College is supposed to prepare you for work. Well, not really.
It was originally designed to broaden your minds and blah, blah, blah, but it’s a necessary step on a path to most white collar jobs.
So congratulations on that degre
And now it’s time to get to work. You may well be completely unprepared because work is very different from school.
Here are nine ways things are different.
To keep reading, click here: From Student to Employee: How Work is Different From School
Love you site, very informative. You are slightly (only slightly mind you) less evil for it. 😉 I actually now come to this site so that I can get some perspective and remember to appreciate what I have…you see I live in an EU country now after working in the US for some time (I am American but am immigrating to the EU country in question) where we get at least one month paid vacation per year and the rules are much less “neo-liberal” or evil… There is a long list of differences between the EU and US in terms of labour laws which I’ll assume you know about as it would be like a PhD dissertation to explain them all. I honestly don’t know how I lived under such rules for so long (ie American labour law) now without doing something drastic. The life I live here in terms of my relationship with my employer is drastically different… Google “no vacation nation” and you will see some of these differences laid bare. American exceptionalism indeed!
So my question to evil HR lady is this: wouldn’t life be a lot better, easier and business do just as well or better if the US adopted EU style rules? Wouldn’t you welcome that? I know that I no longer feel actively oppressed by my employer and actually try to do better for them under these rules. Any comment, Evil American HR Lady? What do you think of the rules across the Pond?
Colleges fail their students. Period.
They teach their students everything except how to”close the circle”. It is a critical gap that does a disservice to every single student who goes to school. Any school.
Students learn everything except how to leverage their education into a message and then actually identify a person who can actually hire them, deliver the message and begin their careers not start a “job”. Leading ones career is a daily and lifetime process, not an update my resume in reaction to being fired or start thinking about a job in the second semester of their senior year.
It is a travesty.
Don’t get me started on Career Services. They deliver, mostly, nothing but convince people who don’t even know what they don’t know that it is powerful leading edge thought leadership. It is not.
Well intentioned? Maybe. Lazy? More likely.
And if you think of “academia” as being well intentioned, look up Thomas Midgley…his good intentions may have doomed an entire planet!
I think the point on diversity is interesting because I’ve thought that myself, and wondered why it isn’t highlighted more. I think colleges only frame diversity as people from completely different cultures/races/religions when it is really so much more than that. You can get along really well with someone from the other end of the globe who speaks broken English, but the real thorn in your side is the guy from where you’re from. Sharing the same background isn’t some panacea for problems. And ditto the age thing, one of the reasons for so many millennial articles out there. People are aware that work styles and attitudes differ with age, and some (though far from all) things are generational, in particular, older workers holding onto older work customs/processes that may not be obsolete, but aren’t the way a younger worker would handle them – and that is a form of diversity.