Of the many buzzwords making the rounds in Davos this year, “skills gap” is the most ubiquitous. While there seems to be a broad consensus on what the causes of the said gap are – outdated teaching methods and course syllabi, and lack of in-work training – there is less agreement on what needs to be done, or who should be doing it.
~ BBC News, reporting from Davos, World Economic Forum, January 2015
Did you ever want to be an astronaut? To take small steps and giant leaps across the face of a planet never touched by toes before? To explore the outer reaches of human curiosity in our celestial back yard? If so, the end of NASA’s Space Shuttle Program in 2011 would have been a sad day for you and daydreamers everywhere. The end of an era. Sure, it’s cheaper and easier to send a probe into orbit than a high maintenance human with a short shelf life, but we’re not going to let the machines have all the fun, are we? Rather than being the death knell for manned space travel, NASA’s loss created opportunities for smaller, hungrier, more innovative players to compete for the billions of dollarsof funding available for the best ideas. Interstellar travel, space tourism and a colony on Mars are all cautiously stepping out of sci-fi blockbusters and onto reality TV. Thank goodness manned space exploration hasn’t gone the way of the tooth fairy – our children can still safely dream of donning 3D printed space suits and radioing ground control, “Houston, we’re getting there.” The UK’s National Space Academy is hoping that our children will do more than just dream about what waits at the very edge of our understanding of the universe.
The space industry is a rapidly growing sector in the UK, earmarked to be worth £30 billion by 2030. But it is faced with a perplexing dilemma right now in a country with a record number of students enrolled in university degree programmes – it can’t find the right people for the job. The recruiters at the National Space Academy are coming up empty handed in their search for the right expertise among students with traditional university educations. But they’re a tenacious lot at the NSA. Unlike many other industries who look to governments, who look to universities, to bridge the chasm between skills produced and skills required – they’ve rolled up their sleeves and solved their own problem.
With the help of traditional education providers they have created a first degree-level apprenticeship – the higher apprenticeship in space engineering1 – to attract more scientists and engineers into the industry’s HR pipeline. What Matt Smith’s Dr Who did for bow ties, a chronic talent mismatch is doing for on-the-job training. Apprenticeships are cool again. It’s a small beginning but has the potential to shake up traditional, and immensely popular, one-size-fits all undergraduate programmes, particularly in specialist areas. Mark Eighteen is the commercial director of Activate Enterprise,2 a business working with companies to directly address the skills shortage they face by training new recruits specifically for them, and managing their apprenticeships programmes. It’s no surprise that they are based in Oxford in the heart of the UK’s tech hub, it’s also no surprise that they are very, very busy and will get busier when the UK’s Apprenticeship levy comes into force in 2017. At the time of chatting to him, they had 150 vacancies for young people on their books but, “Finding the right calibre of job-ready young people is a real challenge for us.” Research that they conducted along with Find A Future/Worldskills UK, the company behind the UK’s largest skills and careers event, The Skills Show, helps us understand why. There is a striking mismatch between what employers expect schools and colleges to equip young people with and what those same young people think they need to enter the workforce. The highest priority for employers surveyed was personal skills for employability, which they cited as communication, problem solving, team work and time management. These skills were stone last on the wish list of school leavers and college graduates. The latter cited work experience as their top priority followed by career advice and interview skills.
150 vacancies is hardly a crisis but if we broaden our frame a little bit we’ll see how it is part of an acute talent shortage that continues to grow despite developed economies drowning in graduates. Let’s dash around the globe and have a quick look at the state of graduate employment across the East/West divide where we find more similarities than differences.
We’ll start with the East, merely because it wakes up first. In highly developed South Korea, the number of economically inactive graduates passed 3 million3 for the first time in 2014. A number that is expected to grow in a country with one of the highest university participation rates. In Singapore, graduate unemployment remains stubbornly above average unemployment.4 In China, advancing to a postgraduate education is more likely to leave one jobless than stopping at a graduate degree. India’s well-educated woes are just as economically painful with 1 in 3 graduates (up to age 29) remaining unemployed. Craig Jeffrey, professor of development geography at Oxford university paints this in numbers when he observes that up to 27,000 applicants apply for a single state job vacancy in India. What has the current state of unemployment got to do with your child’s future? You’ve probably worked that out by now but if you haven’t I’ll tell you: everything.
Despite this growing pool of potential, throughout the region employers are struggling to meet hiring quotas. Especially in India, where 61% of employers surveyed said talent shortages prevented them from hiring people with the needed skills.5 This number rises to a staggering 85% in Japan which boasts a 25% of GDP per capita spending on tertiary education. It would seem that today’s unemployed are better educated and less employable than in any previous generation. So what is creating this frictional labour market? The World Bank points to a skills shortage rather than an oversupply of graduates. Skills shortage? How is that possible when universities are producing graduates faster than American Idol is spawning starlets? It seems that the skills universities are selling isn’t exactly what the corporate world is buying. So it’s a skills mismatch rather than an outright shortage. A talent gap.
A McKinsey & Company study6 into this conundrum tells us what you might already suspect: that employers, education providers and young people operate in parallel universes. There is a struggle between fulfilling the oldest and highest ideal of education – to provide good citizens with a strong moral and academic foundation – and more recent requirements of producing corporate employees or entrepreneurs capable of generating profit for stakeholders and, ultimately, sustained economic growth for the country that appreciates their skills most. If you were hoping that this is an isolated issue in the countries I’ve already mentioned, you’d be disappointed to know that it’s not, it’s a global migraine. The study goes on to tell us that in Europe, 74% of education providers are confident that their graduates are prepared for work, but only 38% of youth and 35% of employers agree. We can also agree that these different players don’t talk to one another and don’t understand one another’s expectations and needs. In fact, only German and UK employers were able to report that they communicate with education providers.
And what are these special skills that recent graduates seem to be terribly short of?
Soft skills such as spoken communication, teamwork, creativity and work ethic. Bet you didn’t see that coming!
Despite ongoing dialogue with education providers, the UK corporate sector still feels unheard and is driving research of their own into what the skills gap really means on the ground, in terms of pounds and pennies. What they found is that employers in the UK have put an £88 billion7 economic value on the lack of soft skills amongst recruits – skills such as initiative, communication, decision making and teamwork. The UK’s Development Economics research group says the lack of these skills could significantly limit the job opportunities of more than half a million UK workers by 2020, which is only a few short years away.
In the US, things don’t look too different with a graduate underemployment rate of 44%.8 Fortunately, the debate around this is louder and clearer in Washington than in most other capitals. At a business roundtable with ex-President Obama, Rex Tillerson, a straight talking Texan and chairman and CEO of Exxon Mobil, points out rather adroitly, “I’m not sure if public schools understand that we’re their customer. Businesses have a vested interest in the education attainment of potential workers. Failure in the education arena is akin to turning out defective products, and those products are human beings.”9 Ouch, that’s harsh, but he’s a man with an eye on the bottom line, and a finger on the pulse of the future with a good idea of what skills are needed to fill Exxon’s talent pipeline to remain competitive.
Still in the US, Deloitte urges employers to look out for “hyper-skilled workers”10 who possess traits that indicate adaptability, such as creativity, problem-solving and critical thinking skills to meet future needs. Hyper-skilled? Shouldn’t these be basic skills?
Given that over half11 of large US companies report a shortage in graduates with STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) skills, it would seem that problem-solving and critical thinking are indeed luxuries. I know I’m painting a glum picture of the world ahead for your children. Indeed, I found this research a bit like trying to decipher a Salvador Dali painting from inside the painting. There are things that intrigue me and bother me at the same time, such as why do US policy makers feel that STEM skills alone will solve their skills gap when technical skills are only half the problem? Why does the skills gap even exist and what does it mean for me as a parent? Can I carry on raising my son as usual, believing that he’s somehow different and will have no problem finding a market for whatever skills he develops at school and university?
After months of researching these questions I found both bad and good news. You’ll have the good first? Perfect.
By 2020, employers worldwide could face a shortage of 85 million high- and medium- skilled workers.12 That’s 85 million vacancies that the current generation of students could access if they have the right training. The bad news is that universities move more slowly than commerce and so are either still oblivious to or playing catch up with the requirements of the corporate world. Fortunately, in most countries across Asia and the developed West, higher education is now squarely on the economic growth agenda. According to UNESCO it’s no longer an issue exclusive to ministries of education, it’s now also on the forefront of the agenda of ministries13 of finance and economics.
Yet, when I look at how governments the world over are starting to address the future twin horrors of high graduate unemployment and talent shortages, I found the greatest action so far has been to be add more technical skills to curriculums. Computer coding in particular is held up as a panacea for many youth-related issues. Coding is the new language of industry and developed nations are rushing to help children gain fluency in it. There certainly is a need for these skills as much as there is for math and science but will this approach truly solve the skills gap in developed economies?
Schools are already well placed to embrace a coding curriculum as it follows a familiar pedagogy: teach, revise and test. It is quantifiable and easy to assess. As ICT classes around the globe get more slots in the timetable I’m going to play devil’s advocate and ask if adding another technical skill to a graduate-saturated world is going to sufficiently narrow the skills gap and provide worthwhile employment in 10 to 20 years time. Is this the best we can do?
If we apply a little systems thinking to this it’s not too hard to envisage a future, say a decade from now, where there are a great deal more young adults who can code competently. Of course this allows them to find employment across a wide range of industries as well as the opportunity of being more entrepreneurial with this skill. We’d all love our kids to be the next Zuckerberg or Jobs or the face of Angry Birds or Minecraft, so bring on coding, right?
An abundance of anything drives down the value. At this trajectory, programmers will become our new assembly line labourers. It’s likely that the corporate demand for programmers will be met by 2030 and leave us with a new challenge – finding the skills needed to turn these bits and bytes into ideas and businesses that are sustainable. Let’s have a look at the skills fuelling the tech start-ups of today to get an idea of what’s working at the moment.
Endeavour Insight14 is part of a global non-profit that supports high-impact entrepreneurship. Their research confirms what many of us who’ve been around the city block a few times already suspect, that the average founder of a New York City tech start-up is not a fresh-faced graduate working out of their garage. (New York City is home to the second largest and fastest growing tech hub.) More interestingly, only 35% of these entrepreneurs have technical training in a STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) subject despite STEM education being the very centre of US entrepreneurship policy. You read that right, only 35% are technically trained. What on earth are they studying that could be more important or useful in launching a meaningful career at the helm of one’s own tech company?
History, Philosophy, Marketing, Business, Finance and mostly, Economics. Weird, huh? This would have been a good myth for the Myth Busters to tackle. They would have found that colleague dropout CEOs are the exception, not the rule, and that mid-career specialist founders with an average age of 31 who are not technically trained, are the norm. Of course, these founders employ programmers to realise their vision and bring their products to market and in a few years’ time, thanks to policy, their cost of labour may well go down.
An Asia-focused UNESCO report reminds us that “technical skills are the bedrock of industrialisation and so very important in developing economies, but as these economies move up the labour chain and into fully fledged service environments, high-level thinking and behavioural skills largely drive economic growth and job creation.”15
High-level thinking and behavioural skills! Finally, something tangible that we can really work with. I know what high-level thinking and behavioural skills are, but I want to make sure that I don’t fall into the same trap as education providers do and make these skills something fluffy and abstract and therefore hard to teach. As much as I love the philosophical underpinnings of critical thinking, I don’t think companies have this in mind when they look for good thinkers and problem solvers. And I’m pretty sure entrepreneurs aren’t up till the wee hours studying the nuances of Nietzsche or the sensibilities of Socrates.
If companies claim that they are ignored by governments and misunderstood by education providers, then let’s go straight to where corporates are currently feeling the most pain and the skills that they think they need to heal it and move forward profitably over the next 10 to 15 years. We’ll also unpack what high-level thinking and behavioural skills mean to them and what all of this means to you and your children.
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1 Loughborough College, Loughborough
2 www.www.activate-enterprise.co.uk
3 Rising unemployment – Are there too many graduates? 14.02.2014 University World News Global Edition Issue 307
4 Rising unemployment – Are there too many graduates? 14.02.2014 University World News Global Edition Issue 307
5 2013 Talent Shortage Survey by ManpowerGroup, a US-based human resources multinational that surveyed 8,600 employers in Asia and the Pacific A Graduate-Rich, Skills-Poor Future?
6 Education To Employment: Getting Europe’s Youth Into Work by Mona Mourshed, Jigar Patel, and Katrin Suder. McKinsey & Company, 2014
7 The Development Economics research group calculates that soft skills are worth £88bn per year, particularly in businesses that rely on “face-to-face human interaction” found at the BBC http://www.bbc.com/news/education-30802474
8 Jobs become more elusive for recent U.S. college grads by Elvina Nawaguna, 01/06/2014 Rueters.com
9 CEOs Say Skills Gap Is Problematic. Business leaders say training a pipeline of workers should start as early as kindergarten, by Katherine Peralta US News, 03/12/2014
10 Deloitte’s 2014 Manufacturing Skills Gap study. Available at http://dupress.com/articles/manufacturing-skills-gap-america/ Available at http://dupress.com/articles/manufacturing-skills-gap-america/
11 Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings – Still Searching: Job Vacancies and STEM Skills by Jonathan Rothwel 01.07.2014
12 McKinsey Global Institute Washington http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/mgi.aspx
13 At the 2015 World Economic Forum held at Davos the skills gap was a hot topic discussed at length by representatives of both poor and rich nations.
14 The Myth of the Tech Whiz Who Quits College to Start a Company by Michael Goodwin, Harvard Business Review 09.01.2015. The research paper can be found on their website at http://www.endeavor.org/blog/endeavor-insight-and-the-partnership-for-new-york-city-releases-the-power-of-entrepreneur-networks-study-of-nearly-700-industry-trailblazers/
15 From Graduate Employability in Asia, a report published in 2013 by UNESCO’s Asia and Pacific Regional Bureau for Education
... the idea of the future being different from the present is so repugnant to our conventional modes of thought and behaviour that most of us offer a great resistance to acting on it in practice.
~ John Maynard Keynes, 1937
Imagine a world 15 years from now. That’s kind of tricky, isn’t it? What makes this even trickier is that to do it as accurately as possible you will need to imagine that you are a political atheist, completely non-dogmatic with no premeditated social views, subscriptions to conventional wisdoms or religious or nationalistic tendencies. In other words, you are completely, absolutely, undoubtedly neutral in all beliefs and mental frames. I know, I know, that’s a really tall order and probably impossible to fulfil.
We don’t have to imagine that many of us are preparing our dimpled darlings for jobs that don’t yet exist in this future world. Little Adam may grow up to be a dentist like his dad – but in 15 years’ time even dentistry will look very different, requiring new skills to harness new laser technologies and cosmetic and other services that haven’t come to be yet. We currently assume the most successful dentists of the future will be those with the skills to market and sell lifestyle dentistry products to patients with healthier teeth than ever before.
In information technology rumours1 are already circulating that the pixels trapped behind our touchscreens will soon be able to join and interact with us on our side of the world. Inexpensive, interactive 3D platforms without 3D glasses are expected to be the next electronic interface in a future where touchscreens are old school. What comes after that? What will those pixels be doing for us in 15 years’ time? What opportunities will they create for future employment? What skills will be needed to exploit them? By their very nature we cannot yet fully conceive of these unknowable jobs of the future, just as our parents could not have imagined us becoming a bitcoin trader at a hedge fund on Wall Street.
Corporate management teams are in the unenviable position of having to predict future trends in order to develop corporate and human resource strategies to tackle presumed challenges and maximise currently invisible opportunities. It’s no surprise then that a top priority for them is getting a reasonable grasp on what lies beyond the immediately visible horizon. Well-established trends such as ageing populations, the rise of single households, effects of climate change and immersive realities are already, or should be, factors that find their way onto their planning agendas, but these are not the only issues keeping CEOs awake at night.
Measuring the pulse of these corporate future proofing concerns around the globe is exactly what the IBM C-Suite Study does. Every year IBM’s researchers conduct interviews with over 4,000 corporate leaders across 70 countries and publish their conclusions at IBM.com. In 2013 every CEO surveyed considers technology the single most important external force shaping their organisations. Don’t think for a minute that they are simply referring to leveraging the Internet or building new smartphone apps. No, each one of them, no matter what industry they inhabit, believe that a new digital frontier is emerging that will change how they do business going forward, creating new opportunities and challenges that will need new skills to solve. These new technologies will have greater impact on traditional business than Amazon has had on high street stores, Wikipedia has had on access to knowledge or social media has had on critical thinking. This was again echoed in 2014 where market and technology factors where singled out as the two most powerful external forces affecting organisations today. By 2015, disruptive innovation at scale and speed is seen as the most necessary corporate survival mechanism, relying on training employees with the skill sets to succeed. That’s pretty high-level stuff, so let’s break it down a little as we peer into the crystal ball of the boardroom.
The digital frontier sits at the intersection between the electronic and physical realms of reality. Digital smart pills, self-healing cars, intelligent clothing and 3D printing of living tissue blur the distinction between virtual and reality into inconsequence. CEOs have little choice but to drive this new source of commercial growth as starry-eyed shareholders wait for their payoffs. Sounds grand, doesn’t it? But the technology that CEOs are pontificating about, and basing future revenue streams on, is still in commercial infancy.
In fact, IBM found that two-thirds of enterprises surveyed still had a weak digital-physical strategy, or none at all. It seems business leaders don’t yet know how to strike the right note between the social, digital and physical worlds. Many can’t or won’t even begin to address this issue until they get their heads around one of the biggest corporate challenges of our century – the monster in the bedroom cupboard, the elephant in the boardroom: data.
CEOs are drowning in the stuff and feel even less equipped to cope with big data than they did three years ago.2 With our ever more complex and refined digital alter egos that interact, transact and publish ourselves online, the amount of data that is currently generated is staggering. As a species we manufacture as much information every two days as we did from the dawn of civilisation to 2003.3 David Shenk4 summed it up perfectly when he wrote, “Information, once rare and cherished like caviar, is now plentiful and taken for granted like potatoes.” Any chef can make mashed potatoes but to turn the same potatoes into a dish that distinguishes her restaurant from its competitors and attracts the right amount of the right customer at the right price requires a real edge in thinking, design and marketing skills and in this case, a flair for flavour.
Only 1 in 5 multinational organisations currently has the capacity to fully utilise their big data5. This statistic may deteriorate before it gets better as the volume and variety of our bits and bytes increases with ferocious velocity, faster than our capacity to understand and exploit it. This is information overload on a massive and continuous scale and it really matters to companies and their long-term growth strategies. Not only are leaders expected to make sense of more data but also to understand and engage with more demanding customers. Consumers of goods and services can now injure an otherwise healthy business through bad press on a blog or Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, YouTube or whatever new information-sharing site is served up before this paragraph reaches you. Chief marketing officers are expected to use and exploit social media tools and technologies their children usually understand better than they do.6 Children who are growing up with their heads in digital data clouds.
I don’t need to tell you that understanding social media and how it is used to reach consumers is one area where our children already have an inbuilt advantage over older generations. But it’s not a real edge at all because their peers are immersed in the same technology. The real edge lies in the ability to make sense of the oceans of data generated by social media and continuously massing on servers around the world. Adults in developed economies are already drowning in information. How do we deal with it? Do we have a strategy for beating back its relentless intrusion into our lives, do we know what information to use as inputs in our decision making and what to leave on the side-lines? Are we able to turn potatoes into profit using high-level thinking and behavioural skills? Are we able to teach these skills to our children?
A flip around online job sites tells us exactly what high-level thinking and behavioural skills mean to some of the world’s most successful and best companies to work for.
In 2014, accounting firm Ernst and Young were looking to fill approximately 16,500 positions. Apart from technical skills and fit with company ethos, what were they after? Their recruiters were honing in on individuals with a passion for problem solving and the ability to tackle complex issues and generate insights. A global mindset is also essential to work across borders in their connected organisation.7
Intel is looking for innovative talent. Recruits that will help spark new thinking that will lead to new ideas.8 KPMG wants to see candidates that are able to use social media to their advantage. Recommending that they post comments on twitter that show their expertise, have a professional looking LinkedIn profile, with appropriate recommendations, and participate in chat forums of professional interest.9 Fashion house Nordstrom is looking for curious and innovative candidates.10
Adobe takes skill requirements one step further with the requirement that candidates are able to demonstrate strong emotional intelligence alongside the capacity to drive innovation.11 Genentech adds that the ability to demonstrate smart risk taking, even if it failed, is a valuable asset to them.12
I was a guest at a recent tech conference at Microsoft’s UK headquarters in the Thames Valley (the Silicone Valley of Europe) along with several heads of leading technology companies. The topic that dominated the morning discussion was the state of the skills gap in technology. It was astounding to see the very real effect that this was having on these companies in terms of their bottom line. Very few of them knew what to do about it other than apprenticeships. To cheer us up a bit, we were introduced to software that allowed us all to reply to questions from the speakers and panellists on our smartphones. We could then see on the projector screens what everyone else had responded. I took a screen shot of the replies to the question, “What skills are lacking from job applicants?” and here were the responses13 given:
• Motivation, ambition, personality
• Problem solving, creative thinking
• Job retention
• HTML5, CSS and SQL
• Creativity
• Collaboration
• Ability to achieve results using technology
• Grit and determination
• Desire to contribute more than anything else
• Active listening
• Passion and enthusiasm
• Communication skills
• Ability to articulate verbally
• Critical thinking
• Languages
• Collaborative communication
• Entrepreneurial skills
• Creative thinking
• Critical thinking and analysis14
Look at that! Only one respondent asked for programing languages whilst the majority are crying out for soft skills, most notably communication skills.
Even traditional hard skill industries are feeling the need for something a bit softer. Auditing giants KMPG and PricewaterhouseCoopers admitted to The Sunday Age that soft skills were now valued more highly than technical ability.15 According to KPMG, the Internet is the new font of technical knowledge, freeing up our brains to do more interesting things than remember vast quantities of data. “How you collaborate, solve problems creatively and authentically lead people will matter more,” says Susan Ferrier, national managing partner – people, performance and culture for KPMG.
And when it comes to recruitment processes, Google Inc is leading the way in showing the world how to hire the best of the best in a post-grades world.
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1 Google Is About To Take Over Your Whole Life, And You Won’t Even Notice by Mark Wilson, Fast Company July 2014
2 How C-suite executives see the landscape changing, available at IBM.com, 2013. http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/en/c-suite/csuitestudy2013/infographic-01.html
3 Every 2 Days We Create As Much Information As We Did Up to 2003 by Siegler, M.G. 04/08/2010, TechCrunch. available at http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/04/schmidt-data/
4 Data Smog, David Shenk, 1997, Harper Collins
5 Statistics by the UK’s Chartered Management Institute and IBM C Suite Survey 2013. http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/en/c-suite/csuitestudy2013/infographic-01.html
7 CNN interview with Larry Nash, executive recruiting leader at Ernst & Young http://money.cnn.com/gallery/news/companies/2014/01/16/best-companies-hiring.fortune/
8 CNN interview with Christy Dickenson, regional manager for global talent acquisition at Intel. http://money.cnn.com/gallery/news/companies/2014/01/16/best-companies-hiring.fortune/3.html
9 They’re hiring! Interview with KPMG recruiting manager Christina Tran by Christopher Tkaczyk 16/01/2014 available at Fortune.com
10 http://money.cnn.com/gallery/news/companies/2014/01/16/best-companies-hiring.fortune/9.html
11 Interview with Jeff Vijungco, Adobe’s vice president of global talent. http://money.cnn.com/gallery/news/companies/2014/01/16/best-companies-hiring.fortune/9.html
12 Interview with Amanda Valentino, director of corporate staffing at Genentech. http://money.cnn.com/gallery/news/companies/2014/01/16/best-companies-hiring.fortune/9.html
13 Interview with Jeff Vijungco, Adobe’s vice president of global talent. http://money.cnn.com/gallery/news/companies/2014/01/16/best-companies-hiring.fortune/9.html
14 Source: 2016 Thames Valley Tech Conference organised by the Thames Valley Chamber of Commerce.
15 The rise of soft skills: Why top marks no longer get the best jobs, The Sunday Age. 15.03.2015
Did you know that’s it’s easier to get into Harvard than Google? Your or your child’s odds of getting to work at one of the world’s most desirable employers with the all-you-can-eat-for-free organic deli at the Googleplex and it’s many miniplexes around the world, are 1 in 130. The odds of getting into one of the most hallowed academic institutions known to our generation, Harvard, are a mere 1 in 14. Google gets over 1 million job applicants a year and employs 0.4% to 0.5% of them. Their internship is 2600% oversubscribed.1 It must be the free lunches.
In a company that produces the purest, most valuable data that money can buy, it’s no surprise that their recruitment processes have benefitted from their lead in analytics. Lazlo Block, their SVP of people ops and principal architect of their recruiting process made headlines when he revealed what most Googlers already know: that academic success at college or one’s GPA (grade point average) is the least important metric in their interview process, in fact, he went on to say that it is discounted in the final selection stage.2 He didn’t say so simply to be cool and contrarian. He doesn’t need to because their 16 years’ worth of data on recruitment have revealed that there is no link between formal academic success, or technical ability, and potential to add real value to a company that transacts in new technology. What they hire for is the ability to learn, mental agility and someone who is not held hostage by years of deep specialisation in a particular area.
Google is all grown up now and their recruitment process is unashamedly geared towards identifying candidates who will create the future – without being evil – of course. So when Lazlo Block says they are looking for curiosity, intellectual humility and resilience he isn’t saying so because it sounds all Googly but because he knows this is what has brought them to where they are and will take them forward. Plus, they have found a way of testing for this through their behaviour-based interview process.
Block highlights resilience several times. Someone who has known academic success most of their life has probably never gotten down and dirty with failure and so might well be crushed by it. Internally, Google fails a lot, that’s the nature of exploring unchartered territory. Without resilience, no new app or technology would be brought to life.
In a bout of intellectual humility, Block admitted that their previous, infamous, interviewing idiosyncrasies that included asking bizarre questions like how many cows there were in Canada, were one of these failures. “A complete waste of time. They don’t predict anything and serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart,” he admits. Well that’s good news, especially if your child wants to work at Google. But what if he wanted to work somewhere else? Is this discounting of GPAs and 15 years of expensive education just a Google thing? Nope, it seems to be a growing trend. A trend that is sucking the life out of an old faithful of corporate recruiting; the formal curriculum vitae. A relic of the pre-electronic age, it seems to be going the way of big hair and platform shoes as it retreats into the ever lengthening shadows of the digital world.
In February 2015, French cosmetics giant L’Oreal was faced with 33,000 applications for the 70 places available in their Chinese graduate recruitment scheme. At the thought of combing through 33,000 CVs, their recruiters decided that it was time to do things differently. “Don’t send us your CV,” they announced, “we won’t read it.” Instead they directed candidates to three online questions that they should complete instead. Here’s one of those questions, compliments of the BBC and L’Oreal: “If you had one month and a 25,000RMB budget ($4,000; £2,570) to tackle any project your little heart desired, what would you do?”3
What?! How dare they? There was no call for the name of the school applicants graduated from, their chemistry scores, language proficiency or greatest hopes and biggest failures. The answers to three of these questions in 75 words or less, where analysed by artificial intelligence and suitable candidates were ranked in terms of the qualities most desired by L’Oreal. Only 500 of the initial applicants were invited for Skype interviews thereafter. L’Oreal’s recruitment director confessed that CV’s don’t give insight into what they are really after in students – raw talent.
Unfortunately, all these skills we’ve been chatting about aren’t yet staples in classrooms. But don’t worry, I’m not going to suggest that you crack open the Lego and task your 3-year-old with finding patterns in random heaps of plastic on the rug or see a shrink to get a handle on his temper tantrums. I am going to help you help your children think in alternative ways about information. Especially in areas where you don’t know the answer or there is no answer to know. Guiding them into mentally uncomfortable situations armed with a cognitive Swiss army knife is as valuable as the best education your money can buy to prepare them for this brave new world.
TIPS AND TAKEAWAYS FROM CHAPTER 2
Chapter 2 was a cloudburst of information with lots for you to think about. If you ask me what we really need to remember about our children’s future, I’d say it’s the skills they will need to be economically active as young adults. This could be in traditional corporate roles, as entrepreneurs or something in between.
We spoke at length about high-level thinking and behavioural skills. If these words are starting to sound like the soulless jargon tossed around boardrooms, then here’s a summary of what the corporate world actually means when they ask for these skills and why:
1. Systems thinking
As big data continues to swell, the current need for both employees and entrepreneurs that can simplify complexity will swell too. A knack for interpreting data and drawing conclusions to inform innovation is already a sought-after skill. A good grasp of systems thinking and the ability to model first and second order consequences from innovation become the natural next step in skills requirements.
2. Risk and failure
When working with unchartered ideas, risk and failure are part of the package. It helps if recruits understand that these are prerequisites to pioneering disruptive change and indispensable for start-ups. The ability to take measured risk is already on the hit list of forward-looking recruiters like those at Google – a company with a high product failure rate that they are particularly proud of. “Have you failed before” and “how did you deal with it” are popular interview questions. They want to know about that one time, back in 2010, when you failed spectacularly, how you coped with the personal blow and what you did to get back on track. Not when you lost the spelling bee in the 7th grade or missed out on being class rep.
3. Global exposure
Most organisations are either global or want to be global. Young adults who have been exposed to a global community have a head start. Not just having a couple of Korean friends at college (or American friends if you’re Korean) but actually having worked with or explored countries with diverse cultures. And I don’t mean being a tourist in Paris for Easter weekend, but spending a summer somewhere exotic, interning on the other side of the world, taking a gap year abroad or even doing immersive cultural (think six months on a kibbutz in Israel) or language studies. None of this is essential, of course, but very valuable in the beady eyes of a multinational recruiter. “More and more employers are wanting graduates to have a ‘global mindset’, which means understanding different cultures and how industries work across borders,” says Stephen Isherwood, chief executive of the Association of Graduate Recruiters.
4. Innovation and problem solving
Previously most of us were rewarded for being productive. Being creative was the role of the R&D or marketing department. Today, figuring out how to get the job done faster and more cost effectively, solving customer complaints in smarter ways and always being on the lookout for the next best idea are sought-after skills in every area.
The corporate world is acutely aware that creativity is required to drive economic growth across developed countries. Yet, in Adobe’s large and sombre State of Create Study,4 there is universal concern across developed nations that school is stifling this most important skill. We’ll talk much more about this later on as well as how to foster a creative mindset.
5. Behavioural smarts
Technical skills are a given but behavioural skills such emotional and social intelligence are increasing required even for entry level positions where engagement with colleagues and clients requires a cool head or the ability to influence, not just sell. If your child has an eye on becoming the “boss” of anything, even his own lemonade stand, then emotional smarts better be on his curriculum. I’ll show you how a little later.
Given that employability today and tomorrow is as much about math scores as it is about adaptability, resilience, social, emotional and raw intelligence, what are our schools doing about fostering these talents? Why is there still not a grade for emotional intelligence and innovation that actually contributes to a child’s final grade on his annual report card? Are they addressing the need for both hard and soft skills? What can we reasonably expect from the hardworking dedicated folk who are educating the day after tomorrow’s global leaders, entrepreneurs, soldiers and nurses?
Note to the school-wise. If you already know how your child’s school system influences his ability to think critically or you don’t care how school systems around the world differ, then please jump right over Chapter 3 and head on to the practical stuff from Chapter 4 onwards. This is a how-to guide after all.
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1 An average of 40,000 applicants apply for the 1,500 positions. The number is rising too.
2 Lazlo Block gave insights into their hiring process at an interview on 28.03.2013 at The Economist’s Ideas Economy: Innovation Forum in Berkeley, California
3 Can technology identify China’s top graduates? by John Sudworth, BBC News China. 25.02.2015