Helicopter Parents Could Learn From Their Trad Moms and Dads

 Helicopter parents are getting worse.

The Wall Street Journal reports that a growing number of Gen Z parents are actively intervening in their children’s job searches, interviews, hiring processes, and even early career issues.

According to the Journal, parents are calling companies about their adult children’s performance reviews, benefits choices, and even calling in sick for them.

According to one survey, 20 percent of Zoomers had a parent attend a job interview with them.

One staffing executive had to fire a 24-year-old twice — once to the employee, who failed to show up for meetings four times, and again to his irate mother who demanded her son be given another chance.

Needed: Trad Parent Wisdom

Ironically, the parents who are hovering over their children now grew up two or three decades ago under trad parents who raised them in an opposite manner.

Not only did our trad parents not obsess over us, they made us go outside to play and not come home until supper, and we knew we had better not be late.

We were free to roam, invent, and discover on our own. We learned how to socialize, make friends, and deal with some of the jerkier kids without a parent anywhere to be found.

True, families were bigger back then and there was always an older sibling around to help us get out of scrapes.

When a big bully busted up my hand-built go-kart, my big sister kicked the tar out of him — he was two years older and 70 pounds heavier than she, but I will never forget the image of her sitting on his back, pounding her fists into his sides as he cried like a baby.

Trad parents didn't give us unwarranted praise. Rather, our parents specialized in admonishing us for the millions of things we were doing wrong — not getting to school on time, not getting high enough grades, not keeping our beds made.

In fact, if we were ever accused of any wrongdoing by other adults, our parents sided instantly with the accusers.

“What did you do now, Tommy?”

We had to prove, beyond any reasonable doubt, that we were not at fault — though, truth be told, we usually were at fault.

Adults Must Figure Life Out on Their Own

When my parents dropped me off at college, they didn't worry about the life challenges that awaited me. They could barely contain their glee that I wouldn't be eating everything in their refrigerator or racking up auto repairs on our Ford Pinto with Jim Rockford maneuvers (don't ask).

They gave me a big jar of peanut butter and some crackers and advised me there was no point in writing home for money — as there wasn't any.

I admit my blue-collar father did intervene in my studies. Worried I would never find a job as an English major, he insisted I minor in something practical.

Thanks to his meddling, I became the only person to ever graduate from Penn State with a major in English and a minor in air-conditioning and heating.

In any event, our trad parents knew that the process of becoming a well-functioning adult required us to figure most things out on our own.

Looking back, that is the greatest gift they gave us.

End Helicopter Parenting Before It’s Too Late

As I said, it’s ironic that so many of today's parents, who enjoyed a trad-parent upbringing, are suffocating their kids’ development by endlessly meddling in their affairs.

It has gotten so bad, reports the Journal, that employers increasingly view heavy parental involvement as a red flag — a signal that Zoomers with especially meddlesome parents likely lack independence and the ability to make their own decisions.

I sure hope these kids figure out how to function on their own before their turn comes to run the country.

Or one day, during a live White House press conference, the president will be asked a tough question and his mother will grab the microphone.

“I don’t appreciate the tone of these questions!” his mom might say. “And for the record, it’s not his fault he was late to the NATO summit — the traffic was terrible and his alarm didn’t go off!”

I am glad I put in the hours.

 I am glad I played 25 of my 50 playstation 5 games. I am glad I wrote 580 internet movie database reviews. I am glad I wrote 290 album reviews at Discogs since 2011. I am glad I was on bluray.com and had 1090 posts since 2011. I am glad I uploaded archive.org memories in 100 videos and 7000 JPEGs. I am glad I wrote 500 game reviews and 300 blog entries on my blog and gamespot blog. I am glad I wrote 100 book reviews at Goodreads and have 4900 friends. Now people can be friends with me or marry me someday.

why im not in information technology

 I’m an electrician and have been for 10 years. You work in the cold. In the heat. On ladders. On roofs. In the mud. In the snow. You poop in porta potties. It’s entirely possible that your job Will literally kill or maim you. There is no microwave. No fridge. No break room.
Sure we make good money but you have to consider the work conditions. IT professionals will always be needed, the scope of work may change with AI sure but I think you’re being a little pessimistic.

Only if you are fanatically passionate about IT. There's a lot of change and there will be a lot more change as AI comes into play. If you're looking to make REAL money with a job that will not easily replaced by AI go look into Plumbing, Electrician, or other trades.

Plumbers make more than most IT people at this point and no their job isn't simple, but each install and repair contains unique challenges which will be difficult for AI to solve since it won't have many or any data points to pull from in the past.

Electrician is a good job, cleaner than plumbing, but a slightly more competitive field. 

The IT industry is oversaturated with boot camp graduates, the "self taught" and overall mediocrity. There is still plenty of room to succeed if you have the appropriate degree. If you're looking to get into anything in IT then you should consider degrees in computer science, computer engineering or electrical engineering. These degrees coupled with an internship at a respectable firm and solid industry references will help you succeed and differentiate you from the mediocre hoard. 

Name the most expensive personal item you’ve ever purchased (not your home or car).

My College degrees were $33,000 from 2003 – 2015 of education at WITC New Richmond, Chippewa Valley Technical College and Rasmussen University. The Rasmussen University had a mascot, but no sports, no dorms, and mostly online education off message boards, and 10-12 pages of APA papers weekly. WITC and Chippewa Valley were on campus. There was no cameras on campus except they didn’t enforce that totally. There were only class pictures by staff and events or holidays on the colleges instagram and facebook page unless someone snuck phone camera inside it.

I paid $800 for a Dell PC Tower with Ryzen 1700, 16 GB of RAM, a Radeon, and 1 terabyte hard drive in 2018.

I quit my high-paying tech job': 10 people share what finally drove them away from big tech

 

In a world where high-paying tech roles are highly coveted, many professionals are choosing alternative paths over big paychecks. Some left behind their glamorous roles to pursue their passions, and some quit tech due to burnout.

These 10 professionals share what finally made them leave big tech — and what they're doing now.

Eric Yu quit his $370K software engineer job at Meta after having panic attacks

Eric Yu was a software engineer at Meta and experienced panic attacks due to work pressure.

"In November 2019, I experienced my first panic attack while I was working from home. It was around 4 p.m., and my left pinky went completely numb. At first, I ignored it, but it got worse: An hour in, my ears were ringing, and my heart was beating really fast."

Now, Yu and his fiancée have started house hacking, a lower-cost way of getting into real estate. They bought a five-bedroom home in Redding, California, four hours north of San Francisco. While they lived in a 252-square-foot detached guest house in the backyard, their main house was bringing in about $8,000 a month in revenue on Airbnb.

Yu told Insider that he knows it sounds crazy to leave a $370,000 job, and staying at Meta for the rest of his life would have ensured financial security, but he knew it wasn't right for him.

Sergio Najera quit a six-figure engineering job because the company didn't allow international travel

During the pandemic, Najera was working as a software engineer at a major corporation based in Minneapolis. He had been dreaming of traveling abroad for a long time. However, the company was very strict on employee travel policy. If he wanted to work outside of Minnesota, he would need special permission.

He decided to quit and take a startup job because it would give her the flexibility to work from wherever he wanted to. "I've traveled to Spain, Morocco, the Netherlands, and Argentina. Next, I'm planning trips to Brazil and Chile."

Mayuko Inoue left her tech job due to panic attacks 

Mayuko Inoue is a former iOS software engineer at Patreon and Netflix. She started to get panic attacks and learned her anxiety stemmed from overexerting herself at work.

Inoue told Insider that "Work hard, play hard" is a mentality that echoes throughout tech offices, and hustle culture seems like this aggressive, masculine personality (though that's probably because the tech industry is very male-dominated).

"I saw that what lures people into hustle culture is the idea of working for financial stability, finding status, or feeling that you're changing the world. It can feel contagious and impossible to escape.

Michael Lin quit his job as a Netflix engineer making $450,000 a year and has zero regrets

Michael Lin joined Netflix in 2017 as a senior software engineer. At first, he enjoyed his role.

However, over the next two years, the shine began to wear off. Lin told Insider that the projects and meetings blended together, and they felt like small variations of each other after a while. The engineering work began to feel like copy and paste.

After quitting Netflix, Lin was worried that he'd have no social life. But the opposite happened — he's met more people through starting his own business, like other entrepreneurs, writers, and creators. "I now feel a deep calmness inside me, an unshakable belief that everything will be OK, even if any future success is not guaranteed right now.

Jerry Lee quit his $198,000 job at Google to build his startup

Jerry Lee is a former strategy and operations manager at Google. He told Insider that after working at Google, he felt like he got a mini MBA.

Lee told Insider that he's grateful for all the lessons that his managers and his teams taught him, and he still uses them to run his startup today.

"But certainly, my job at Google was stressful: We worked on a global team and some coworkers were based in Europe and Asia. So we had meetings at 5 or 6 a.m. on Tuesdays and at 11 p.m. every Wednesday. I felt I always had to give 110% every single day because my colleagues were extremely smart and hardworking."

Rahul Pandey left his $800K job at Meta to build his own startup 

In 2017, Rahul Pandey he joined Facebook (now known as Meta) as a senior engineer and worked there for almost five years. His compensation at Meta rapidly increased to more than $800,000 a year.

In 2022, he left Meta to start Taro, a community to help other engineers achieve similar career success.

Pandey said that he left Meta as a much better engineer compared to when I joined in 2017. "I attribute this to a mindset shift around building deep relationships at work. I understood that asking questions is a prerequisite for growth within a complex, fast-moving team. I was able to receive actionable feedback from colleagues, which allowed me to identify and deliver high-impact projects."

Mitchie Nguyen left her $196,000 tech job at Meta to build her creator-economy startup

Mitchie Nguyen spent about six years working in the tech industry at companies such as LinkedIn, Meta, and Google.

Nguyen told Insider that many people talk about salary bumps as a benefit of job-hopping. However, her No. 1 reason and motivation has always been to gain a breadth of experience.

"When you're starting out in your career, it's important to explore roles and build a network in new companies. Through all these jobs, I gained confidence and skills from sales to product marketing. That's why I quit her job at Meta to start my own startup in the creator economy."

"I realized my 20s was my time to explore roles and industries. Our careers span upwards of 40 years, so I wanted to take full advantage of exploring — I feel the later you get in your career, the harder it is to drop off and do something else."

Dayana Sabatin quit her job in tech in Seattle because she felt miserable with her career

Sabatin used to work in a cubicle for eight to 10 hours a day as a financial specialist at a tech company in Seattle. Feeling beyond miserable, she decided she wanted to change her life. She made the decision to move to Los Angeles and is now a writer, blogger and YouTuber. 

"I can confidently say I'm on the right path now, and I've never felt more excited about the direction my life is headed in. If you feel destined for something outside of what you currently have, then go for it. Don't be afraid to color outside of the lines.

One tech worker quit her job due to burnout and has no regrets

This tech worker hit a wall last year after working at a large technology company for about a year and a half. She'd sit on the couch with her partner at the end of each workday and not be able to carry on a conversation. Her job was so demanding that she didn't have energy left over for anything else.

"So, I asked myself: Is this what I want for my life? I'm nearly 30. Do I really want to give up so much for my job? I decided to quit in August."

She has no regrets about quitting, despite a tough job search.

Jonathan Javier left his $120,000 job to build his startup to help people land their dream jobs

Jonathan Javier is a former product operations analyst at Google, Snap, and Cisco. He left his $120,000 job to build his startup, Wonsulting, an AI-powered platform that helps job seekers optimize their résumés, cover letters, and LinkedIn profiles. 

Javier than told Insider that people need to build their network early on to land their dream job. "Building your network early on makes a big difference in job hunting. Before negotiating compensation, I asked peers who worked at other tech companies what a reasonable pay range might be. With that information, I felt much more confident during interviews. It's better than relying solely on websites like Glassdoor."

Reasons Why IT Professionals Are Quitting Their Jobs

 

Faced with the double whammy of a shortage of IT workers and a widening digital skills gap, it is critical for organizations to understand what motivates tech professionals and why they would choose to quit their jobs. New research from Jefferson Frank, an Amazon Web Services recruitment firm based in the U.K., finds numerous reasons why tech pros are quitting or planning to quit their jobs beyond a lack of salary increases

Why IT pros are quitting or wanting to leave their jobs

Based on this research, here are the top 10 reasons IT pros plan to change their employer within the next 12 months; the reasons are listed in order of how the answers were ranked:

1. Lack of salary increase/earnings increase.
2. Lack of career and promotional prospects.
3. Need new challenges.
4. Lack of leadership and vision.
5. Working environment/company culture.
6. I’m underutilized in my current role/company.
7. Lack of exposure to the latest X products.
8. To pursue a better work/life balance.
9. I’m underappreciated in my current company.
10. I’m over-stressed/overworked.

Fair compensation will always be critical, the report noted.

One surprise finding is that “57% of freelance AWS specialists would consider switching to a permanent role,” said James Lloyd-Townshend, chairman and chief executive officer of Jefferson Frank. “The world of contract work has previously been seen as such a lucrative ecosystem that leaving it behind seemed unthinkable. While those within it remain in huge demand, it’s interesting for those looking to attract professionals on a permanent basis that they are able to potentially hire from new talent pools.”

3 retention tips for tech leaders

Retention of IT staff is an issue that spans all positions and all industries, according to Lloyd-Townshend. Because tech professionals ” … have historically been in such high demand that if their current employer can’t offer what they want, there’s been a good chance someone else out there would be willing to,” Lloyd-Townshend told TechRepublic. “While that balance of power has evened itself up over the last 12 to 18 months, the culture of professionals not being afraid to move on to develop their career has remained.”

The other top reasons tech pros quit broadly fall into three categories: progression, purpose and working culture. Businesses will need to reinvigorate these elements in the hope of retaining their tech talent, the report said.

Retention tip #1: Provide career tracks

Tech professionals want clear pathways and career tracks to give them more incentive to stay with a business in the long term. This needs to include clarity around new responsibilities and initiatives at each stage to avoid any possibility of the work becoming too stale or employees feeling like they’re being underutilized, according to the report.

“Clear pathways are about being transparent on what a professional needs to take the next step in their career with you,” Lloyd-Townshend explained. “Rather than promotions being awarded without any clarity on the process, make sure people know exactly what’s required in order for them to progress.”

This might include experience in a specific area of that technology, or soft skills such as project management or presenting, he said. The important thing is knowing what’s required for employees to move up the ladder. This ” … gives you a far greater chance of a person taking those steps with you than trying to achieve their goals elsewhere,” Lloyd-Townshend said.

Retention tip #2: IT professionals want to be on the cutting edge

Organizational purpose has never been more important; professionals want to feel engaged and connected to what they’re doing. Ensuring your business is keeping up with developments in the space is essential, as tech professionals tend to want to be on the cutting edge.

Retention tip #3: Address well-being

Burnout remains a serious subject in tech, according to the study. A healthy workplace culture that considers work-life balance and stress levels must be fostered.

Lloyd-Townshend recommended making sure that ” … praise is visible across departments. A ‘well done’ email is always nice, but a shout-out during a larger call is better, as well as being able to explain to others how that person’s work matters as part of the bigger picture,” he said.

But this is something that must be embedded at the leadership level. A clear and well-communicated sense of purpose and company trajectory will radiate outward in a positive way for staff throughout a business.

These issues can’t be solved at the individual level, the study said; it requires ” … company-wide solutions that seek to prioritize well-being for its own sake rather than for purely utilitarian reasons, according to the report. Otherwise, ” … burnout will only continue to take people out of the sector.”

Additional steps companies can take

Jefferson Frank has seen companies offer volunteer days, which allow employees to take time off and contribute to local projects and causes, ” … giving them a feeling of purpose and that their company is helping them to do something that really matters,” Lloyd-Townshend said.

The process should start by listening to your staff, he said. “Your role as an employer isn’t to second guess what your employees need from you.” Leaders have a responsibility to find out, he added.

Methodology

The findings are based on 607 tech professionals working across AWS, Salesforce, Microsoft 365, Azure and business applications, as well as NetSuite. Jefferson Frank is part of the Tenth Revolution Group.

The new labor market: No bachelor’s required?

Groom, who was once enrolled at Bowie State University, left college when his first daughter was born. That daughter now has a college diploma. Groom still does not. But he had gained experience and credentials: a two-decade rise in retail from Giant cashier to CVS store manager, and a suite of computer networking certificates that led him to three years of information technology contracting gigs.

When Groom interviewed for his first IT job, he heard the dispiriting sentence that trips up so many careers: “I’m looking for someone with a bachelor’s degree.” But the hiring manager at that job looked past the unchecked box, and took Groom on as a configuration management analyst.

    “Certificates are huge in IT. A certificate will get you in the door. But if you’re gonna go anywhere, you need that [B.A.] in addition.”
    Amber Wallace Dekie, help desk professional

That was one position, and one hiring manager. Who knew what would happen with the next job search? With Hogan’s move, however, the lack of a degree was no longer an obstacle, at least for state jobs: It was a reason to be recruited.

“It means a lot,” Groom said of Hogan’s announcement. “There are a lot of companies limiting out a lot of talent. You can have a degree and not have the knowledge and skill sets.”

He followed a link to a job site called Stellarworx and applied for two IT positions with the state.

Related: What if we hired for skills not degrees?

Thanks to a tight labor market, more good jobs are opening up to workers who lack a bachelor’s degree. A month after Maryland’s announcement, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis directed government agencies in his state to embrace hiring workers for skills, not degrees. Private sector employers have been rolling back B.A. requirements too.

While the pandemic labor shortage has prompted more employers to welcome applications from workers without degrees, workforce advocates have been pushing back for years against a surge of so-called degree inflation triggered by the Great Recession. When the economy tanked in 2008 and millions of laid-off workers began competing for scarce jobs, employers got pickier about who they hired and increasingly added four-year degree requirements to some “middle-skills” jobs that had frequently been filled by workers without degrees. (Middle-skills jobs, which include positions in fields such as health care, IT, and sales, require some training or education beyond high school, although not necessarily a B.A. — jobs like registered nurse, human resources assistant, or help desk technician.) Even before Covid hit, advocates for accepting applicants who lack a college degree had found some success persuading employers that it is in their interest, no matter the labor market, to hire workers who have skills but lack a bachelor’s degree.
The Google campus in Mountain View, California. The company is one of many that’s dropping bachelor’s degree requirements for certain jobs. Credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

The increasing availability of good jobs for those without degrees coincides with a growing struggle for postsecondary education. Enrollment, already on a decade-long decline, dropped precipitously during the pandemic, emptying a million seats at two-year and four-year colleges. This convergence — fewer people pursuing diplomas, and more being recruited without one — raises the prospect of young workers putting less stock in obtaining a bachelor’s degree, for so long an unshakable aspiration for Americans of every background.

The lack of the credential has traditionally shut workers out of their desired professions and the wealth accumulation that comes with them. Sixty-two percent of Americans over 25 have no bachelor’s degree, and that number rises to 72 percent for Black adults and 79 percent for Hispanic adults. Any shift in the workforce to the advantage of workers without degrees carries obvious implications for economic mobility and equity.

However wide the door opens for workers without degrees, they won’t get through it without sufficient skills. Their success in the labor market depends upon finding an affordable pathway to develop those skills and the willingness of employers to keep prioritizing skills over degrees, even if a recession upends the job market.

Some workforce observers see reasons to believe employers will keep that door open for workers without degrees, even if the economy sends more college graduates their way.

Related: More students question college, putting counselors in a fresh quandary

When the Hogan administration heard how hard it was becoming for agencies to fill open positions, it partnered with a nonprofit organization called Opportunity@Work to recruit workers like Groom. Opportunity@Work calls such workers “STARs,” because they are Skilled Through Alternative Routes, like workforce training, community college courses and job experience.

Opportunity@Work connects STARs to training programs and works with employers to develop job listings for its Stellarworx employment website. The organization claims 70 million Americans are STARs. Maryland labor secretary Tiffany Robinson estimated that 47 percent of Maryland workers are, too.

“We had a flood of applications on the first tranche of postings,” Robinson said. She estimated that more than half of the state government’s 38,000 jobs could eventually substitute experience for a four-year degree.

Businesses like Google, IBM, and Accenture have also made high-profile moves to boost skills-based hiring and remove bachelor’s degree requirements. In a report on the “emerging degree reset” released earlier this year, the labor analytics firm Burning Glass found that just 9 percent of Accenture’s “computer support specialist” listings required a bachelor’s in 2021, down from 46 percent in 2017.

    “The sad truth is, when you filter candidates based on college degrees, you’re closing out the vast majority of Black and Latino talent in the country.”
    Merit America co-CEO Rebecca Taber Staehelin

During the pandemic, employers ditched degree requirements at an even faster pace. In January, the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia examined a subset of middle-skill jobs and found that the proportion of job listings asking for a college degree dropped 4 percent between the first quarter of 2020 and the second quarter of 2021. In the Philly Fed’s estimation, that means 700,000 more of what it calls “opportunity jobs” — positions open to those lacking degrees that pay more than the U.S. yearly median of $36,660.

Employers could slap bachelor’s requirements on these kinds of listings again, if job seekers come flooding back. But Joseph Fuller, a professor of management at Harvard Business School, believes many of them likely won’t.

The Burning Glass “degree reset” report, which Fuller co-wrote, found that between 2017 and 2019, the number of positions requiring a B.A. dropped by more than 5 percent in roughly half of all middle-skills occupations. Though the labor market was already tightening, the report found that only a quarter of these changes were “cyclical,” or attributable to the labor market. Sixty-three percent of the changes were deemed “potentially permanent” shifts in hiring practices.

The trend toward degree inflation, the report concluded, has been reversed. If it sticks, Fuller and his co-authors believe 1.4 million more jobs could become available to workers lacking a B.A. between now and 2027.

Related: Long disparaged, education for the skilled trades is slowly coming into fashion

Although degree requirements may disappear for many jobs, workers will still need some alternative way to build the skills required to get hired without a college degree, whether through workforce training, on-the-job experience, or the kind of short-term education and certifications provided by community colleges and other institutions. Many job seekers never get the chance to access these pathways because they are stuck in low-wage, low-skill jobs and, as Fuller put it, “can’t afford not to work.”

“They’re inhibited to seek training because they can’t give up what they’re doing now,” Fuller said.

Fuller points to the work of Social Finance, a nonprofit funded by “impact investors” that helps workers train without going under financially. Social Finance provides wraparound services such as an emergency aid fund for child care, rent or transportation. Workers pay back the cost of their training only when they reach a certain salary level.

In February, Google announced a $100 million partnership with Social Finance to help as many as 20,000 workers earn IT certificates. Social Finance will draw on nonprofit workforce groups such as YearUp and Merit America to train participants and counsel them toward employment. Merit America co-CEO Rebecca Taber Staehelin said these kinds of programs can help companies walk the walk after years of talk about diversity, equity and inclusion.

“The sad truth is, when you filter candidates based on college degrees, you’re closing out the vast majority of Black and Latino talent in the country,” Taber Staehelin said.

Related: More people with bachelor’s degrees go back to school to learn skilled trades

Halid Hamadi, a 28-year-old Washington, D.C., resident, stumbled upon a Merit America IT training program on Indeed.com. “I was like, ‘Okay, that’s too good to be true,’” he said. “Because in bold they said, ‘We’re looking for minorities that don’t have a bachelor’s degree.”
A Google IT certification helped Halid Hamadi, 28, jump from minimum wage work at a Nike store to a $45,000 help desk job. Credit: Image by Anne Giebel, provided by Merit America

Hamadi had withdrawn from Penn State University in 2016 for financial reasons and taken a minimum wage retail job back home in Montgomery County, Maryland. Merit America provided a stipend that helped him afford a bus pass to attend job counseling sessions while he completed a 13-week Coursera program to earn a Google IT certification. His first job was a $45,000 “tier one” tech support position with a health care software developer. Two promotions later, he was an integration engineer making $75,000.

Another Merit America participant, 32-year-old Amber Wallace Dekie of Manassas, Virginia, graduated from high school in 2008, just in time to hear the housing bubble pop. She chose a comparatively recession-resistant industry to work in: health care.

“I realized I’d find more work; it felt like there was job security in it,” she said. “I found out later they don’t pay very well — the lower-level jobs, at least.”

She worked as a nurse’s aide, clinical technician and pharmacy assistant, never earning more than $14 per hour. Then her boyfriend landed a good IT job, and she started looking for her own. Like Hamadi, she stumbled onto Merit America’s program browsing IT listings on Indeed.com, applied, and completed the training. With her new Google certification, she went to Stellarworx and found a $22-per-hour help desk job.

Related: More people with bachelor’s degrees go back to school to learn skilled trades

A bachelor’s degree still holds prestige as a ticket to the middle class, but its value has received increasing scrutiny. In the last several years, rising tuition has been reason enough to reconsider an investment in postsecondary education: Americans owe more than $1.7 trillion in student loans. When Gallup asked Americans in 2019 about the value of college degrees, just 51 percent answered “very important,” down from 70 percent in 2013. The pandemic has driven down four-year college enrollment by 4 percent and community college enrollment by 17 percent since spring 2020.

Whether even more Americans opt out of four-year college will depend in part on the quality of jobs available without that diploma. Anthony Carnevale, director of Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, said that a decade from now, 4 out of 10 jobs will be reserved for people with at least a bachelor’s degree, and 3 out of 10 for people who lack the degree but do have some training or postsecondary education.

“Where the rubber hits the road is: Are they good jobs or not?” said Carnevale. For four-year degree holders, 75 percent of jobs will be good — which he defined as paying at least $40,000 per year by the time the worker reaches age 40. For those with no bachelor’s degree but more than a high school diploma, the share of good jobs drops to 40 percent. In other words, not everyone without a B.A. will be able to land a good job.

But, Carnevale said, “If you’re careful and make good choices, you don’t need a B.A.”

On Capitol Hill, where lawmakers are worrying about America’s competitiveness, Carnevale perceives a turn from higher education to workforce training. One bill currently in conference committee would make some short-term training programs eligible for federal Pell Grant funding, as long as their graduates demonstrate a 20 percent wage increase.

    “The communities that don’t have the college background, they still want that for their kids. They’ve been told that’s the American dream.”
    Maureen Ponce, president-elect of the Maryland School Counselor Association

Still, the workers most likely to thrive, Carnevale said, will have accumulated both the general education and flexibility that come with a bachelor’s coupled withsome specialized training. Specialization alone can pay off in the short-term: Carnevale said that 30 percent of two-year degree holders earn more than those with four-year degrees. But a bachelor’s degree still pays off in the long run through a significant advantage in lifetime earnings.

“The American B.A. is superior in the postindustrial world, and the reason appears to be that it makes people more adaptable over time. In 20 to 30 years, there’s something of a recovery in terms of earnings power,” Carnevale said.

In other words, a B.A. in, say, the humanities might get workers off to a slow start. “But a substantial share [of workers] 20 years out will be fine,” Carnevale said. “If you get a certificate in HVAC, 20 years out you’ll fall back in the pack.”

Even if more young people recognize the short-term gains they can make by plunging into the workforce without a college degree, that degree has retained its potency as a symbol of economic advancement. “I can’t tell you there’s one student I’ve ever talked to that said, ‘What’s the point of getting a college degree?’” said Maureen Ponce, president-elect of the Maryland School Counselor Association. “I’m Latina. For Latino families, it’s about, ‘I never had a chance to get a college degree. If my kids can get one, they’re gonna get one.’”

Counselors like Ponce work under the banner of “college and career readiness,” but any focus on career at the expense of college still gets pushback from families — and not just from wealthy families with Ivy League dreams.

“The communities that don’t have the college background, they still want that for their kids,” Ponce said. “They’ve been told that’s the American dream.”

Related: Debt without degree: The human cost of college that becomes ‘purgatory’

More workers may be accessing skills and finding good jobs without degrees, but not all of them have foreclosed on the idea of returning to school. Some, like Virginia resident and Merit America alumnus Wallace Dekie, worry they’ll hit a career ceiling without a college diploma, despite the gains they’ve made with alternative qualifications. Wallace Dekie knows the benefits of training — after moving into IT and developing specialized skills, she makes twice what she made as a nurse’s aide seven years ago — but she understands the power of the four-year degree.

“Certificates are huge in IT. A certificate will get you in the door. But if you’re gonna go anywhere, you need that [B.A.] in addition,” she said.
Previously stuck in low-wage jobs, 32-year-old Amber Wallace Dekie of Manassas, Virginia, jumped from health care to IT and nearly doubled her salary after workforce advocates helped her get a Google certification. Credit: Courtesy of Amber Wallace Dekie

She’s currently looking into an online bachelor’s program at Western Governors University, an online-only private institution.

The strategy of earning certificates in the IT field has also worked out well so far for Groom, the former cashier, even if it depended on the good luck of having a hiring manager who looked past his lack of a college diploma. Groom has already earned six figures in one year. The Hogan administration’s move to hire for skills rather than degrees has opened another potential career path for him, and he hopes landing an IT job with the government will give him an entrée to a career in cyber security.

Would workers leave a position over lack of suitable tech?

 

Having the right tools in order to complete tasks quickly and effectively has become imperative in the era of hybrid and remote work, but some decision makers at organizations reportedly see it differently. Ivanti, as part of its “State of Digital Employee Experience” report, found that both employees are fed up with the tech at their jobs—and it might be the difference between staying on as members of an organization or looking for opportunities elsewhere.

Ivanti surveyed 10,000 office workers, IT professionals and the C-suite to determine what trends are emerging with digital employee experiences, and the statistics uncovered by the company are surprising.

“The Everywhere Workplace has forever changed employee expectations when it comes to where they work, how they work, and what device they work on,” said Jeff Abbott, Ivanti’s CEO. “How employees interact with technology and their satisfaction with that experience directly relates to the success and value they deliver to the organization. The Digital Employee Experience should be a board level priority, and IT teams are poised to be strategic leaders in their organization to make it happen.”

According to the study, nearly half (49%) of those surveyed said that they are frustrated with the tech provided by their organization and 26% said they would consider quitting their jobs as a result of this dissatisfaction. To attempt to ease some of this satisfaction, a concerning statistic has emerged: Forty-two percent of workers have spent their own money to work more productively due to their grievances with enterprise provided tech.

Put simply, the technology given to employees is not keeping up with the expectations of workers. Employees are reporting that without the right tools to work effectively, both productivity and morale are negatively impacted, leading some to seek other work opportunities as a result. From the executive side, a schism has become apparent between employees and the C-suite with regards to company goals. As part of the survey, 62% of the IT decision-makers say they prioritize revenue over employee experience, and just 21% of leaders say they prioritize end user experience when selecting tools.

Ivanti’s CEO said with many workers in the tech industry in such high demand, it is imperative that companies are taking employee provided feedback seriously and catering to some of the wishes of their workforce so that they may work productively.

“Maintaining a secure environment and focusing on the digital employee experience are two inseparable elements of any digital transformation,” Abbott said. “In the war for talent, a key differentiator for organizations is providing an exceptional and secure digital experience. We believe that organizations not prioritizing how their employees experience technology is a contributing factor for the Great Resignation.”

This type of disconnect is what led to employees feeling ignored and the Great Resignation in the first place, and those in C-suite positions should be taking additional steps in making their workforce a more efficient and productive one, which then will raise morale in the workplace.

A few thoughtful changes could make them stay

 

With the rise of digital services and development tools, the time has never been riper for launching businesses -- or new ventures within businesses -- with composable building blocks now available through APIs, microservices and cloud platforms. In other words, IT without all the IT. Where does this leave technology professionals? 

Actually, building composable businesses means more work than ever for tech pros and managers -- it just adds a new dimension to their jobs. Appropriate technologies still need to be identified, tested, implemented, and replaced. With the move to composable, "enterprises will need help at all levels - strategic consulting, business services, enterprise software, cutting-edge technologies, operations support - very little is out of scope," Rajesh Kandaswamy, a Gartner analyst, noted. While he is more specifically addressing technology product and service leaders, this is just as applicable to individual professionals as well.

The advent of composable businesses means the technology development process will be more inclusive, suggests Matt McLarty, global field CTO and vice president of the digital transformation office at MuleSoft, a Salesforce company. I had the chance to catch up with McLarty at MuleSoft's recent summit in New York, where he provided his latest perspectives on a topic he has been evangelizing for a number of years. 

"It's embracing not just developers, but more builders," he says. "The developers aren't going to be out of work. They'll never be out of work. There will always be a need for gatekeepers and system thinkers to manage the stability and the interoperability of these systems. But having more people being able to inject new business ideas."

McLarty says there are many instances of people building successful enterprises without any on-premises IT. This is especially the case with digital-native startups such as Clubhouse and Lyft. "Nobody really starts from scratch," he says. "They built their businesses essentially reusing an API that did all the heavy lifting. You may think startups are all new cool tech. But they're constantly looking at the landscape of what APIs are out there."

This applies to larger, more established companies as well. "Even if companies are not necessarily making their legacy systems composable through APIs, they're going out to the digital ecosystem and finding capabilities," says McLarty. "They may use Stripe, Twilio, Google Maps, and AWS for their infrastructure. They're bootstrapping their businesses on top of all of these APIs."

When it comes to building a composable business, "it's not just about connecting things, it's about how you connect them," says McLarty. "It's more important to be adaptable than it is to be the best at something. For companies today, things happen too fast. The last three years have taught us this more than ever that the ability to change quickly is the most important strength. And the only way to change quickly is to build your core competencies in a way that can be pivoted and used."

7 in 10 tech workers say they're considering quitting their job within the next year in a new survey

 

• Seven in 10 tech workers are considering quitting in the next year, per a new survey of 1,200 people.
• Their top reasons included working hours, limited career progression, and toxic work environments.
• The labor shortage continues to cause havoc across multiple industries.

Seventy-two percent of US tech workers are considering quitting their jobs in the next 12 months, according to a new survey from learning software firm TalentLMS and Workable.

About four in ten of the 1,200 IT, software, and tech workers surveyed said that limited career progression made them think about leaving their jobs.

Other common reasons for considering leaving included non-flexible working hours, feeling underappreciated, and toxic work environments.

Just under a third of respondents said a lack of remote working options was making them consider quitting, too.

Eighty-five percent of respondents said that they felt their company focused more on attracting new employees than investing in existing staff. They said that more training and learning would make them feel more motivated, and that so would greater flexibility in where and when they worked.

Another 58% of all respondents said they were suffering from job burnout, though only 30% of those thinking of quitting cited burnout as a top reason why.

The US is suffering from a huge labor shortage, catalyzed by the pandemic, and people are reassessing what they want from work.

This has fueled the "Great Resignation," with record numbers of people quitting their jobs. Some are returning to education, while others are swapping industries or going freelance.

A separate survey by Joblist found that 73% of Americans were considering quitting their job, with more than a quarter of these people saying they would feel comfortable quitting their job without a new one lined up.

The labor shortage has hit industries ranging from education and healthcare to trucking and restaurants.

To plug their labor shortage, some companies have hiked up wages and started offering hiring bonuses.

Some chip companies, including Intel, are even hiring students who are still in college to plug a labor shortage amid surging demand for semiconductors.

 Here’s the why:

• Relentless employer demands
• Continual interruptions and disruptions to work-life balance
• Ill-defined projects
• “a steady stream of half-baked requests from stakeholders”

All of these elements contribute engineers’ dissatisfaction and yet, if the median annual wage for engineers is $91,000, which is substantially higher than the average American income, how bad could it be? Shouldn’t we just say “toughen up cupcake”?

It’s worse than we thought…

Of the 600 data engineers surveyed, 78% stated that they wished the job “came with a therapist” to help with stress management. Nearly 80% of respondents stated that they were considering a move to a different career altogether. The researchers who conducted the survey warned that burnout must become “every organization’s top priority” in order to retain top talent for the long-term.

Employment is dangerious

 

I have never worked more then 17 months in my life. I didn’t think my life was toxic until they cut my hours. I was getting used to the heavy metal / death metal over Spotify at work within 9 month. The manger had a Youtube of Northern Invasion (Somerset, Wi) concerts that included thrash (Metallica), Tool, nu metal (Slipknot) death (Amon Amarth), glam metal. The Windows logins were farm animals after Animals by Pink Floyd. There was a lot of Snapchat and Instagram trades at Laptop Chips. Before this, I never got any contacts from work at Circuit City in Woodbury, PC network Services in Stillwater, Western Wisconsin Health in Baldwin, or Pulatech in Hudson. I know that the career exploration program employees replaced me at Laptop Chips and Pulatech. These military people take my job over at request. I showed the CEO of Laptop Chips the bird! At Laptop Chips, it was a marine who had nepotism with the CEO. It got many employees fired. It was in the middle retail apocalypse with Best Buy closing stores. Laptop Chips barely got past firemen codes. I never got a good position in retail and my jobs were all retail. Retail is toxic workplace. I wasn’t able to get deep into Information Technology much which is also toxic with burnout problems. The stakeholders would give their half-baked ideas to IT workers. However, I had easier jobs in my throughout my life. I think laptop Chips had high turnover.

The meaning of life is not to work so hard. Its too difficult to make new friends, and the cops are out to jail me if I try too hard. I tried going to bars in my 20s. The parties are over at 30. The gatherings are over at 30. I don’t see family coming to visit me often.