Millenials and jobs

Ex-PH2 sends us a link from NBC News which reports that which we already know. Recent college grads holding their bright and shiny new diplomas grasped tightly in their smooth, unscarred forepaws aren’t well-suited for the job market.

This is a tough job market for millennials, those born between the early 1980s and 2000. The unemployment rate in March for recent college graduates was 12.2 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. A study by Accenture found that roughly 40 percent are employed in jobs that don’t require a college degree.

[…]

In that survey, State of St. Louis Workforce 2013, a lack of communication skills, a poor work ethic and a lack of critical thinking and problem solving were the biggest shortcomings of the job applicants they were seeing. ” ‘Soft skills’ once again far outpaced technical skills such as math and computer skills as the most lacking in the workforce,” the study concluded.

Of course, most of us know that most jobs really don’t require a college education anyway. The job from which I recently retired required that I have a diploma when I applied, but I didn’t use anything I learned in college to do that job. Of course, neither did I learn anything in college that I hadn’t already learned in high school two decades before. That’s education inflation.

High schools have pretty much stopped teaching and become a socialization process. So much so that colleges have a large portion of their freshmen students in remedial skills programs – much like the military has had to do, as well (In the Army, we called it Basic Skills Education Program). And of course, the sirens’ song for parents is that unreasonably hallowed college degree for their children.

But that’s not what the article is about. Well, not exactly. I looked up to college students…until I taught some of them at ROTC. They develop bad work habits in college because their teachers let them get away with stuff that no employer ever would. I once heard a student plead with a teacher to delay his midterm exam (which was scheduled for that day) because he’d been up all night at the frat house working over the pledges. Of course, the teacher acquiesced.

The job I just left paid a lot of money and promotion potential was very high because it was tedious – we edited federal regulations, about the driest crap in the world to spend your life doing. But, I started at $10/hour and retired at $40/hour after nearly 15 years, rolling over a fairly large 401k. And, after a training period and the technology catching up, I worked from home every day. But we had new employees who would come to work the first day and we’d never see them again after a rigorous selection process – because it wasn’t as exciting as it sounded to be a Writer/Editor at the National Archives. But I got out of your way, so take a shot at it.

In another article at Yahoo News about the unemployment rate which went down today, they explain why that news isn’t particularly good when it closely examined;

Below the headline both average wages earned and work-week duration were unchanged, but the participation rate fell to 62.8%. It’s the lowest participation since 1978, highlighting concerns that the economic recovery is largely a statistical game of smoke and mirrors. Participation is a widely watched number though it’s hard to say exactly what it’s supposed to be given the skewing impact of retiring baby boomers.

“Like all these reports there’s something here for everyone,” says Zach Karabell of Envestnet. “800,000 people evaporated from the labor force. You have continual participation going down and a lot of these jobs are ill-paid and tough to live on. I do hope that in some sense the conversation shifts from jobs to what are the quality of these jobs and what kind of wages (are being earned).”

So, as bad as the current employment climate is, it’s not changing very much anytime soon.

If I was young again and starting out, I’d take Mike Rowe’s advice and go to a trade school instead of getting my degree in Indonesian Interpretive Dance. My degree is actually in History and Political Science – about as useful as Indonesian Interpretive Dance, actually, unless you’re going into the education field.

By the way, while I was adjusting to the job market and finding my niche in the Machine, my retirement pay, and Tricare, however skimpy that was, kept us alive. So don’t rule out the military. Despite what some folks at Foreign Policy might argue, you learn good work habits that translate well to college and the work world, while your peers languish in college, making excuses to their teachers why they can’t do something.

If you were an employer, who would you rather hire? Now if we can only beat that PTS stigma thing.

Category: Economy