[disclaimer: I do not speak on behalf of my employer. Views are my own, expressed with AI assistance]
As a student, you often hear about the pivotal role of credentials and degrees.
We’re told they're like passports to our professional journey, allowing us to access the good careers which can change our lives. That’s true, but it’s only part of the story. It’s becoming more and more apparent that merely earning a degree is not the golden ticket it once was.
In this article, we’ll discuss the structural reasons why academic credentials and technical certificates are necessary but not sufficient for the current marketplace. Then we’ll talk about some of the sources and tools that can illuminate your decision-making and help you prioritize where to focus your scarce time and energy. Lastly, we’ll outline an action plan to put yourself in the best possible position.
The Problem: Elite Overproduction
My dear Gen Z friends, you’re on track to becoming the best educated generation humanity has ever produced. But as a cohort, you also have record levels of anxiety and depression. Professor Laurie Santos’ The Science of Wellbeing in Teens has quickly become Yale’s most popular course because the need for positive psychology is so intense. It’s available for free on Coursera, and those who take the course note a measurable self-reported increase in happiness. The importance of cultivating a resilient growth mindset deep within yourself cannot be overstated.
But psychology aside, a big part of the stress young people are under is from legitimate worries about your economic prospects. So why are things like tuition and housing costs skyrocketing? Why is it so hard to find high paying jobs that can earn a comfortable life, as compared to previous generations?
To better understand the situation we’ll turn to Peter Turchin, a social scientist whose predictions of instability were met with mocking disbelief in 2010 when he made them, but have been thoroughly vindicated in recent years. In particular, we’ll talk about a concept he’s developed called elite overproduction.
Turchin’s idea is analogous to a high-stakes game of musical chairs where the chairs represent the sought-after job opportunities, and the players are individuals, each equipped with degrees and credentials.
For many years, it was widely believed that educating as many people as possible was an unambiguously good thing to do, and that it would lead to a better and better society. What got lost in the debate is the difference between education as a personal quest for truth and knowledge (always good), and credentialism as a verification of competence (only good to a certain point).
Tragically, policy makers didn’t realize the downside of flooding the market with people who believed the narratives, paid a lot of time and money to get degrees, and now expect a seat to be open and waiting for them. Turchin posits that this oversaturation of credentials leads to intensified competition, underemployment, and, subsequently, societal unrest and economic disparities. But we no longer have to theorize about what happens in the increasingly cutthroat game of musical chairs as more and more players vie for the same few places to sit. We see it every day. Trust erodes, anger builds, and young people turn against capitalism.
The issues experienced by young people are frequently not a superficial problem of inadequate effort and achievement, but a deeper, systemic issue reflecting the misalignment between educational output and market demand.
The news from Turchin gets much worse. To ensure continued growth for the increased number of elites, his model predicts a perverse “wealth pump” that cannibalizes from lower classes and pushes wealth upwards to maintain satisfaction amongst a bloated elite. Indeed, the data shows that’s exactly what’s happened in America starting around 1980. Wealth doesn’t trickle down. It gets pumped up. And eventually The People notice.
Turchin has some pretty dark warnings about what happens to a society when elites fail to aggressively reverse course on the part of the cycle that we’re currently in. If you feel compelled toward civic service to help save the soul of America before it’s too late, then a wonderful place to start is by listening to former Labor Secretary and Berkeley Professor Robert Reich, whose free course I strongly recommend.
However, the focus of this particular article is not to advocate for capitalism, socialism, social reform, or any movement in particular. Instead, I’m merely aiming to help you as an individual student and job seeker to understand the rough seas into which you’re sailing, and navigate through storms over which you have no direct control.
To get where you want to go, you’ll first have to set the right target. Market research is the way to do that.
Market Research
“Know thyself” is the immortal wisdom of Socrates. But it takes a lot of years of careful observation to get to know yourself. If you’re taking a more active approach, then it takes a lot of challenging experiences and failures to forge yourself. So if you stop and think about what we demand from young people, it’s all a bit strange. How is it reasonable to expect a teenager to pick a career that their 40-year-old self will still be happy with? Little wonder that so many people go so long as “undecided”.
Instead of basing your decision about what to study solely on the shifting sand of who you are right now, or on the crystal ball of guessing what you’re becoming, a more straightforward approach might be to look at the job market, check what skills are in short supply and high demand, and then to simply go about acquiring those high demand skills.
If a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favorable. - Seneca
But where does one go to find out such information? Social media or news outlets are often a first stop, yet this kind of content is frequently clickbait, and can sometimes be worse than useless. Don’t rely on anecdotal information from well meaning friends and family members to make your life choices either, because that’s going to be very hit or miss. No matter how insistent your uncle is about the importance of being proficient with fax machines, whatever worked for him 30 years ago may or may not be what’s best for you now.
That’s not to say there are no good sources for you out there. For example, here’s a fantastic video essay on the topic that I want to thank my colleague Dr. Yohe for sharing with me.
But as insightful as it is, content like this still can’t go deep into specifics. Here’s what does: the high quality reports produced by consulting firms hoping to win lucrative contracts from employers and wealthy investors.
This McKinsey & Company Technology Analysis, for example, is pretty much your cheat sheet for all the skills that companies are going to have a very hard time recruiting for in the coming years. It’s like having a torch in a Zelda game that lights up the dark room and shows you exactly where all the enemies and treasure chests are.
Studying these kinds of resources and learning these high demand skills will give you a huge edge. So let’s talk about what that looks like in detail.
It’s not by accident that I taught myself Python during the pandemic and that I’m heavily emphasizing it in Code Club. Notice that in the interactive McKinsey report, Python is one of the skills that are in short supply for four high growth fields: cloud and edge computing, future of mobility, generative AI, and Quantum technologies. Furthermore, specific Python libraries are essential for another two fields: Tensorflow for applied AI, and Pytorch for industrializing machine learning.
By contrast, a skill like molecular biology is very important for the future of bioengineering, but there’s a ratio of about 5 people who have that skill for every 1 job opening! You’ll of course need to know some molecular biology if you want to be a bioengineer, but because it’s such a relatively common skill, don’t focus on that as hard you do on the skills that companies are absolutely desperate for, which in the case of bioengineering would be pharmaceuticals, gene therapy, and CRISPR.
If you were to just blindly pick classes, majors, and skills on the basis of what you get the best grades in, you will haphazardly assemble a portfolio of abilities that may or may not match what employers actually need. By failing to do in-depth research, you’ll likely be contributing to the severe elite overproduction problems that already exist in generic fields like “business”. However, if you decide on the kind of problems that you want to help solve in the world and deliberately assemble your skill stack on the basis of what the market craves, you’ll be in a very good spot at graduation.
We’ve talked about mindset, skills, credentials, and while each of these is essential, there is one more load-bearing pillar you’ll need to lock into place to reach your potential. People. More specifically, ones that like you.
Networking
I’m going to give you the hack for simultaneously building a network of people who want to see you succeed while also building a portfolio to demonstrate your value to future employers: you need to build a podcast.
To be clear, you don’t need your podcast to go viral. You don’t need to care about gathering a huge audience and making ad revenue. None of that is likely, nor is it important.
Instead, what you’re going to be doing is using your podcast mainly as a reason to talk to the people who you admire, who you can learn from, and whose support would be valuable to your career.
But how do you reach out to strangers and get them to say “yes” to coming on your podcast? You don’t. If you’ve studied the techniques of master hostage negotiator Chris Voss then you know never to aim for a “yes”. Instead, always aim for a calibrated “no”. If you haven’t studied him yet, then do that immediately after finishing this article! Voss is required reading for anyone who has to deal with the humans. Anyway, here’s your script:
YOU: “Hi I’m a college student calling for [person], is now a bad time?” (If it is a bad time, you don’t want to talk! Make a plan to call when it isn’t a bad time.)
THEM: “I’m [person], what is this about?”
YOU: “My name is [you] and I’m learning about [topic related to their job]. I’m interviewing [their title] like yourself for a podcast that I’ve just started. I’d really like to get your perspectives on what you’re seeing as someone working in the field, but I’ll be honest that my audience isn’t very big yet. Would that make it totally out of the question to schedule a Zoom call with you?”
THEM: “No, that’s not a problem, we all start somewhere. I mean, I’m pretty busy on a product sprint for the next few weeks so it might be a while, but I like your initiative and I’d be happy to talk to you when things calm down.”
But also, why start with strangers? Ask your instructors, ask your family members, even ask your uncle who loves fax machines to come on your podcast! You don’t have to take all the advice of the people you have on on your podcast, but it’s still good to hear it and share it with an audience.
If you’re an introverted nerd like I was at your age, these ideas probably have your heart pounding and your palms sweating. But it’s worth it. And in the grand scheme of things, compared to the job interviews you’ll soon have to go on, conversing with people over a podcast and just listening to them talk about their jobs is easy mode. Especially when there are so many experts out there like Pat Flynn explaining for free how you can get started in the next 10 minutes.
The approach I’ve shared will connect you with people that you can get to know and follow up with over multiple interviews. As months and years go by and a position opens up, you will be the person that comes to their mind as a go-getter that would be perfect for the job. So while building a podcast takes a bit of courage and work, this is an extremely fast and reliable track to developing a network of people who want to see you succeed.
So to recap what we talked about in this article, here’s the plan:
Avoid filtered news and use market research directly from sources like McKinsey to identify high value skills.
Get certifications and/or degrees acquiring and demonstrating that you have those skills.
Nurture a resilient, strategic, adaptive mindset that will help you in many aspects of life, including your career
Build a network, with podcasting interviews as a great way to get started
Speaking of networking, reciprocation is a big deal in human interaction. So if you want people that are rooting for you and sharing valuable information with you, then you’ll want to do the same and share valuable things with them.
If you’ve read this far, it’s because you found this article valuable. Think of at least three college students that you know. Would it be crazy to think they’d appreciate it if you shared this article with them?