Beyond the Business Suit
Earlier this week, I wrote about Year Up, an organization that is unusually successful at preparing young adults from disadvantaged backgrounds for jobs in big companies like banks, investment houses, health care providers and technology firms. What became clear to me while researching the story was that workforce development no longer means giving people job skills; it means giving them the ability to navigate a career in a professional environment. This isn’t knowledge you’re born with. You pick it up from family and friends and, if you’re lucky, from mentors. Oddly, for something so important, it receives little emphasis in schools and colleges; many job training programs gloss over it. 
The professional culture is a kind of dial tone that allows everyone to connect. Operating in a different culture can be stressful. When I first traveled to Bangladesh as a journalist, I embarrassed myself more times than I care to remember. Whether it was declining food that was offered, opening a gift in front of my hosts, or using my left hand to pass a plate, I had to be repeatedly corrected — and taught cultural norms by friends and translators. Thankfully, they cared enough to be honest with me.
But what happens if your success in life depends on mastering cultural norms that no one brings to your attention? Or, worse, that actually go against your upbringing? William Julius Wilson has observed that inner city youths in the United States are at a disadvantage whenever they seek jobs that involve making eye contact with strangers. To survive on the street, they learned to avoid eye contact.
In the past, this wasn’t a big problem. A young adult could count on finding work in a factory or a local business where co-workers came from the same community and shared the same background. Today, corporations are crossroads; they bring together people of different ethnicities, religions, political affiliations and sexual orientations. What we call the professional culture is a kind of dial tone that allows everyone to connect. For better or worse, the social norms, the courtesies, the standardized costume — business attire — serve to smooth out differences, simplify interactions, and avoid conflicts so work can get done.
The real problem is that, while proficiency in the professional culture is now linked to career success at the global level, the distribution channels for these skills have not been democratized. It’s still a game that favors insiders. That’s partly because the value of cultural skills are hard to evaluate, unlike reading and math scores, so they haven’t been prioritized — and they are tough to teach. In fact, they need to be modeled as much as taught. They often touch on sensitive issues, which is why Year Up provides extensive training to its staff in the art of giving feedback.
Year Up’s founder, Gerald Chertavian gave me an example: “If a young man came to me and said, ‘Gerald I need to ‘ax’ you a question,’ I have to tell him honestly, ‘If you go into a Fortune 500 company and say that, there will be a whole set of assumptions about who you are. I’m making no moral judgment. But if you want to act on that stage, there are norms for how language is used and you don’t want to give someone an opportunity to make an assessment about you that isn’t linked to your ability or your brains. We’re not asking you to be someone else. All we’re saying is that if you want to act on that stage, we’re going to give you the knowledge you need to succeed.
Feedback works best when it’s about helping another person to grow. If it becomes about expressing your emotions, it’s rarely effective.
“What’s deeply important is how you communicate that information to a young person,” he added. “It has to come from a place of caring, not authoritarian dictate. How you do it will determine whether they say, ‘I get it. I get to act on several stages depending on how I choose to use vernacular. I’m inheriting new stages to play on. I’m not giving anything up.’ ”
The real world isn’t nearly as frank. Managers are often too busy to tell young people about what aspects of their behavior or communication style could help, or hinder, their career prospects. When companies dismiss junior employees, it’s often without explanation. That’s why the pre-job feedback is so valuable.
Feedback works best when it’s about helping another person to grow. If it becomes about expressing your emotions, it’s rarely effective. Chertavian recalled talking to a student who had come in late a number of times. “I got frustrated with this young man and I said, ‘Don’t you get it? We’re giving you an opportunity and you’re late and it’s just not appropriate. You can’t be late.’ ”
“You could almost hear a pin drop in the room,” he recalled. “And as I walked out, my staff member said, ‘Gerald, you didn’t do a good job there.’ He said, ‘As soon as your voice hit that tone, it became the parent lecturing the child and the authority figure imposing authority. It totally didn’t do what you wanted it to do.’ ”
But even if young people master professional skills — will it make any difference in this economy? One reader, Professor Edwin Wellselsy, didn’t think so. He wrote: “[T]he leading cause of massive unemployment among youth is lack of jobs, any jobs,” he said. Everything else, he suggested, was incidental. That may be partly true, but it overlooks two important qualifiers: the recession hasn’t hit all workers equally — and it isn’t permanent. Workers in manufacturing, construction and retail were hit particularly hard. But, as I noted, the unemployment rate for college graduates is only half the national rate. And while the low-wage, low-skill jobs that were eliminated during the recession are unlikely to come back, other kinds of jobs will open up when the economy recovers. As baby boomers retire, for example, U.S. companies are expected to face a shortage of 14 million college-educated workers over the next decade. Moreover, in a 2009 survey of close to 1,200 companies and organizations, 79 percent reported that they were currently facing a “skills gap” — one that they would have to fill eventually. The industries expected to grow the most are education and health services, and management, scientific and technical consulting services. That’s why Year Up prepares students for work in these areas. Even during the recession, it managed to expand and find internships for every student who enrolled. It focuses on jobs that require problem solving, critical thinking and complex communication — jobs that are difficult to outsource, like customer service, and jobs in finance and health care, where confidentiality considerations militate against sending them overseas.
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Year Up also demonstrates how important it is for job training programs to work closely with front line managers who supervise interns and new recruits. In late fall, for example, some of its corporate clients reported talent shortages in their I.T. “quality assurance” units. (A quality assurance specialist develops and runs computer scripts to test software and identify defects.) Within weeks, Year Up created a quality assurance sub-track and the first cohort of interns in this track will start working next week. “I think Year Up operates as close to market time as is possible in an educational setting,” notes Daniel Rabuzzi, who directs operations and strategy for Year Up’s New York office.
As more of its graduates spread out into the professional world, Year Up is monitoring their progress. In a 2009 survey of graduates who were six years out of the program, it found that a third of respondents had obtained a college degree or certificate (studying at night and on weekends) while another 10 percent said they were on track to get one within the year. Only 11 percent of students had not pursued further education. This is all good news. What remains to be seen is whether Year Up’s professional training model can open up not just a few thousand career paths per year, but tens or hundreds of thousands. I’ll be following the program as it pursues new partnerships with community colleges — that’s where the majority of low-income students begin higher education — so that’s where big changes will have to come.
Female freshmen were more likely than their male peers to report feeling stressed. The UCLA researchers said just under 46 percent of females ranked their emotional health as very good, compared to 59 percent of males.
