Corporations need assurance that workers have both adequate general education and specific up-to-date training in relevant fields.
This does not mean up to last year's levels. Under the North American educational system it means up to last Monday's levels. This cannot be accomplished with traditional book-based school-teaching and the present leisurely covered-wagon-era university education. Tenure, with union clauses enabling professors to draw $75,000 a year while teaching only three hours a week, must become history. There is no time now for traditional teachers to learn things new, adapt and regurgitate in 20th century-style classrooms. Much of the info, classrooms and many of the skills are obsolete. And the kids know it! They are bored. These kids cannot be activated with dull dry static print when they have been raised on the colorful dynamic visuals and fast cuts of MTV and MuchMusic.
The Internet is changing the world and will destroy education as we know it. Corporations must make in-house learning part of overhead just like rent, raw materials and accounting. It could mean personnel must engage in formal or informal learning at least a day a week. They must do this quickly, efficiently and inexpensively. No other medium known to man has yet been able to offer instantly the variety of info and skills available and yet to come via the World Wide Web. Watch for massive private sector invasion of learning fields at a fraction of the price paid today through those heavy school taxes levied on property owners.
Corporations must move quickly to provide such current knowledge spigots for their workforce. If not, they will end up like Eaton's*, the Canadian retailer, once la creme de la crème, that failed to notice when change and new knowledge became essential to survival.
Another trend, never before so evident, is the move by people who have recognized this new eldorado of knowledge and are paying for, on their own initiative, education via a really fast track.
Why? Because they know that what schools are teaching today is largely irrelevant to demands of global business. Once they reach what THEY, not what some paper-granting traditional school authority, considers an education, they approach industry with a sense of confidence few high-school and college graduates can muster. They tell the company what pay, perks and working conditions they will accept. If the company doesn't respond favourably, they move to one of the world's many silicon valleys where start-ups offer them dream jobs and stock options university presidents can't even imagine.
Remember Linux, the operating system that went from freaky to famous? That overnight billion-dollar company might now be a challenge to the $100-billion company that is Microsoft! The young developer offered his software free to the world. It started to catch on. Then visionary venture capitalists saw the possibilities and bought him out, but kept him on with the deal of the century -- for someone in his twenties. One Thursday last November, he made $480 million. His stock options went up 700 percent in one day. He's now a legend! Tens of thousands of others are trying to emulate his success.
Hollywood, once and still the glamour and showbiz capital, now has a similar same-state neighbor: Silicon Valley. The dreams these industries have firmly established are bold and seductive. More so than money, nationalism or religion. This is the competition other CEOs face when such kids -- if they deem the company worthy of their skills -- must consider seriously what to do when such individuals issue their demands. Such demands are not supported by a union of numerous brainwashed automons, but by the invisibles in the young person's head. This single brain could contain that eldorado of something that could change the world. If she looks like a nerd, dresses like a nerd and thinks smartly, then pay attention and hire her on her terms, or she might go out and become the new Bill Gates and buy your company. The first one fired would most likely be you.
If you do hire this wunderkind, make sure to tell your spouse that if she asks your offspring out for a date, make sure he doesn't say "no". Think of all the mothers in Seattle suffering through the rest of their lives, heavy with guilt because they once refused to let their daughter go out on a date with Bill Gates. Now that's purgatory!
*Canada's major department store. Made money for 150 years, then lost $10 million a week for last two years. Gone now!
