or BA degree, the on-line, for profit industry grew to fill the gap. Our survey has shown that has only been partially successful. We've reached that aforementioned intersection and discussed the first road, the one coming from employers. The second road is the one that comes from the schools themselves. Since they are not sufficiently closing the gap, what have they done wrong and how do they correct it? Schools have profoundly misunderstood the skills that their students need to succeed. They zigged but the world zagged. In a misguided attempt to provide "skills", they've become trade schools, selling a finely diced series of majors and minors marketed to a gullible public. Rather than turning out well rounded people who can adapt to new tools and new situations, they have focused on teaching a skill checklist designed to allow their students to walk into a world of specialists that does not exist. Let me give two anecdotal observations. In the late 1990's, when IT was hot, I spoke to a fellow who was an Informix database administrator. Informix was a competitor of Oracle and a handful of other companies in the database world. He saw himself as a computer scientist and, since all surveys said that IT professionals would always be in demand, he was very sure of a permanent and long-lasting market for his skills. He was wrong. He was an expert in one tool provided by one vendor. His inability to broaden himself cost him dearly as his platform lost ground to other database providers. The world of Informix users shrank over time, limiting his employability. He thought, because he worked in a hot field, he would personally be hot. In fact, his field was changing so quickly that he became his generations COBOL programmer. He was credentialed in a tool but uneducated about the world. Last year I spoke to a fresh grad from Drexel. She had a degree in BioEngineering, an engineering program emphasizing medical and pharmaceutical products and applications along with some mechanical and chemical engineering. Unfortunately, last year was a tough year in which to graduate and she had not received any offers. She had applied to us for a job designing consumer products. Our client was not interested in her for two reasons. One, her college program emphasized areas that had no relevance to their needs. Yes, she had some mechanical design courses and was a mechanical engineer but side courses were in medical and scientific areas. My client wanted someone with business and related interests and they wanted a more general background. The second reason they had no interest in her is also worth noting. They assumed that she chose a narrow major because that was where her true interest lied. They felt that their products would not interest her and that she would end up leaving once something in her field appeared. Both examples show the danger of specialization. Schools believe that businesses want people with very specific skills and think they are responding to that need. They hear that bioengineering is hot and design a program based upon that concept and sell it to a general public as a competitive career advantage. The two problems with that are obvious. The first is, as we’ve said before, businesses don’t want specialists, especially at a junior level. They want very good basic skills and the ability to work on a team. Two, if you start to design a program around a hot field today your first grads won’t be graduating for about 6 years. No one knows what field will be hot 6 years from now. If wind energy is not hot in 2018, what will all those wind energy majors do while the mechanical engineers are still getting hired for traditional engineering jobs? On-line programs are trying to fill a need for a quick and affordable college education. That’s a laudable goal. However, our survey showed that both schools and students need to find a way to provide what businesses really want. Employers want people who know specific facts and have mastered skills but who also can apply them in a variety of settings in a constantly changing work environment! The simplicity of getting a degree on-line from your bedroom or den comes with a price. Traditional colleges, with all their many faults, do a pretty good job of throwing a lot of different types of people together. From that experience, some walk away with a well-rounded tool kit of personal and communications skills. That’s what businesses really want. The solution is easy to see but difficult to implement. The rush to credentialize the on-line curriculum needs to be slowed down a tad. I know that most students in these programs work full-time and are in a hurry to get their degree and become eligible for the jobs and promotions that elude them now. That’s good. But the value of the credential can be enhanced by extending or altering the program to include an emphasis on general day-to-day business and personal communications issues and skills as well as a reinforcement of the fact that a continual commitment to education and skills upgrade is required of the individual. Put simply, a certificate is great as long as the specific skill acquired is of value. A certificate is helpful as long as you can apply it to a constantly changing working environment. An employee who thinks a credential is an education needs to focus on broadening their skills and outlook and see the world as it is today. This in an interconnected world that requires professionals to work on teams of people from many disciplines and fields. Know enough about the world to be able to appreciate excellence outside of your area of expertise. Our survey has shown that on-line programs have not yet been fully successful in bridging the gap between no degree and a traditional degree. It’s a first step that can hopefully lead to a series of increasingly more effective steps. I hope so. As ever, Thanks for getting this far. Don’t hesitate to send any comments or questions.
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