But this week I liked the way he summarized things: we live in "A brave new 401(k) world, where we all take the bar exam, and are measured by the most-emailed list." His explanation follows (my emphasis added in bold):
What’s exciting is that this platform empowers individuals to access learning, retrain, engage in commerce, seek or advertise a job, invent, invest and crowd source — all online. But this huge expansion in an individual’s ability to do all these things comes with one big difference: more now rests on you.Our education system is like a horse-and-buggy in this world. The government has decided at both the federal and state level to tie teachers to standardized tests. This is the "most-emailed" list for teachers, in that they are evaluated, measured by their students' performance on these exams. It isn't a horrible idea to have accountability for teachers, nor some way to measure students' progress. But the system has skewed incentives badly. Rather than using these tests as one piece of a larger evaluation package that would include lots of peer observation and supervisor evaluation, they become the only metric used. And so teachers spend all year teaching the test. Period. Students (the good ones) learn to memorize what's on it and regurgitate it at test time, but if it isn't on the test, it probably doesn't even get five minutes of mention all year in class. Critical thinking skills? No time for that.
If you are self-motivated, wow, this world is tailored for you. The boundaries are all gone. But if you’re not self-motivated, this world will be a challenge because the walls, ceilings and floors that protected people are also disappearing. That is what I mean when I say “it is a 401(k) world.” Government will do less for you. Companies will do less for you. Unions can do less for you. There will be fewer limits, but also fewer guarantees. Your specific contribution will define your specific benefits much more. Just showing up will not cut it.
The policy implications? “Just as having a 401(k) defined contribution plan requires you to learn more about investing in your retirement, a 401(k) world requires you to learn much more about investing in yourself: how do I build my own competencies to be attractive to employers and flourish in this world,” said Byron Auguste, a director at McKinsey and one of the founders of Hope Street Group, which develops policies to help Americans navigate this changing economy. “As young people rise to that challenge, the value of mentors, social networks and role models will rise.”
Indeed, parenting, teaching or leadership that “inspires” individuals to act on their own will be the most valued of all.
When I say that “everyone has to pass the bar now,” I mean that, as the world got hyperconnected, all these things happened at once: Jobs started changing much faster, requiring more skill with each iteration. Schools could not keep up with the competencies needed for these jobs, so employers got frustrated because, in a hyperconnected world, they did not have the time or money to spend on extensive training. So more employers are demanding that students prove their competencies for a specific job by obtaining not only college degrees but by passing “certification” exams that measure specific skills — the way lawyers have to pass the bar. Last week, The Economist quoted one labor expert, Peter Cappelli of the Wharton business school, as saying that companies now regard filling a job as being “like buying a spare part: you expect it to fit.”
Finally, every major news Web site today has a “most e-mailed list” that tracks what’s popular. Journalists who tell you they don’t check to see if their stories make the list are lying. What makes those lists possible is the use of Big Data and the cloud, which can also measure almost any performance in any profession in real-time and tailor rewards accordingly. More schools can now instantly measure which teachers’ kids are on grade level in math every week, Jamba Juice can see which clerk sells the most between 8 and 10 a.m., and factories in China can find out which assembly lines have the fewest errors. On schoolloop.com, you can track your kid’s homework assignments and daily progress in every K-12 class. A most e-mailed list is coming to a job near you.
I find a lot of this scary. We’re entering a world that increasingly rewards individual aspiration and persistence and can measure precisely who is contributing and who is not. This is not going away, so we better think how we help every citizen benefit from it.
It has to start, argues Ryan Burke, the director of jobs and workforce for Hope Street, with changing our education-to-work system to one that “enables and credits a variety of viable pathways to needed skills.” But “for students and workers to take advantage of the opportunities open to them in a ‘defined contribution’ world, they will need much better information to inform their decisions. Right now it’s much easier to evaluate a choice about buying a car or picking a mutual fund” than to find the competencies employers are looking for and the best cost-effective way to obtain them.
Sure, it's hard to "measure" great teaching, but you know it if you see it. Like porn.
I had experience with a job search not that long ago. The surreal experience of it was that employers seemed to be looking for ridiculously-experienced and qualified candidates, yet were not offering great pay or benefits, just modest. In one specific example, I went through three interviews (two by phone) and drove in from seven or eight hours away for the final in-person on-site interview. Everything seemed very positive. Then they emailed me to let me know that I was beaten out by someone who had more experience/qualifications. Strangely, I saw the same position was still listed on indeed.com months later. It's possible that they did hire someone, but that they needed to hire another. It's possible that I suck and they wanted anybody else but me. But why go through three interviews and give indications that I would be hired if I sucked that bad?
And this kind of clusterfuc* seems confirmed by the experience of others, so it probably reflects that "bar exam" point Friedman makes. The NYT did some pieces on how many employers are requiring up to six interviews before hiring and many positions are staying open for six months with thousands of applicants: here and here.
UPDATE (5/3): It seems that my own experience and feelings are not just anecdotal regarding the plight of 25-54 year olds seeking employment:
UPDATE2 (5/4): Charles Blow in the NYT today:
A Pew report from February 2012 found that:
“Since 2010, the share of young adults ages 18 to 24 currently employed (54 percent) has been its lowest since the government began collecting these data in 1948. And the gap in employment between the young and all working-age adults — roughly 15 percentage points — is the widest in recorded history. In addition, young adults employed full time have experienced a greater drop in weekly earnings (down 6 percent) than any other age group over the past four years.”
