h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I'm not quite sure how to take this article over at the beeb:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15713196

In some places it's well written and well informed, in others is dire.

I think the problem is that it's got some informed quotes in it, but the journalism around those is trying to make a serious subject sensationalist.

Here's an example...


"But employers have become increasingly reluctant to hire school leavers.

"Employers need more support to set up apprenticeship programmes, particularly when they are hiring apprentices for the first time," Mr Pearce said.

He believed that channelling more funding for apprenticeships directly to employers, rather than through training providers, could help address this problem.


This quote seems to be deliberately picked because it's a nice "attacky" quote. But it's not. It's the truth.
At the day job we do a lot of work trying to help people, training schemes placements, seminars talking to students. And yet the thing that comes out again and again is that students these days rarely seem to want to learn and expect everything just handed to them.

The article talks about "soft skills" and yet doesn't go into what they actually are, expecting people to know.

Here's some we have to teach placements:

Turn up on time. Yup, surprising that one.
Dress for the office. Yeah, we may be relaxed on dress code, but we draw the line at your jeans half way down your legs with your arse showing.
Put your phone away. Yup, spending all day texting your mates means you're not doing the work we're paying you for.
Turn your headphones down. The rest of the office doesn't want to listen to your rubbish.
Answer the phone. We've got one lass as an admin assistant who's petrified of answering the phone.

It's the employers who then have to teach kids this sort of stuff before they can actually start training them for work.

And strangely, it's the employers that don't get the money to do this. As an example with university students... the university gets paid in fees, the lecturers get paid salary, the agencies that find the placements get paid in fees, the employer... yeah, there's not much left by then.

If the kid comes through a placement, the employer gets a small amount towards their salary, but that is by far offset by the time spent training them.

If the kid comes through looking for internship, then the employer gets nothing. Yet interns seem to always want paying market rate. Yes, they'd be doing work. No, it's not market rate work. I've found over the years that the first month of an interns six month placement is usually spent teaching the soft skills, the next month or so is spent teaching them how to work in the real world. Breaking the news that they can't work on their own project or do things the way they want to, but rather have to do what the client wants. That then only leaves three months of often mediocre work. At a cost of three months of my time. The company looses.

Channeling funding to employers would certainly help. It'd stop them being out of pocket each time they tried to help someone. But I do wonder if a Soft Skills course might be a better use of the money.
Run a course, or even have it as a university course module, where kids learn to turn up dressed properly at 9am each morning and to actually do what they're there for. Train them to answer the phone, to be polite, to deal with clients when they call.

This is why employers are taking on older apprentices. You don't have to waste time teaching them these simple things. They've often been working already and learned them, and they appreciate that having a job is something you work at, it's not just handed to you.

There's a world of difference between an apprentice in an office-based job, and one learning a manual trade.

You can get away with a lippy teenager in ill-fitting jeans on a building site, but an office, especially one used for sales, requires everybody to have acceptable social skills from the outset.

We get the odd apprentice in the IT team where I work (we're about to recruit another), but we don't have the capacity to teach them stuff their parents should have before the age of 6. We can, however, teach them some pretty cool customer and technical skills.

>>You can get away with a lippy teenager in ill-fitting jeans on a building site<<

I can understand that the masonry might not mind the snarkiness, but I'm suspecting the jeans might present a safety hazard.

The thing is, we're not getting paid to teach them what their parents should have. We're not getting paid to teach them what the schools and universities should have

Yeah, I know.

This has been going on a long time. In the nineties, I kept finding out stuff the college kids should have learned in high school, and didn't.

In recent years and in Ontario, a number of high schools now have a "co-op student program". Students are found places in work environments for roughly half of the school year, no salary but hands-on experience. If they are successful (as measured by a school counsellor and the supervisor of the work-place) they earn school education credits. We have had to 'fire' a few who would not accept the notion that when the schedule said be in for 8 am, that did not mean 'think of waking at 8' ... Some work out quite well though and learn real skills while also facing a real-world work-place

I once got less money for my internship because of people like that. I was told 'the students who were here before you were lazy so we will give you less.'
4 Euros less per hour because others were lazy!

One company I was contracting at had some interns that they asked me to teach fundamental html to. Three of them spent the day messing about, one tried to learn.

At the end the boss asked me my opinion of them, in front of them and I told him. Three of them got fired on the spot. They started moaning that they weren't paid enough to sit in a lecture that they thought wad beneath them, to which the boss pointed out that if they wanted to pay for that days training themselves to go ahead and they'd keep their places, but that he was paying me £150 an hour. They left.

Interesting.

We get a new batch of medical graduates every August, and I have to say I've never had any of these problems. They're usually bright keen, and willing to learn. They're nearly always appropriately dressed. I'll moan about the quality of their training at times (bring back 56 hour weeks), but never their motivation. There might be the odd one but they usually only need telling once.

If one of them slips up and forgets to shave, or turns up to work late, (that means at the same time as us, and not the expected 10 minutes before hand), you have to jump on them like a ton of bricks and point out that they're wrong.

They've been on clinical placements for the last 3 years of Uni, and that's usually meant we could drum professional behavior into them. I've had words with girls for wearing clothes that are too revealing before (which was a shame I enjoyed the view down her clevage), and with guys for not wearing an ironed shirt. If you have to do it more than once you contact the medical school let them deal with it.

And they're the students who got three As at A Level, the ones who when at the age of 17 they had a choice between going out and getting laid, or studying physics choose to study physics.

I would have though that this applied to all other graduates to be honest. Maybe not school leavers, but I would expect graduates to have these basic skills. I've worked with nursing graduates on their first day, and they are certainly always tidy and punctual, hard working, and keen to learn.

I have found that you have to be very very firm the first time something happens (that is unacceptable, never do it again). We don't have a professional culture of pussy footing around, and you have to raise juniors to be professional. There are a few colleagues of mine who always complain about the behavior of their juniors, but when I ask them haven't actually told the junior.

I think that some professions are blessed

Professions like doctors I think will always attract just the dedicated ones, at least I hope it will. There are those professions where people have decided early on that they want to do it, and it involves a lot of hard work, all the time.

Then there's the ones like the one I'm in, that involve hard work but also a slightly twisted mindset, thinking both logically and creatively at the same time calls for a slightly weird mindset.

I think the difference seen from the outside though is that doctors are expected to have to work at it, but web guys aren't, and it's not helped by all these courses being advertised saying how much the average IT salary is, yet with only one year part time study you too can be earning £££s! yes you can, flipping burgers.

It's not as hard as cutting someone up and putting them back together again, but it's not as easy as the films make it out to be.

Digressing though, so back to topic, maybe that's the problem. People don't know what jobs actually are these days. So they don't know what to expect.

But they can't get the work experience, either. I applied to soooo many architecture work placements, and they all wanted me to pay them to be allowed to work there, even with a degree...

That's what you get for wearing those hip-hop jeans to interviews, Mala.

Ooops. You're right. But I thought it was an improvement over the time I forgot to wear any trousers at all

Twenty years ago I was teaching evening classes in basic computer skills at a vocational-technical skills in central Florida. I was teaching adults.

The curriculum was designed to be self-enabling: specific tasks were listed, some of them mind-numbingly simple ("Recognize telephone equipment"), and when you completed a task you got x credits toward completion and the instructor signed off that task, once satisfied that the student demonstrated mastery of the task.

I discovered that a few students would motor through a task, following the steps in the task description. Bring up screen A, do this, do that, do this. Click that button to bring up screen B and do this then do that. At the end of the task, they would bring me the completed work and be totally unable to describe in their own words what they had done, or anything about the app they had been using (a word processor, a spreadsheet, a database entry form).

I wanted to hold these few students back and have them review the material, at which they went to the director and filed a formal complaint, which was upheld. It was considered perfectly ok for a student to learn nothing when taking a course.

At that point I withdrew from the evening teaching program and stuck to my day job, but what an eye opener! Content is nothing. Completion statistics are everything.

I know a lecturer who would whole heartedly agree with you.

By and large, that hasn't been my experience - not even with high schoolers. Most of my students over the years were appreciative and a joy to be around.

But a warning: practical pedagogy in North Carolina can be harzardous to your health.

The high school physics teacher in one town told me that he quit teaching mechanical drawing at the community college when he told a student, 'You need to make that line perpendicular.'

To which the student replied: 'This is the only colour pencil I got.'

The teacher told me this on the day the current mechanical drawing instructor was shot dead by a student who was angry at the critical comments he received.

The student used a shotgun, by the way - we aren't handgun-carrying barbarians.