Training People for an Industrial Economy?
There’s a massive misalignment between the labor pool and the job pool, and I blame our undergraduate institutions. They’re still training people for an industrial economy. While not every person graduating can be an engineer, business folks are not going to be managing and working with production lines, or for that matter filling roles in investment banks and management consulting firms. The business jobs in this economy comes from: selling digital media, trafficking ads in DART, negotiating CDN prices with suppliers, creating P&L’s where the COGs is Akamai, tracking and filing bugs in Pivotal Tracker. A business person in 2011 needs to be able to dialogue with a Product team about the features customers need, and this business person needs to have an inkling of a sense as to how code is built and what can be shipped and how.
And yet, the case studies in business schools still involve cranberry farms, beer shipping, and Microsoft vs. Apple.
This short blog post sums up such a huge problem that I have seen in the labor market these days. Not only at startups, but most large companies literally can not find enough employees to work there.
Then I realize why - we truly are still teaching people to work in an industrial economy. I always use this example. In my Intro to Marketing MBA course, we had to do a few case study analyses. Every single one predated the internet. The one my group had to focus on was a mail order catalog.
I’ve never even ordered something from a mail order catalog.
Luckily I have been blessed with professors who ditched their textbooks and fostered true discussion and learning of what was new in the world. One of my best undergrad professors would literally print out articles from that morning’s Wall Street Journal or New York Times if it was relevant to what he was teaching.
Students coming out of college today should be at the forefront of innovation. We have lived our entire lives with some of the most amazing technology that other people are just starting to grasp, yet it seems like the dots aren’t being connected in some learning environments.
(shameless plug) I also hope that my new site, Behind Companies, will become a resource for up to date business case studies.
