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 them-selves
unaware of the robust op-portunities
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.”