The next phase of life awaits
How to prepare young people for the workforce
3
StatePoint
Student loan debt is on the rise
and, unfortunately, the high cost of
tuition doesn’t mean that graduates
are guaranteed to find high-paying,
meaningful work after earning a
degree.
“Our education and workforce
development systems are broken
right now, and as a result, the country
is facing a crisis,” said Mark C. Perna,
workforce development consultant,
education strategist and author of a
new book, “Answering Why: Unleash-ing
Passion, Purpose, and Perfor-mance
in Younger Generations.”
“Millions of jobs in sectors cru-cially
important to our economy and
society are open, and we have no one
with the right skills — or even the
desire — to fill them,” he said.
In “Answering Why,” Perna
lays out a road map for better
preparing young people for the op-portunities
ahead, while also closing
the skills gap currently dogging the
economy.
Here he offers some of his top
insights and recommendations:
• Biases and misconceptions about
younger generations continue to per-sist,
and there’s an intergenerational
struggle to connect effectively.
Perna refers to Generations Y and Z
collectively as the “Why Generation,”
because its members want to under-stand
the “why” behind everything
they are asked to do.
We need to get to know and
understand their traits and abilities if
we expect them to perform beyond
expectations.
• Non-college career paths have
become stigmatized in this country.
Experts like Perna believe that
teachers and parents need to move
away from the belief that everyone
has to go to a four-year university to
be a successful and productive citizen.
Fulfilling, high-demand, high-wage
careers can be attained by postsec-ondary
training pathways beyond the
traditional college route.
• We should prioritize career devel-opment
exploration and education
as part of the K–12 system, Perna
stresses.
Even many teachers, counselors
and school administrators are
themselves unaware of the robust
opportunities available to today’s
youth and have tended to devalue
career exploration for the sake of
sending everyone through one
pathway — college.
• The Why Generation needs to
better understand the relationship
between self-motivation and outside
motivation when it comes to achiev-ing
goals, and parents and teachers
can help.
To succeed today, young people
must develop the “want-to” that
fosters passion, achievement and
self-esteem.
“As young people prepare for and
enter the world of work, we need to
coach them to do three things: focus,
plan and take action,” Perna said.
“This generation is tenacious and tal-ented,
but they need to be motivated
to reach their peak performance. They
can do it, but we have to help.”