Bosses believe your work skills will soon be useless

[mu03eng]

See earlier ... they weren't criticizing the millennials ... even though what they wrote was critical of them.

And, you are exactly right ... the older genrations participation trophy is getting to work before the boss and staying until you're the last to leave.  This should count for nothing but in their generation, it counted for a lot.

OK, so my take away from this is that in your view millennials have this working thing all figured out and that they are 100% correct and everyone who doesn't line up with that is 100% wrong. Noted

[🏀]

As a millennial with two boomers working underneath me, nothing irritates me more than when their car is at the office at 7:30a when I'm getting in 'early'.

[mu03eng]

As a millennial with two boomers working underneath me, nothing irritates me more than when their car is at the office at 7:30a when I'm getting in 'early'.

ha ha, this is one of those places where I'm not a "typical" millennial and you'd hate me.

I'm into the office by 715 and try and be out the door by 430 at the latest. A lot of that is dictated by my kid's schedule as I do daycare drop off in the mornings and half the days in the evenings. I'm up by 5 most mornings so I can get a run in and then get the kid ready for daycare and dropped off then commute to work. All that let's me have the evenings free to do stuff fun.

Biggest thing I don't understand....people who "waste" time sleeping at least 8 hours, I'll sleep when I'm dead

[🏀]

ha ha, this is one of those places where I'm not a "typical" millennial and you'd hate me.

I'm into the office by 715 and try and be out the door by 430 at the latest. A lot of that is dictated by my kid's schedule as I do daycare drop off in the mornings and half the days in the evenings. I'm up by 5 most mornings so I can get a run in and then get the kid ready for daycare and dropped off then commute to work. All that let's me have the evenings free to do stuff fun.

Biggest thing I don't understand....people who "waste" time sleeping at least 8 hours, I'll sleep when I'm dead

I'm in heavy highway construction though, so there's more imporant things to do outside the office 95% of the time. However, boomers will still race to the office for the presence. It's a shame, really. They need to get that coffee chat in and talk about the weekend with everyone.

I'm all about time utilization. I hate going to the office Monday morning, too much wasted time. I do not pull the 8 hour workday ever. I will do 7a to 12p often. Go hit some golf balls, cut the grass, pick up the kid early and go to a park. Usually after the family is asleep, I'll fire back online for another 3-4 hours.

I find my afternoon is often wasted time, unplugging for the afternoon allows the work to generate and sit until I come back to it. I can then knock everything out quicker instead of getting distracted. It also allows me to fully prepare for the morning, which often go to crap quite quickly.

[GGGG]

I'm in heavy highway construction though, so there's more imporant things to do outside the office 95% of the time. However, boomers will still race to the office for the presence. It's a shame, really. They need to get that coffee chat in and talk about the weekend with everyone.

I'm all about time utilization. I hate going to the office Monday morning, too much wasted time. I do not pull the 8 hour workday ever. I will do 7a to 12p often. Go hit some golf balls, cut the grass, pick up the kid early and go to a park. Usually after the family is asleep, I'll fire back online for another 3-4 hours.

I find my afternoon is often wasted time, unplugging for the afternoon allows the work to generate and sit until I come back to it. I can then knock everything out quicker instead of getting distracted. It also allows me to fully prepare for the morning, which often go to crap quite quickly.

I'm usually 8:00 - 4:00.  Work over lunch.  After dinner I will generally do another 1-2 hours.  I have no interest in "office time" either.

[mu03eng]

I'm in heavy highway construction though, so there's more imporant things to do outside the office 95% of the time. However, boomers will still race to the office for the presence. It's a shame, really. They need to get that coffee chat in and talk about the weekend with everyone.

I'm all about time utilization. I hate going to the office Monday morning, too much wasted time. I do not pull the 8 hour workday ever. I will do 7a to 12p often. Go hit some golf balls, cut the grass, pick up the kid early and go to a park. Usually after the family is asleep, I'll fire back online for another 3-4 hours.

I find my afternoon is often wasted time, unplugging for the afternoon allows the work to generate and sit until I come back to it. I can then knock everything out quicker instead of getting distracted. It also allows me to fully prepare for the morning, which often go to crap quite quickly.

I whole heartedly agree with everything you said, and my getting in as early as possible has nothing to do with making it look "right". My boss and most of the engineering team are on east coast time, so I want to beat most of them in so I can be productive before they get spun up and start pinging me for stuff and/or the meetings start up in earnest.

Side note for meetings, I've started a policy with my employees that they better have a really really good reason why they schedule a meeting for longer than 30 minutes. Unfortunately, outlook defaults to an hour, but the vast majority of meetings can complete the task in less than 30 minutes the rest of the time we just end up having a freeform discussion which is fine to a certain extent but if it's a conversation that needs to take place, let's have it official/documented so we all remember what the hell we agreed to.

It's funny, for the most part I hate the chit chat around the office, I just want to plug away at my work with my headphones in so I can get crap done and get home. If I could go virtual more I would, but I really only work from home a handful of days a month.

[🏀]

I whole heartedly agree with everything you said, and my getting in as early as possible has nothing to do with making it look "right". My boss and most of the engineering team are on east coast time, so I want to beat most of them in so I can be productive before they get spun up and start pinging me for stuff and/or the meetings start up in earnest.

Side note for meetings, I've started a policy with my employees that they better have a really really good reason why they schedule a meeting for longer than 30 minutes. Unfortunately, outlook defaults to an hour, but the vast majority of meetings can complete the task in less than 30 minutes the rest of the time we just end up having a freeform discussion which is fine to a certain extent but if it's a conversation that needs to take place, let's have it official/documented so we all remember what the hell we agreed to.

It's funny, for the most part I hate the chit chat around the office, I just want to plug away at my work with my headphones in so I can get crap done and get home. If I could go virtual more I would, but I really only work from home a handful of days a month.

My biggest fear is having a tradesman killed/injured on a job.

My second biggest fear? Returning to the office after holidays or a vacation.

[warriorchick]

Unfortunately, outlook defaults to an hour, but the vast majority of meetings can complete the task in less than 30 minutes the rest of the time we just end up having a freeform discussion which is fine to a certain extent but if it's a conversation that needs to take place, let's have it official/documented so we all remember what the hell we agreed to.

Not to veer too far off topic, but my guess is that the 1-hour default is a setting that can be (or was) changed.  I have been using Outlook for many years at several companies, and it has always defaulted to 30 minutes for me. 

[mu03eng]

Not to veer too far off topic, but my guess is that the 1-hour default is a setting that can be (or was) changed.  I have been using Outlook for many years at several companies, and it has always defaulted to 30 minutes for me.

I'm sure that it is....but I'm not going to be able to steer the iceberg that is my corporate IT system or even by business unit....I'm just a low level dictator, making do the best I can.

[mu-rara]

I think that is part of it.  The other part is that millennials really don't believe in "paying your dues" when it comes to promotions and the like.  If they start one job and see a better opportunity at another company a year later (and at another place a year after that), they have no reservations about jumping ship.

They've seen their parents dumped by corporate America and don't want it to happen to them. 

Corporate America is a crap hole.  My friends (mid 50s) are hanging on for dear life.  Hate their jobs and are treated like crap.  "Oh, you don't want to work eighty hours a week, unnatural carnal knowledge you.  We have other drones we can plug in." 

I went off on my own 15 years ago.  The only way to fly.  Need to adopt to the new technology, but that's for my customer's sake.

[dgies9156]

Part of the problem is that no one can accurately predict what skills are going to be needed in the lead time that is necessary to develop the training.

I graduated from college in 1984 with a degree in accounting.  Spreadsheet software wasn't even really a thing at the time. Hell, desktop computers weren't even really a thing.  We went out to audits with a ten-key printing calculator and a crapload of yellow seven-column paper.  I had to develop skills as the technology involved.

I have a Facebook friend who got all ranty that the government should be training people for the "jobs of the future".  I responded, "Who knows what those jobs are going to be?  If the government did that in the mid-80's, they would have churned out a bunch of Walkman repair technicians and Blockbuster store managers."

I feel your pain. I finished my MBA in 1987. I recall going into Chicago on a Saturday morning for a seminar on Lotus 123 and basic spreadsheet use. That was in 1985 and it remains about all the formal Lotus or Excel training I ever received. The rest I taught myself. I did OK.

Compare that to the education the Millennials I hire have. Computer literacy is a pre-requisite for any business school. These kids (and they are kids) are technical geniuses.  But the challenge is that too many of them don't know how to "think" and communicate beyond their field of study. Fundamentally, too many of them can't carry a conversation outside of a  business field and God help them if they actually have to sell something.

So yes, there are specialties we need to prepare for. But if I was running Marquette or any other university, I'd be focusing on turning out young men and women who are broadly educated, know how to think and can adapt as the world changes.

[jesmu84]

I feel your pain. I finished my MBA in 1987. I recall going into Chicago on a Saturday morning for a seminar on Lotus 123 and basic spreadsheet use. That was in 1985 and it remains about all the formal Lotus or Excel training I ever received. The rest I taught myself. I did OK.

Compare that to the education the Millennials I hire have. Computer literacy is a pre-requisite for any business school. These kids (and they are kids) are technical geniuses.  But the challenge is that too many of them don't know how to "think" and communicate beyond their field of study. Fundamentally, too many of them can't carry a conversation outside of a  business field and God help them if they actually have to sell something.

So yes, there are specialties we need to prepare for. But if I was running Marquette or any other university, I'd be focusing on turning out young men and women who are broadly educated, know how to think and can adapt as the world changes.

I would think you need to start much earlier with that approach. As a member of a family with many grade school and high school teachers, logic and critical thinking have gone by the wayside as standardized testing and rote memorization have become the norm.

[GB Warrior]

As someone who lives in the IT world, I can tell you that in an amoral view of things, we bucket every process into a "value-add" and "non-value-add" category. The latter used to be prime candidates for offshoring, but we're rapidly moving towards automating (via bots) them altogether, where any scripted decision making requires little to no human intervention.

In the next 5, 10, 15, 20 years, business will rapidly change the nature of work for kids leaving school. There soon will be no such thing as 'entry-level' jobs that require data entry to learn the ropes; new hires will be expected to be fluent in data and decision analytics, since the lowest tiers of the organization will be close to entirely automated. This increases competition for those entry level jobs (Example: for every 10 entry level jobs, you'll get 1 job to monitor, analyze and provide insights), pushing the next tier of applicants elsewhere, pushing non-college grads further down the ladder still. It can and will get to the point where the "insights" can be partially automated. I imagine that it will get to a point where you will have masters' prepared students entering the workforce, because these are the skills needed to compete. This is already happening in some fields.

There are some very real ethical concerns about the impact of "progress" in this space, as these types of things have the propensity to consolidate knowledge and power in the hands of the well-to-dos more than it already is.  Even for well-meaning companies who care about their employees, at some point this becomes an arms race, and it becomes the cost of remaining competitive.

Moral of the story: The old American dream of working one job, the same job for your entire career is dead. Even if you are in the same job role, the expectation is that you reinvent yourself over and over again, and the "product lifecycle" of the career you currently have is getting shorter and shorter. Those that don't reinvent will get reinvented out.

[mu03eng]

As someone who lives in the IT world, I can tell you that in an amoral view of things, we bucket every process into a "value-add" and "non-value-add" category. The latter used to be prime candidates for offshoring, but we're rapidly moving towards automating (via bots) them altogether, where any scripted decision making requires little to no human intervention.

In the next 5, 10, 15, 20 years, business will rapidly change the nature of work for kids leaving school. There soon will be no such thing as 'entry-level' jobs that require data entry to learn the ropes; new hires will be expected to be fluent in data and decision analytics, since the lowest tiers of the organization will be close to entirely automated. This increases competition for those entry level jobs (Example: for every 10 entry level jobs, you'll get 1 job to monitor, analyze and provide insights), pushing the next tier of applicants elsewhere, pushing non-college grads further down the ladder still. It can and will get to the point where the "insights" can be partially automated. I imagine that it will get to a point where you will have masters' prepared students entering the workforce, because these are the skills needed to compete. This is already happening in some fields.

There are some very real ethical concerns about the impact of "progress" in this space, as these types of things have the propensity to consolidate knowledge and power in the hands of the well-to-dos more than it already is.  Even for well-meaning companies who care about their employees, at some point this becomes an arms race, and it becomes the cost of remaining competitive.

Moral of the story: The old American dream of working one job, the same job for your entire career is dead. Even if you are in the same job role, the expectation is that you reinvent yourself over and over again, and the "product lifecycle" of the career you currently have is getting shorter and shorter. Those that don't reinvent will get reinvented out.

I don't know that I totally agree with this. If you think of humans and technology as "processing machines" technology is absorbing the repetitive and knowable processing which frees up human capital to focus on the unknown or undetermined. That doesn't necessarily require smarter people, simply people who can absorb the technology output and utilize it in the pursuit of the unknown or undetermined. We don't have to clutter everyone's brain with the how of machine learning or neural networks or algorithm development, but educate as to what those things tell us then teach people how to "connect the pieces".

I remember getting into an argument with my high school calculus teacher about having to learn Leibniz's Fundamental Theorems and how they were mathematically derived. I don't care why the first derivative of the equation of the line gives me velocity and the second gives me acceleration, some really smart dudes 300 years ago already figured that out and proved it. I'm much more interested in how I can apply that truth to scenario's that I might face. Even further, I shouldn't have to know how to do the first derivative I have any number of means to figure that out (apps, calculator, internet, etc). What I need to understand is where it is useful to apply that technology.

We need to teach people how to use the technology and more importantly how to think critically to pull technology and it's outputs together in new or interesting ways. Assume the technology is there, how do I maximize it's utility?

[Tugg Speedman]

I don't know that I totally agree with this. If you think of humans and technology as "processing machines" technology is absorbing the repetitive and knowable processing which frees up human capital to focus on the unknown or undetermined. That doesn't necessarily require smarter people, simply people who can absorb the technology output and utilize it in the pursuit of the unknown or undetermined. We don't have to clutter everyone's brain with the how of machine learning or neural networks or algorithm development, but educate as to what those things tell us then teach people how to "connect the pieces".

I remember getting into an argument with my high school calculus teacher about having to learn Leibniz's Fundamental Theorems and how they were mathematically derived. I don't care why the first derivative of the equation of the line gives me velocity and the second gives me acceleration, some really smart dudes 300 years ago already figured that out and proved it. I'm much more interested in how I can apply that truth to scenario's that I might face. Even further, I shouldn't have to know how to do the first derivative I have any number of means to figure that out (apps, calculator, internet, etc). What I need to understand is where it is useful to apply that technology.

We need to teach people how to use the technology and more importantly how to think critically to pull technology and it outputs together in new or interesting ways. Assume the technology is there, how do I maximize it's utility?

The highlighted part above is 100% correct.  But while we all understand this means jobs like cashier, clerk, secretary, factory worker and driver are going away as these jobs are, as you said, repetitive and knowable processing many white collar jobs are also going away for the same reason. 

Think about your job.  How much of it is a repetitive and knowable processing?  If all of that is eliminated via algo or robot, do you still have a job? 

The white collar jobs most at risk are:

Accountants
Office support
most Lawyers (estates, will, contracts and real estate closing can all be done by computer without a human involved)
Securities traders
Portfolio managers (they are already are)
Surgeons (in fact I think virtually all these jobs will be replaced by a robot)
many types of Engineering jobs. 

[GB Warrior]

I don't know that I totally agree with this. If you think of humans and technology as "processing machines" technology is absorbing the repetitive and knowable processing which frees up human capital to focus on the unknown or undetermined. That doesn't necessarily require smarter people, simply people who can absorb the technology output and utilize it in the pursuit of the unknown or undetermined. We don't have to clutter everyone's brain with the how of machine learning or neural networks or algorithm development, but educate as to what those things tell us then teach people how to "connect the pieces".

I remember getting into an argument with my high school calculus teacher about having to learn Leibniz's Fundamental Theorems and how they were mathematically derived. I don't care why the first derivative of the equation of the line gives me velocity and the second gives me acceleration, some really smart dudes 300 years ago already figured that out and proved it. I'm much more interested in how I can apply that truth to scenario's that I might face. Even further, I shouldn't have to know how to do the first derivative I have any number of means to figure that out (apps, calculator, internet, etc). What I need to understand is where it is useful to apply that technology.

We need to teach people how to use the technology and more importantly how to think critically to pull technology and it's outputs together in new or interesting ways. Assume the technology is there, how do I maximize it's utility?

I think we're indirectly saying the same thing. We're freeing up human capital to focus on things that provide insights into the unknown or that can't be scripted (yet). That requires a changing the pedagogy with which we approach the world's problems. But I'll add that while critical thinking is a foundation course in every degree, it needs to be at the center of everything- not 3-6 credits. We're talking about changes to the core of the educational model. If we extrapolate the premise of this thread a decade or two, the jobs that this type of advanced critical thinking caters to are typically those that are reserved for those with experience, so education has to accelerate this. I don't think someone has to be masters' prepared to be qualified, but that is one way people try to get 'qualified' (sometimes MBAs are used in the absence of experience). Every field is already moving towards advanced or terminal degree programs (needlessly, I'll add), so this only adds to a pre-existing trend.

Where you and I disagree, I think, is the value of understanding why something works the way it works. So while calculus has stood the test of 4 centuries, understanding how to prove that it's true is a valuable mental exercise. That's not to say that nothing is sacred and we can't hold some things to be true without breaking it all down into component parts - just that there's value in understanding those component parts exist and how they work. Applying that in today's economy, businesses, processes, etc aren't usually one-size-fits-all. They're different. They're subjective. So understanding the foundational pieces that comprised yours and my educations still have to be there - they're the basis of all of our insights and value we add to the analytics. The hurdle that i'm referring to is weave really advanced critical thinking into the curriculum that expands beyond the X's and O's of a given degree. It's a level of maturity greater than many 4-year degrees, where some courses will require critical thinking, but others are facts and regurgitation.

Most people won't care (and they shouldn't - that's the point of the technology) how something does what it does. But we do need to understand WHAT and WHY. I think it's uncommon for a new hire to understand these in their entirety out of school, but that is precisely what these technological developments are demanding.