I'm comfortable not knowing

About a thousand years ago I was a newbie consultant working for a large, (actually quite large), implementation services arm of a equally large software company. As the software products that our consulting and implementation services group were responsible for implementing numbered in the dozens (if not more), and they were each one reasonably complex technologies, the company enrolled all newly hired implementation consultants in an extensive 8-week training program that was affectionately known as 'bootcamp'.

The bootcamp consisted of 8 hour days, for 8 weeks, taking all of the new consultants through the details and inner workings of the most commonly purchased of the company's applications, giving us a reasonable facsimile of 'real-world' problems that needed to be solved via case studies, and took us through what life as a traveling software consultant was actually all about. Aside - the job and lifestyle was equally better and worse than we all anticipated, but that is a topic for another time.

But even over an 8-week period, the amount of technical, functional, business, process, and project management material that was presented to us was immense and fast-paced, and truly, there was almost no way to actually remember I'd estimate more than about half of it. The rest, and certainly the more important parts of the knowledge needed to become a good consultant would take more time to acquire, and work in the field with real customers to reinforce.

All of this setup is to get to the point of this post. I don't really remember anything specifically from the content of the 8-week training bootcamp save for one sentence that was uttered not from one of the excellent instructors or experienced consultants that led our training, but rather from one of my fellow bootcampers.

At the end of a long week of intensive work on some complex application and technology concepts, our instructor was making a final point about some detail or another, and she noticed a look of confusion on the face of a student in the front of the class. She paused, explained the point once more, and then asked him point blank, "Do you understand what I mean by configuring setting ABC in order to allow the customer to do XYZ?" , (the specifics don't matter, and I don't remember what they were anyway).

The student thought about the question for a second then replied, "No, I really don't understand. But I'm comfortable not knowing."

The instructor was a little taken aback, tried to re-state the concept, and hammer it home so that it clicked with the student, but she missed the real point of his response. It was not that he didn't care about understanding the point she was making, or that he would never understand it, but rather in that setting, with that specific point competing with about 3,000 other ones we'd all been exposed to in the last few weeks, that is was ok to not understand. He was comfortable (his word), with his ability to access reference material, draw on his network of colleagues, do some of his own testing, etc. in order to understand the key point when confronted with the problem in the future.

He was comfortable not knowing because he was comfortable in his ability to think about the problem, access relevant resources, and apply what he'd learned more generally in order to solve this specific problem. He didn't need to know everything, Heck, no one needs to know everything.

I like people that don't claim to have all the answers. I especially like people that are willing to admit that they don't have all the answers, but know how to find them. 

And are comfortable with that.

The end of retirement

Some highlights, (or lowlights, depending on your perspective), from the recently released Wells Fargo Middle Class Retirement Study, an annual look at the attitudes, preparedness, and expectations for retirement amongst middle class American worker:

1. More than half the middle class (59%) are very clear that their top day-to-day financial concern is “paying the monthly bills,” an increase from 52% in 2012.

2. Saving for retirement ranks a distant second place, with 13% calling it a “priority."

3. Four in ten middle class Americans (42%) say saving and paying the bills is “not possible.”

4. 48% are not confident they will be able to save enough for a comfortable retirement.

And last but not least the major implication for HR and Talent pros from this pretty depressing report on the state of American middle class retirement readiness:

5. 34% of the middle class say they will work until they are “at least 80” because they will not have saved enough for retirement, up from 25% in 2011 and 30% in 2012

A pretty grim situation on the current state of the average middle class American worker you would have to say. Even allowing for some sample size error, and for the inability of folks to accurately estimate the amount of funds needed for their retirement, (and their likely life spans), which I would argue would put even more folks in the 'there is no way I can ever retire' category, when over a third of folks think they will be working until they are 80 years old then I think we have to pause and think about the implications of that conclusion.Save my seat. My shift at Walmart ends at Noon.

I know it has become perhaps even trendy to say or think things like, 'I'm never going to retire', or to look at the traditional view of 'Full' retirement, i.e. doing absolutely no work at all once you leave the workforce as a relic of our parents generation, many of whom logged 30+ years at one employer and hit 65 (give or take), and started drawing a nice monthly company pension check that combined with their savings and Social Security payments would see them nicely into their golden years. With long-term employment at one employer and guaranteed pensions no longer the norm, the entire geometry of the path to retirement in 2013 looks almost nothing like it did even 25 years ago.

But it seems to me like the folks that I hear that proudly talk about 'never' retiring, really aren't the same ones that the Wells Fargo survey is measuring. Mostly, it seems, that 'I'm never retring' people are the ones that are making that decision quite consciously and out of a desire to continue the interesting and challenging work that they have been fortunate and industrious enough to have been doing. They probably could, strictly speaking from a financial point of view, afford to retire in the traditional sense close to the traditional retirement age.

No, it seems to me that most of the rest of us, and the majority of the survey respondents, still remain philosophically attached to what is fast becoming a relic of the past, that after logging 30 or 35 years as a loyal and diligent cog in the corporate machine that you'd have at least 10 or 15 years of front porch sitting, lemonade drinking, and grandchild spoiling to look forward to, all unencumbered by the demands of work, (and some 32 year-old hotshot and clueless boss).

But this survey, and likely a dozen other we can find, tell a very different story, one that is more about the mismatch between expectation and reality, and one where we see what has long been a cherished and venerated ideal bucking up against the reality of life in corporate American in 2013.

Retirement might indeed be over in America in the very near future.

Is your workplace ready to accommodate even more workers in their 70s and 80s?

Have a great week all! 

Making the most of the time you have

This is probably an 'Off-topic' kind of post except for that it falls squarely into the category of 'Things that are interesting to me' and therefore at least in the broad definition for this blog is actually 'On-topic.'

Check out the Tikker - a watch that not only tells you the time, but tells you the time you have left.

And the folks at Tikker mean that quite literally, the watch displays, based on information you provide on your current age, habits, BMI, etc., how much time in years, months, days you have left to live.

Why would anyone want to glance down at your wrist in hopes of determining (variously) if and by how much you are going to be late for work, how much longer this interminable opera/play/ballet your significant other dragged you to is likely to drone on, or to make the mental calculations that start with 'If I go to bed now, then I will still have 5.5 hours of sleep before the big meeting tomorrow, that should be enough', and instead be reminded that you only have precisely 41 years, 8 months, 12 days and some hours left upright?

Well according to the folks behind the Tikker project, the stark display and countdown of your time left will make you appreciate that time more, help you to make better decisions about how you use that limited and diminishing time, and even make you happier. 

From the Tikker project's Kickstarter page:

As a group we first started working on the idea of Tikker 2 years ago (although we have dwelled on the concepts of time and happiness for well over 10), and we've come a long way since those first development meetings. What started as an idea slowly took form in sketches, models and concept prototypes. It wasn't long until the project took on a rather morbid name – Tikker has come to be called "the death watch" by the people in and around the development group. But despite it's nick name we really doesn't see it as one.

"Forget all about "smart watches" that will keep you connected to your work email 24/7. How about a watch that is designed to actually make you happier, and help you get a better life? A happiness watch. That's what Tikker is designed to do."

It is an interesting concept for sure, that being forced to contemplate more directly the limited time you have left would lead you to be more thoughtful and even could change at least some of your decisions about how you use parts of that time.

Would it make you 'happier', to see every day the countdown clock winding down, winding down?

Hard to say. 

But it is pretty likely that just about all of us spent potentially large parts of this time we have doing things we really would prefer to not be doing. Of course many of these are from necessity - we have to work, sometimes at jobs we don't enjoy to provide for ourselves and our families, we have to rake the leaves, have to take the odd colonoscopy and so on.

However, it's also likely that we spend a fair chunk of our time on silly things that we choose to do, and rationalize this by convincing ourselves that we have to do to them, and don't really have a choice. Which is also silly, because of course we do.

Anyway, I found the Tikker kind of interesting. I am not sure I would want to wear one though. I am not totally convinced it would make me happier.

But then again maybe it would lead to some better decisions. 

And I just spent 31 minutes I will never get back writing this post.

Can you help a reader out?

For a Friday, here is a simple question lifted directly from the blog mailbag:

Hi Mr.Steve, 

I have been into HR for the last 4 years.

What should I do grow in my career.

Regards,

Avis Federick (name changed to protect the reader)

Well?

Have any ideas for the 4-year HR pro that wants to grow or get ahead, or maybe just wants to learn something new?

And is desperate enough to ask me for advice?

Hit me up, take yourself back to when you were four years into your career, what advice would you want to give the 25 year old you?

I have some ideas but I'd love to hear yours.

Have a great weekend!

Sincerely,

Mr. Steve

More on the STEM talent shortage, or lack thereof

Fall weekends are for two things, watching my beloved New York Football Jets display their unique brand of ineptitude on fields across America (big non-relevant aside: I am starting more and more to come down on the site of Malcolm Gladwell regarding football and its eventual and likely marginalization. The only football game, college or NFL, I watched all weekend was the Jets vs Bucs, and in that game alone in the first half, two Jets players wobbled off the field, pretty much incoherent from blows received to their helmets. Multiply that by hundreds of games, many played by little kids as young as 7 or 8 and try to count, you can't, the number of kids/teens/collegians/men who are absorbing ridiculous and repeated trauma to the head each weekend. I don't know. Most of think boxing is a crazy sport. But we are ok with football. Sorry, that was a long aside), and catching up on some longer reads from the week I did not have time to really review.

The piece I'd like to call your attention to is titled 'The STEM Crisis is a Myth', an absolute takedown of the notion that currently the American economy is suffering, and will continue to suffer from a dearth of workers with the needed STEM skills to fill current and expected demand for them (or more precisely, the skills themselves). The author, Robert Charette, makes a compelling case that there is not, in fact, a STEM worker shortage. If anything, there is a surplus of STEM-capable workers, both from the amount of STEM graduates that are produced each year, and from the upwards of 11 million STEM-trained workers that for one reason or another, are not working currently in STEM roles.

Chech the below chart from the piece to see where Charette is coming from:

Do the math, (no pun intended), if you like, but when you break down the estimates of new STEM jobs being creating against the numbers of new graduates and existing STEM-educated workers it becomes harder and harder to make the 'shortage' case.

Additionally, it might be in tech and other firms best interested to play up the shortage narrative.  Why?

From the piece:

Companies would rather not pay STEM professionals high salaries with lavish benefits, offer them training on the job, or guarantee them decades of stable employment. So having an oversupply of workers, whether domestically educated or imported, is to their benefit. It gives employers a larger pool from which they can pick the “best and the brightest,” and it helps keep wages in check. No less an authority than Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, said as much when in 2007 he advocated boosting the number of skilled immigrants entering the United States so as to “suppress” the wages of their U.S. counterparts, which he considered too high.

 And STEM wages are 'in check', check this nugget from the article:

And over the past 30 years, according to the Georgetown report, engineers’ and engineering technicians’ wages have grown the least of all STEM wages and also more slowly than those in non-STEM fields; while STEM workers as a group have seen wages rise 33 percent and non-STEM workers’ wages rose by 23 percent, engineering salaries grew by just 18 percent. The situation is even more grim for those who get a Ph.D. in science, math, or engineering. The Georgetown study states it succinctly: “At the highest levels of educational attainment, STEM wages are not competitive.”

It is a complex and even controversial subject, but in light of all the available data, it gets harder and harder to make the 'shortage' case, and in fact, it gets more dangerous if it perpetuates to the point where it serves to help create a real shortage in the future, as students decide to avoid these fields in the future.

If you're interested at all in these issues, I encourage you to take a few minutes to read 'The STEM Crisis is a Myth', maybe bookmark it for new Saturday though!

Have a great week!