So you get in college these days, and in addition to the great classroom experiences, you have great on-line discussion tools where you can post questions and solve problems with other classmates. You turn in all of your assignments on-line and have valuable feedback from your professor through technology. It’s assumed that you’ll bring your laptop to all meetings, and often, your class notes can be shared with others in a seamless and simple way.
You graduate from college with great enthusiasm and get a 5 year old PC with MS Office and Windows 2000. People bring paper and pen to meetings and then spend (waste) time later putting notes into an e-mail. Collaboration happens in the hallway. You wonder why your work colleagues are 10 years behind the times.
The ongoing debate that has raged on the web and at systematicHR over the last few months hasn’t brought us any conclusions about whether these “millennials” are any different from the rest of us in terms of how they look at the world. But they are certainly different in their treatment of work and their use of technology. The hard cold truth is that the fact there has been a transition for these new graduates, and that they have a completely different experience with the technology that could be used for work, networking and collaborating with others is not something that will create a major retention risk. While they might be disillusioned with what they find, the truth is that there really are not better places for them to go. Sure they all want to go to Google, but not all of them will make it and there are very few Google’s around.
My hope is that we can start implementing some of the technologies found in higher education and place them into the workplace. Where 5 years ago we would have had trouble with adoption, today we have a younger segment of the workforce that will give us instant adoption. With these employees leading the way, we can now quickly advance new technology adoption at rates we never had before.
6 responses to “Shifting from Higher Education to the Workplace”
Shifting from Higher Education to the Workplace So you get in college these days, and in addition to the great classroom experiences, you have great on-line discussion tools where you can post questions and solve problems with other classmates. You turn in all of your assignments … [
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So, for the fuddyduddies in the audience who went to college before laptops were invented but not before punchcards were the output options, please… suggest key tools that should be embraced!
— sign me, Young @ Heart!
I’m a fuddyduddy? I went to school in the early 90’s and certainly laptops were around, but totally impractical for a student. They were costly, big, slow, not networked, and few people had them.
I think if we merge this conversation with the Web 2.0 conversation, we’ll see that many of the technologies used on academic settings are about collaboration, community and sharing.
Yes, I think large corporates should use some of the new hires from this networked academic environment to accelerate adoption rates not only of technology but also of collaboration culture.
It is an opportunity to design time interesting and valuable onboarding paths for new graduates with strong community software skills, that will pass on their own knowledge while acquiring valuable info and skills about the company, its culture, its sector.
One way to do this is by making these new hires community managers at communities of practices or other types of internal networks
Thoughtful comment e-mailed to me by “Jim B”:
Most of this block exists in the work place due to the security issues of a company’s product competition, insufficiently powerful equipment (lack of funding) to provide adequate connectivity and security, less costly ways of doing this (hallways) and just plain old “too lazy to make a change.” “The old its just the way it has always been” and “making a change is always more difficult than maintaining the status quo” and why should we change something that is not broken? Maybe that is why corporations and small companies still have #10 pencils and paper (the only thing that has gone by the wayside is the BIG CHIEF Tablet!) and BIG CHIEF got dropped because of the tree hugger movement in the 70’s. There is no graphite movement to date, so pencils are still fair game!
Many people in business offices are collaborating through other mediums such as Google, but only infrequently on business issues because of their corporate IT police and the liability of information security issues. This is because these mediums lack the security needed and there are not many choices other than Google and as you mentioned, “not many Googles”. Most of the collaboration are on non-business secure subjects such as employee learning, studying, general subject matter discussion, networking, the next coffee shop meeting, etc.
Also while in college, the only ones who mattered in “collaborating groups” were the people studying the material, playing games, having fun or taking the test, all non-costly non-corporate, mostly academic issues. [No one ever invented the next IPHONE on a collaboration medium in college. The competition would have snapped it up in a second without a second thought!]
In any corporation or business, the people who matter are the stockholders (many more than a classroom group) and the stockholders are not willing to lose their stock value to collaboration of issues or the liability issues of “lack of security control” that might cause them to lose the value of their stock in any way, consequently, business is protecting it’s life blood, rather than “creating a bigger pie (or better ideas) through collaboration.” In a way, I cannot blame the stock holder or the company President. Losing this edge costs both of them money! Without security of the medium, business collaboration is limited to subjects that do not cost the company money, fun employee discussions, networking, joint appointment meetings, the next beer call, etc. Setting up a secure collaboration medium “so that employees do not have to collaborate in the hallway” (a very secure, time tested, fractured, non-reinforcing medium, FREE medium) costs money!