Using young minds

Who here thinks our tertiary education sector is preparing students well for the workforce? A show of hands please. Anyone? No one? Hang on, there’s someone down the back. And where are you from sir? Ministry of Education. Ok. Well done.

No further evidence your honor.

My time at university was back in the halcyon days of accommodation grants, study grants, book grants and $4 jugs. In my last year I had to stomp up a whopping $250 of what my grants did not cover. We all considered this grossly unfair, as the previous year it had been around $50. So given the benevolence of Government of the day, our holiday earnings were mostly allocated to piss and petrol.

It was indeed happy days. But there was little of what I learnt in those lecture halls that got applied once I joined the workforce. (Now that may had something to do with the fact that I was working in an IT department having studied farm management - but I’m not going to allow the facts to get in the way of the story.)

So what did I learn at uni? That seeing how far you could climb up an unsupported ladder is a risky activity. That the best lecturers tended not to have spent all their time in academia. If you did not save your work on the computer regularly, you would lose it when it crashed. That C’s got degrees. All the lyrics to the The House of the Rising Sun. That it is the place where many lifelong relationships are formed and your world becomes all the more richer for it. That you never regretted having to pull all-nighters because you bunked out to grab that bluebird day skiing. That agreeing to have ‘just one more’ was not always the wisest move.

Uni taught me that the world was an interesting place, that meeting new people was fun and not as scary as it had been in my imagination, and that for most, reward was pretty proportional to effort. So university was an education on a lot of good things, but not many of them were that vocational for me or many of my peers doing non-specialised courses.

So l can't say I was well prepared for the workplace. After a while you got into the groove, but my employer had worn the cost of me being pretty clueless through those early days. I had my fair share of muppet moments where more experienced staff had to spend time undoing what I had cocked up, or explaining things to me that later became patently obvious. I certainly was not alone, many humorous stories of workplace blunders were be recounted among my friends during our first year out of uni.

If there were a more graduated introduction to the workforce, rather like walking slowly into the sea to allow your body to get used to the temperature instead of launching into it off the jetty, then that transition would be easier for both parties.

Sounds reasonable you say. But how?

My idea is that the Government funds internships. So a workplace has a range of permanent intern roles (the number of being dependent on business size). These roles are structured so that the interns are able to produce useful work while learning on the job. And part of their role would be to infuse young thinking into a business and challenge convention. This would give organisations a continual stream of new ideas and fresh thinking, which would start to give NZ some chance of moving our stagnant productivity growth into something that is bright and flourishing.

For this work there would need to be genuine commitment in businesses at a senior level to adopt an innovation culture where the idea is king, not the credentials of those proposing them. So they treat the students as their spring of new thinking that helps feed their innovation processes, and at the same time help them adapt to their future customers.

So where does the money come from you ask? Increased tax revenue through businesses generating growth from the clever new ideas introduced by these bright young things. That’s a bit fanciful you say. Uh-oh. There goes that thinking which is constrained by assumption and risk avoidance. Get that black hat off and go and burn the bastard.

Aversion to risk and change seems to increase as we age. But if you think about it, it should be the other way around. Us older folk who have used up more of our available time on this planet have less to lose than the generations that follow us. Yet they are much more comfortable to take risk and seek change - just as we were when we were their age. So next time you think you shouldn’t do something, ask what your younger self would have said, and listen to them.

So what next? Don’t wait for the guvinmint to do anything here. Go and write a job description for some interns and employ them.  Get the leg up on your competition because they will be busy trying to generate new ideas with old thinking.