by Bill Sardi
Recently by Bill Sardi: Mr. O’s Fairness Taxes Could Backfire and End Up A Big Zero for America
The young who are entering the workforce for the first time are hit the hardest because they usually do not have the experience or financial backing to start their own business. Though one of my neighbor’s sons is defying the odds and starting his own online business – a first-of-its-kind site that helps school sports teams raise money now that public and private schools don’t have sufficient funds.
Value traps
A major problem that I see is that it never dawns upon many people they need to increase their value. And there are "value traps" as I call them – getting a PhD is no guarantee you will be gainfully employed. For example, in Cuba and Argentina there are few jobs so people go back for more schooling. These countries have the best-educated cab drivers. Taxi driving is the only job that is widely available. A lesson here may be to use your education to create your own job rather than relying upon someone else to create opportunity for you.
Can higher education keep up with the speed of information?
The "higher education trap" in America today is that higher education has largely become unaffordable and going into lifetime debt to gain a degree that may not pan out into a career is potentially a dead-end proposition. Readers might want to view an incredible short online video entitled "Did You Know?" which points to the fact knowledge is increasing at such exponential speed that college textbooks are out of date by the time a freshman becomes a senior, that careers must change many times over a lifetime due to the speed of change, that the top ten in demand jobs in 2010 did not exist in 2004 and that we are preparing students for jobs that do not yet exist. This video cites a fact that according to the US Department of Labor "today’s learner will have 10-14 jobs by the age of 38."
About 15 years ago I took advantage of an explosion of information in the field of nutrition that was occurring. There were more published studies involving nutrition and health in just a short period of five years than there was in the prior 50 years. Whoever was educated and degreed in the field of nutrition was holding antiquated information in their head. I began to bone up on new information about vitamins, minerals, herbals, by visiting local university medical libraries and photocopying articles that I filed. Today this is much easier with online access to the entire National Library of Medicine. I became the "go-to" guy in the field of dietary supplements to answer perplexing questions from consumers. I turned my self-taught knowledge into a new career. I authored more than a dozen books and am heard on the radio as a pitchman for a dietary supplement company over a thousand times a month.
Because these radio interviews are taped, I earned passive income, another lesson on the road to financial freedom. Barbers, doctors and dentists reach a point where more they cannot be any more productive without burning out. If Barbara Streisand had to sing a song every time someone wanted to hear it, her income would be limited. But she sings it once and technology makes it possible for her to earn income every time her tapes are sold. Passive income should be a long-term goal for everyone.
I soon found myself being sought after for radio interviews and public presentations. I wasn’t degreed in the field of nutrition. I was a perceived threat to some degreed nutritionists who wondered how I could speak out so boldly on health and nutrition issues without a degree (my degree was in journalism and public relations).
I have also had a number of wanna-be’s contact me, wanting me to educate them. They want to do the same thing I do in life. I give them a list of books to read and other online sources I use. However, they usually don’t want to do the necessary homework, they want me to spoon-feed them, educate them via e-mail or by telephone. They want personalized education served up on a platter. They want me to literally put words in their mouth. It doesn’t come that easy. You can’t lip sync knowledge.
Medicine, law and information technology all create value by creation of an undecipherable language that requires translation for consumers. One of the stumbling blocks to learning a new field is that it is like learning a foreign language. You have to catch on to new terms. For example, a few of the buzzwords in the field of nutrition today are epigenetics, apoptosis, autophagy, hormesis. A new entrant will have difficulty understanding what biologists are talking about unless they can catch on to the terminology. The same is true for any new field you enter, and it appears this fast-paced world will require workers to learn whole new sets of terminology many times over a lifetime.
Make use of free educational opportunities
There is another lesson here too. Unprecedented access to online information should help people adapt their career paths, create new directions, learn new skills, but this doesn’t appear to be the current American experience. Unfortunately, we see young people largely using the internet for self indulgence and social purposes. Music and social networks prevail among the young. Yet many of these same young people, particularly those in the Occupy Wall Street movement, lobby for equity in wages and wealth redistribution, as I will discuss below. The plundering of the American economy by the financial sector is appalling, but seeking transfer of wealth from rich to poor should not be a career move.
Are learning institutions really dedicated?
A killer for higher learning institutions is that you should be able to access online lectures from the most prominent professors of physics, biology, mathematics, and obtain their recommended textbooks, take proctored tests and skip the high cost of attending classes altogether. The list of schools offering courses and degrees online is growing. But online learning is the death knell for brick and mortar schooling.
I’m left with the thought of a young person with a college degree, with some acquired knowledge but few skills. Compare a college grad like that with a young person who has learned how to repair Mercedes Benz’ or who can write a complicated computer program on a rush deadline, but has no degree. Which one has the greatest value in the marketplace? Skills are marketable. Skills cannot be taken away. If your boss fires you and thinks you are a bum, so what? If you have skills, you can travel.
Good old boy networks
An unmentioned aspect of a college degree is inclusion in a "good old boy" network where fraternity members and alumni identify themselves in visual ways, like school flags that fly in front of their homes, to identify themselves in a semi-secret society to gain favor for contracts and jobs. The University of Southern California alumni association is said to have set itself up in a similar manner to Masonry. In recent times I have observed that more friends and acquaintances have joined Masonry to enhance their earning power. The fact that educational institutions rely upon an informal network of favoritism based upon entrance into an elite alumni group rather than advancement by demonstrated skills and knowledge is a tacit admission these institutions have little to offer graduates in the form of true competitive advantage. This is a distasteful way of getting ahead in life as it doesn’t build real personal value.
Your worth and the supply of labor
One of the problems is not seeing your worth in context of labor supply. This is why unions were fashioned. For example, there were too many bricklayers and hod carriers and many would work for less and less just to get the job. Unions were formed to negotiate minimum wages or livable wages.
Unions are not always necessary in producing adequate wages. It was Henry Ford who realized he couldn’t sell his model-T cars without consumers having adequate incomes to afford to buy one, so he compensated his workers so they could buy the vehicles they built.
Examine the following chart. What it shows are the number of jobs available in the Cincinnati area compared with wages. It is clear that jobs which require greater education, skill and experience are much scarcer and much more rewarding financially. This may seem obvious to readers here, but not to the average Joe looking for a job. If you want a livable wage, you are going to have to become something more than a stock clerk. If you have knowledge and skills others don’t and you can coax others to pay for that, you will earn more. Common knowledge pays common rates of pay.
What we often read or hear today in the news are efforts by workers to obtain a "livable wage." You can click through here and read about bus drivers in New Mexico delivering their plight to a sympathetic news reporter who is attempting to help them gain better wages. But as you read the news story it is obvious that a contractor for the public school transportation contract under-bid to win the contract and now can’t make a profit. The bus driver union says starting pay for these bus drivers is $9.87 per hour and $13.60 per hour for a veteran driver. The average annual salary ranges from $10,000 to $12,000 with no health benefits or retirement packages. The bus drivers complain they are victims of "paltry state funding." The drivers say they are "trying to get a living wage so that people here can get off of welfare and food stamps. It's hard to raise kids on 10 dollars an hour." Lesson: don’t waste your time fighting for higher wages when your employer doesn’t have the money.
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