By Howard Tullman

21-Oct-24 – Want your kids to still love you when they’re in their 30s, when they’ve started work at a real job, busted their butts for a few years, maybe had a child or two of their own, and hopefully come to appreciate how hard you had to work – at whatever you did – to provide them with viable options and serious opportunities for a strong and secure future?

If so, then now’s a great time to do your offspring a real favor, wherever they are on the education and employment treadmill. Tell them that, for the next decade or so, the smart money is on vocational training, OJT, and concrete careers rather than investing four or more years on college and grad school followed by a fruitless search for employment in areas of the economy that are disappearing. Today, I’d rather be a longshoreman than a lawyer, a builder rather than a banker and, for sure, a plumber rather than a political science major.

The ugly alternative for millions of students whose parents, like so many lemmings, followed the traditional route and fumbled their kids’ future, is to condemn them after college to a few years of wishful thinking, lots of numbing networking, go-nowhere gigs, and endless pleading emails to family and friends. All of that accompanied by a challenging clump of college debt that will likely be an albatross around their necks for decades.

(Left) Welders working on a caisson form on the Chicago River west of Dearborn Street.

In addition to the unavoidable loan repayment load, these graduates suffer from the deluded and misleading indoctrination offered by the faculties of most colleges and universities. These Ph.D. fantasy factories do a miserable job of setting realistic expectations and goals for their graduates.

A-range grades at Harvard and Yale represent almost 80 percent of all grades “earned” by students at these two schools. You might ask yourself how those participation awards compare with the typical distribution of team members’ performances in your company and how this kind of “everyone’s a star and a winner” crap is helpful in preparing students for the vagaries and vicissitudes of the working world. Inflated grading on a curve doesn’t help anyone outside of these institutions although it keeps the campers and their parents happy.

The reason we’re seeing so many employers unhappy with the newest crop of employees has a lot more to do with attitude problems, unreal expectations, and accelerated entitlement than with actual aptitude. That’s because in the real world of work, you learn a cruel lesson early on: that the amount of education you allegedly need to get a job has risen much faster than the amount of education you actually need to do a job.

There are three main reasons for this disparity:

First, the present job occupants don’t want new, younger threats to their own positions, so they raise the bar, expand the requirements, and effectively pull up the drawbridge. But much to their dismay, the inbound tide is unstoppable. By 2025, there will be more Gen Zs in the workforce than boomers – and the Gen Zs are coming for those very jobs.

Second, there are fewer and fewer available jobs in certain “soft skill” sectors like banking, finance, and publishing, because the mid-level positions in every organization are being compressed or eliminated. So, the competition for scarcer slots is fiercer than ever and the paper credentials required are more substantial, even though they may have little bearing on the candidate’s actual ability to do the job in question.

In the long haul, preparation, perspiration, and passion ultimately win out over diplomas from even the fanciest schools.

The third reason is the growth and expansion of disruptive technologies, which are changing the work requirements in many of these fields. There’s no doubt that automation, robotics, and AI are job killers, but the nasty little secret is that the expected devastation is highly targeted and primarily aimed at middle management, administrators, editors, and bean counters.

Jobs are on the front lines

But the good news is that the front-line folks – the ones who need to deal with and deliver the goods and services to the ultimate customers, the ones who work with their hands and their heads – will always have secure positions. This is true across the board, whether it’s construction, maintenance, early education, nursing and elder care, or anything in hospitality and retail. You’re always going to need a meat sack at the end of the production line if you care at all about customer satisfaction and results.

Columnist George Will says that we don’t have enough trained workers to build our nuclear subs, and those vessels are the most formidable tools we have to defend our shores and discourage our enemies on multiple fronts. We’re going to need millions of new team members to support our most fundamental industries and they’re not going to be coming exclusively from traditional colleges and universities.

I’m increasingly convinced that vocational education, industry apprenticeships, and union labor may save our kids as well as our ships. We all learn by doing, not just by watching or listening. It’s a “put up or shut up” world today. When you’re working side-by-side with others who’ve been there and done it, the ongoing “education” isn’t limited to specific physical skills; you learn a lot about cooperation, connection, community, and work ethic. Unlike college, it’s never just about you.

The bottom line: I’d rather be a welder than a writer, a mechanic not a mathematician, and a nurse rather than a naturalist.