The World of Education and Work is Not Like Your Father’s

by George Lorenzo

Editor’s note: These are not your short, under-500-words posts that are so prevalent on social media sites. This is a book-in progress. You are seeing the beginnings of a writing endeavor that is not geared toward being brief.

I’m also inserting myself into this book because my personal experiences in life, I feel, are very similar to others and hopefully make for more interesting reading than the typical non-fiction tome. 

Also, the reason why I am using this vehicle is that I’m hoping to get some comments from people who deal with the new and dramatically changing world of work and education that we live in today. This will help frame the message to include real-life examples in the book about what many Americans are going through today. So please, comments are really more than welcome. Thank you.

After giving an outline for this writing project a great deal of thought, I decided that a good way of providing a framework for starting to describe how the American workforce has changed would be to emphasize a brief historical perspective beginning with the early 1970s up through today. 

To begin with, today is not what my early-adult-aged work and education environment was like in the 1970s. In short, it ain’t your father’s factory anymore. It’s an entirely different, rapidly changing world of work for college kids today; one, in my opinion, that is more difficult and challenging than my father’s world (born in the mid 1920s) or my world (born in the early 1950s), but still full of great opportunity to be successful if you know what you are doing and can figure out how to approach your education and career development in an intelligent manner.

When I graduated from high school in the early 1970s, my first pathway was not geared toward pursuing a higher education. It was trying to find a decent job. 

I obviously did not have a computer and Internet connection to help with this process. In some ways not having the access to information we have today made life easier and less complicated. At the same time, when compared to what’s at our fingertips today, it was a limiting factor of life to not be able to scan the entire county for work and education opportunities with the click of a mouse. Back in the 1970s, my father’s advice for finding work was to go fill out an application at the automobile plant, the steel mill and at the railroad. At that time it was customary to simply walk into a human resources department and fill out an application and then hope that you got interviewed. I remember standing in line at the Chevy auto manufacturing plant that was located not too far from the neighborhood where I grew up. I dutifully filled out the necessary forms, handed them to a clerk who said the same thing to everyone there: “We will place your resume in our files and call you when a position opens up.” Of course, I never got called. The only way you got called was if you had a connection that could put in a good word for you with the human resources department – what’s sometimes referred to as “juice.” I had no such connection and hence any auto manufacturing career possibilities came to a rapid dead end. It was the same situation at the steel mill and railroad.

Today, applying for a good-paying blue-collar job is similar except that it’s all done electronically. Instead of physically walking into a human resources office, you go online and submit your application and then typically never get called. Instead of a human voice telling you that they’ll call you, you get a pre-formated mass email message. People spend an inordinate amount of time filling out these online applications, all for naught. 

My parents were not educated beyond high school, so they really did not have any advice about getting a college degree, much unlike the wealthy helicopter parents so prevalent today who hold their children’s hands through college admission processes up through the time they graduate. To say I was a bit lost at the time is an understatement. There are plenty of 18 and 19-year olds experiencing the same thing today, lost after high school graduation, finding themselves working in low-paying jobs as cashiers, fast-food preps, phone sales, and coffee servers. These people are stuck in jobs that limit their opportunity for advancement – getting out to a better life is difficult if not impossible without taking on at least another part-time job in addition to the full-time job they may have. For this segment of our population, paying for and finding the time to attend college are very difficult propositions due to rising tuition costs and the already high cost of living, in general.

It took me a while to come to the realization that I either had to learn a trade, such as carpentry, plumbing or electricity, or get a four-year degree if I wanted any chance of moving on in life in any kind of productive manner. I was 27 at the time and had pretty much roamed around the country traveling and working in the restaurant and hospitality industry as a waiter, bus person, bartender, and front-desk clerk. I decided on going to college and was old enough by then to give it a very focused and concerted effort, graduating in four years with an BA in English – not exactly a degree that brings the greatest job opportunities, especially when compared to a degree in engineering, but a degree nonetheless that worked very well for me over my lifetime.

The mass media lately, as well as many of our politicians and state legislators, love to put down liberal arts degrees as meaningless pursuits, but I really beg to differ on so many levels. Stay tuned about that topic as well in future posts.