Young Adults Naive About Their Working Future

Our retort to a recent post on YPulse has created a lot of discussion and debate and Meredith over at the Y has pulled some of the great discussion points. Although some of the commenters (often older ones) supported my suggestion that maybe young adults leaving college should think about setting themselves up as a business rather than looking for a job, others (who seem to be the younger ones) argued that there’s more benefit in getting a job – particularly in a large company.

When I read the comments I couldn’t help to think that by receiving too many cups for being on the losing side at school, Gen Y’s sense of reality when it comes to work has been ruined. Some blunt thoughts in response to the discussion:

* You have the right to work. You do not have the right to have a job.

* There are no jobs waiting for you. Your education was designed to place you into factories that no longer exist. You must be responsible for your own re-training.

* The workforce is making a large shift to freelance / flexible working whether you like it or not. There will be far less permanent jobs available.

* Some commenters saw a difference between being a freelancer and running your own business. Being a freelancer is running your own business. You are both intern and CEO as a freelancer.

* It’s naive to think that you can’t afford to run your own business – being a freelancer or entrepreneur is not a luxury. It’s a necessity. If you have debts no one is going to pay them off but yourself. There will be fewer and fewer full time jobs that will be secure enough so that you can expect to pay off your loans quickly.

* Working for a large company does not mean that you’ll get the necessary experience to help your career. Often, the larger the company, the bigger a mess it is in internally with thousands of people doing the work that could be done by a few in a modern structured company. You’ll learn how to win at office politics and how to short cut bureaucracy.

* The Bay Area and other entrepreneurial hubs are full of people trying to run new companies without what traditionally would be considered ‘the right experience’. The folks there sit in coffee shops and co-working spaces and learn from each other.

* Working for a large company with much safety means less drive, less will to succeed, less fear of failure, less connectivity with the world, less lessons for a great career.

* The internet provides better career learning that your job ever will (Ypulse is a good starting point). A job is designed to make you produce something not learn something. In my experience, it is very rare to get training in a company – and in my opinion if you’re working in a company that spends a lot of money on training, then it’s probably a bloated pilot-less oil-tanker of a company and not one that’s going to teach you the right lessons for the future.

* Your 20s is the decade you need to least care about your healthcare. If you really think great healthcare coverage is high on your list when considering employment, get a job as a coffee grinder at Starbucks. America’s healthcare is in a woeful state but young folks could take the healthcare option I took for the first 5 years I lived in the US – if I needed healthcare I visited ER. (Sorry, I know that is a bad way to use the system but hey, I was just following the tradition of many, many other immigrants. And thank gawd, I never used it).

* Turn to your out-of-work peers and collaborate. Build a product or service together that people or other businesses want. Digital media has leveled the playing field and democratized opportunity. You have to make the effort to make it all work for you.

More:
A Debate Over Young And Aspiring Media Professionals | Ypulse
Bad Advice – Get a Job