Quote:
Originally Posted by Bubblehead Nuke
Even worse are people who show up for work and want to start at 75-80K a year and never do any of the 'gunt work' that any job field requires. Not a day of actual experience and they expect to max out the earning potential.
I do not know how many times I have told some young kid: "It does not matter that you graduated from 'such and such' school with high honors." You are gonna start here on the bottom of the heap and work up.
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I might as well hop on the Rant-o-Van.
We had a discussion about this on one of our intranet forums. Young people are hired into my industry (Geopolitical Analysis) but leaving after 2 years because they are bored or are not being used to "their" capability.
I have 27 years experience, a Master's Degree (ABD on my Doctorate) and I am only slightly above average in experience/education. I know that I, and many of my co-workers sound like curmudgeons (and we are), when we talk about it taking years to even start getting a reputation in my industry.
When I started out in the 1980's grunt, crappy research projects were all there was. It took me about 5 years before getting my first nice project and I was lucky to get that. It was actually a research project no one else wanted, but, through hard work by my team, turned out to be pretty cool.
Yeah, I am a crotchity old man, but the facts are clear. In my industry, it takes years to start establishing a reputation that gets you the good assignments. The kids are graduating with their Bachelor's degree and zero experience and expecting not only the six figure salary but also the pick of the projects.
WTF? Everyone else had to work up from the grunt work. Did we like getting crappy assignments? Of course not. We hated it. But we looked at it from an "investment" point of view. If I do well on the crap assignments, soon I will "graduate" to the better assignments, and later even better assignments.
It seems like the younger generation wants, and I hate to use an over used term, instant gratification. They want the cool projects right away and they expect the better assignments even though they don't have the experience and judgment to handle them.
So what is happening is that our industry is losing potentially good analysts who are unwilling to accept the concept of working up from the bottom and the value of experience. This is not good for my industry as us curmudgeons are getting a bit long in the tooth and we are starting to die off.
One of the problems is that PA has lousy PR.
Political Analysis is a job that everyone thinks they can do and yes, as we tell people, anyone can be a political analyst, the question is can they be a good political analyst? What is the difference between a Political Analyst and a good Political Analyst?
About 20 years and a doctorate.
The bottom line of my rant is that there are jobs out there that require experience. No college can grant 20+ years experience. The only way to get experience is to start at day one and earn the experience. There are no short cuts, there are no fast-tracks to experience.
Sometimes I think the younger generation in my industry either don't understand this, or don't want to accept it.
Hey, if there is one thing a curmudgeon can do is rant right?
