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‘How Do I Do That?’ The New Hires of 2023 Are Unprepared for Work
- salawat 3y agoCorrection: management expectations of the time costs of training up new entrants are vastly underestimated.
- ajhurliman 3y agoEven the intro example about designing an aluminum part to be milled with a lathe as a simple first year college thing… no, we had a manufacturing class where we briefly used a lathe in junior year, but most of the stuff in college was academic. We were doing linear algebra and sizing HVAC systems, not designing for production.
- acornax 3y agoJust imagine how much worse it would be if the graduate had an art history degree. I mean, it's fascinating but it doesn't tend to be relevant on the job. The idea that university is job training just needs to go. The academic material may be relevant for work later on but it often isn't, and on the job there is way more to learn.
- lucidguppy 3y agoI agree - college is a filter - not a tech tree. In engineering school you solve problems similar to industry - but its more the difficulty than the similarity. New grads can handle the difficulty your job provides. If you train them - they should get the hang of it. Industry leads academia in undergrad - not the other way around. Industry knew that new grads needed 6-12 months of niche education (this is the general operation of Turbo Encabulators https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ac7G7xOG2Ag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ac7G7xOG2Ag). It was in their budget. Now.... not so much.
- arethuza 3y agoWhen I started at my first job out of university in 1988 I was told it would be at least 6 months before my contribution to the business would be a net positive - which was probably an underestimate!
- constantcrying 3y agoHow is it a "correction" when the article explicitly quotes someone saying that hiring managers should focus more on willingness to learn? Did you read the article?
- archo 3y agohttps://archive.is/ORkht https://archive.is/ORkht
- seeknotfind 3y agoCan you imagine being confused how to do something on your first job out of college, and someone writes an article about it in The Wall Street Journal?
- jaygreco 3y agoMy thought exactly. This article might as well only exist so older folks can pop it open and feel smug and superior about something dumb.
- constantcrying 3y agoThe article argues that the pandemic is to blame and that it is not about decreasing quality of young people.
- pydry 3y agoIt reads more like typical investor entitlement syndrome. The WSJ opinion pages are often a laundry list of gripes against the government that investor demands that are not being met.
- tapoxi 3y agoThe WSJ is a Murdoch rag. It's just slightly classier than Fox News.
- blitzar 3y agoOf course that assumes that they all knew exactly how to do everything day one on the job. The kind of people that will feel smug and superior probably like to tell themselves these lies are true, but after 20 years on the job most of them still need the junior on the team to show them how these new fangled computermibobs work every few days.
- smodo 3y agoYeah it’s a nice variation on ‘todays kids don’t want to work anymore.’ In this episode it turns out they’re too stupid! This place is going to hell in a hand basket I tell you! In my day we learned to use a slide rule and that got me through 50 years of not using slide rules. Kids these days.
- PrivateButts 3y agoI know that this is yet another article about how an emergency shift to a novel form of education maybe wasn't ideal for a quality education, but when has school ever completely prepared someone for whatever path they take in life? Didn't for me when I graduated. There is so much to learn, so much specific knowledge out there, that it's impossible to cram it all into X years of schooling. Best you can do is teach them the broad, base level stuff, give them some opportunities and connections to get started, and help them build the skills to learn new things efficiently. Learning doesn't stop when school ends.
- ttoinou 3y agoExactly. This type of article is to make us believe school was ever useful. It was not much
- ngetchell 3y agoSays the person that can form a sentence, likely thanks to instruction they received from a school.
- willcipriano 3y agoI can form much more complete and eloquent sentences and I treated school as the re-education camps that they are. My mother taught me to read, then books (and later the internet) taught me the rest.
- andsoitis 3y ago> I can form much more complete and eloquent sentences much more than what?
- willcipriano 3y ago> It was not much Not a big deal and not something I would point our normally but it lacks punctuation and lands a bit soft for my tastes.
- onetokeoverthe 3y ago[dead]
- constantcrying 3y agoThe title is really bad. "How do I do that" is the most normal response any new hire has about many things in his job and the rest of the article is not really about people having questions when entering the workforce. The claim of the article is that around two years of social isolation and removal from normal methods of learning has significantly hurt the social and educational development of young adults and that employers now should focus more on training for new hires.
- mikrl 3y agoThe worst kinds of companies - will expect you to do the thing - won’t tell you how to do it - will ignore you or get mad if you ask how to do it - will punish you for figuring it out yourself It happened to me somewhat recently (I’m out of that place now) and I’ve been sharpening my proverbial knives ever since.
- Pigalowda 3y agoIt took 3 people to write this beautiful fecalith.
- Eumenes 3y agoNews flash: college continues to be poor preparation for the workforce and remote work fails at creating an environment for mentorship and L&D, esp. among the inexperienced. If you're fresh out of college or looking for your first job in tech/engineering, do yourself a favor and find a company that works onsite. Ask recruiters and the interviewers about this. Make sure that senior/staff level employees don't have carved out exemptions to WFH. You have an entire career to work remotely, spend the first ~ 5 years being surrounded by people smarter and more inexperienced than yourself.
- rabbits_2002 3y agoWhat a terrible article.
- nebulousthree 3y agoStop complaining and bring back apprenticeships. A university's objective is to create more professors and researchers, not industry workers.
- emmelaich 3y ago... create more adminstrators, professors and researchers
- eli_gottlieb 3y agoNow don't be silly. No point creating professors and researchers when the funding could go to administrators instead!
- x86x87 3y agoI know! RTO /s An environment that fosters collaboration and mentorship surely will address this. Not.
- helveticar 3y agoThere is a difference between academic learning and vocational training. The UK used to have higher education institutions called Polytechnics, I went to one. These taught degree courses qualifying you for working life. Architects, chemists, computer scientists... I did a 4 year degree, the third year was spent working for an employer. At the end of the final year much of what I'd been taught formally was outdated or irrelevant to the workplace. Many of the useful skills came from practical projects and that third year. Polys got phased out and renamed Universities, a valuable distinction was lost and no one was fooled.
- starky 3y agoRegarding the example at the start of the article I haven't found that new design engineers are less capable than ones in the past. Hiring interested and capable of learning junior designers isn't a problem at all. If anything, with the availability of inexpensive 3D printers, more students actually build stuff in their free time since it is more accessible than needing to have access to machine tools. In the past you would have mostly been looking at the few who had joined a design team like Formula SAE. I still do think it would be beneficial to any aspiring mechanical designer to spend some time working in a machine shop and learning how things are actually made. It is definitely one of the most beneficial experiences that I had during my schooling and made me stand out from the rest of my fellow graduates when finding a first job.
- fatnoah 3y agoIs this new? I distinctly remember this as my own experience starting out in the late '90's, and it basically feels like the experience of every new hire I've seen. Actually, with better tooling, Google, and the like, I feel like new hires are more able to fix and solve their issues. (in software, anyway)