‘How Do I Do That?’ The New Hires of 2023 Are Unprepared for Work

[PrivateButts]

I know that this is yet another article about how an emergency shift to a novel form of education maybe wasn't ideal for a quality education, but when has school ever completely prepared someone for whatever path they take in life? Didn't for me when I graduated. There is so much to learn, so much specific knowledge out there, that it's impossible to cram it all into X years of schooling. Best you can do is teach them the broad, base level stuff, give them some opportunities and connections to get started, and help them build the skills to learn new things efficiently. Learning doesn't stop when school ends.

[ttoinou]

Exactly. This type of article is to make us believe school was ever useful. It was not much

[constantcrying]

One claim of the article is that specific job focused training programs have failed to provide students with skills previous students had gained during their training.

I completely agree that education does not remove the need to gain real experience on the job, no matter the circumstances. But there are certain skill that should be learned before entering certain jobs and the article claims many students are lacking in those skills.

[constantcrying]

The title is really bad. "How do I do that" is the most normal response any new hire has about many things in his job and the rest of the article is not really about people having questions when entering the workforce.

The claim of the article is that around two years of social isolation and removal from normal methods of learning has significantly hurt the social and educational development of young adults and that employers now should focus more on training for new hires.

[mikrl]

The worst kinds of companies

- will expect you to do the thing

- won’t tell you how to do it

- will ignore you or get mad if you ask how to do it

- will punish you for figuring it out yourself

It happened to me somewhat recently (I’m out of that place now) and I’ve been sharpening my proverbial knives ever since.

[seeknotfind]

Can you imagine being confused how to do something on your first job out of college, and someone writes an article about it in The Wall Street Journal?

[smodo]

Yeah it’s a nice variation on ‘todays kids don’t want to work anymore.’ In this episode it turns out they’re too stupid!

This place is going to hell in a hand basket I tell you! In my day we learned to use a slide rule and that got me through 50 years of not using slide rules. Kids these days.

[jaygreco]

My thought exactly. This article might as well only exist so older folks can pop it open and feel smug and superior about something dumb.

[salawat]

Correction: management expectations of the time costs of training up new entrants are vastly underestimated.

[ajhurliman]

Even the intro example about designing an aluminum part to be milled with a lathe as a simple first year college thing… no, we had a manufacturing class where we briefly used a lathe in junior year, but most of the stuff in college was academic. We were doing linear algebra and sizing HVAC systems, not designing for production.

[arethuza]

When I started at my first job out of university in 1988 I was told it would be at least 6 months before my contribution to the business would be a net positive - which was probably an underestimate!

[constantcrying]

How is it a "correction" when the article explicitly quotes someone saying that hiring managers should focus more on willingness to learn?

Did you read the article?

[nebulousthree]

Stop complaining and bring back apprenticeships. A university's objective is to create more professors and researchers, not industry workers.

[emmelaich]

... create more adminstrators, professors and researchers

[archo]

https://archive.is/ORkht

[Eumenes]

News flash: college continues to be poor preparation for the workforce and remote work fails at creating an environment for mentorship and L&D, esp. among the inexperienced. If you're fresh out of college or looking for your first job in tech/engineering, do yourself a favor and find a company that works onsite. Ask recruiters and the interviewers about this. Make sure that senior/staff level employees don't have carved out exemptions to WFH. You have an entire career to work remotely, spend the first ~ 5 years being surrounded by people smarter and more inexperienced than yourself.

[starky]

Regarding the example at the start of the article I haven't found that new design engineers are less capable than ones in the past. Hiring interested and capable of learning junior designers isn't a problem at all. If anything, with the availability of inexpensive 3D printers, more students actually build stuff in their free time since it is more accessible than needing to have access to machine tools. In the past you would have mostly been looking at the few who had joined a design team like Formula SAE.

I still do think it would be beneficial to any aspiring mechanical designer to spend some time working in a machine shop and learning how things are actually made. It is definitely one of the most beneficial experiences that I had during my schooling and made me stand out from the rest of my fellow graduates when finding a first job.

[helveticar]

There is a difference between academic learning and vocational training. The UK used to have higher education institutions called Polytechnics, I went to one. These taught degree courses qualifying you for working life. Architects, chemists, computer scientists...

I did a 4 year degree, the third year was spent working for an employer. At the end of the final year much of what I'd been taught formally was outdated or irrelevant to the workplace. Many of the useful skills came from practical projects and that third year.

Polys got phased out and renamed Universities, a valuable distinction was lost and no one was fooled.

[Pigalowda]

It took 3 people to write this beautiful fecalith.

[fatnoah]

Is this new? I distinctly remember this as my own experience starting out in the late '90's, and it basically feels like the experience of every new hire I've seen. Actually, with better tooling, Google, and the like, I feel like new hires are more able to fix and solve their issues. (in software, anyway)

[x86x87]

I know! RTO /s

An environment that fosters collaboration and mentorship surely will address this. Not.

[rabbits_2002]

What a terrible article.