Careering
the Job
Pam
Miller
TEDx
Swakopmund
21
November 2015
Certain photos kind courtesy of ShutterStock
How many of you here believe that you possessed all the knowledge, the
skill, charisma and talent when you entered the world of work?
Believing you knew everything?
Along
my career journey I learnt I was wrong but also right.
I am 51 years old. Old enough to
remember the dark ages where we had no cell phones, no tablets, no social
networking. Days where a sit down with
the family surrounding Monopoly was as hard-core as gaming got.
But I am also young enough to have been able to survive the age of
enlightenment. Where the average laptop
has more processing power than all the computers combined, that put Armstrong
on the moon. The same technology that
really comes in handy when I watch cute cat videos on Facebook before I go to
sleep at night.
I had a very fortunate childhood – fortunate in the sense that my
mother was tough, but as children we developed skills that others did not have:
my mom groomed us for life and living.
During my first 6 years, she was a stay-at-home-mom, with me and my
siblings, Katherine and Geoffrey.
Our days were filled with activities, with little time for
boredom. Because there was so much to
do, to talk about, to see, we needed to learn how to manage our time - make the
difficult choices and to sacrifice, for the things we wanted to achieve.
Need played a big part in our living as we had a responsibility, not
just to ourselves, but to our family and our community.
I was quite shy as a child and I would hide rather than speak to
people. However my mother insisted that I look at people, smile, greet and
always respond. Your eye contact now as I speak is a positive response that
encourages me to speak and to communicate. And that was the basis on which I
could interact with the world.
What became very apparent later in life is that every day experiences
can turn into the foundation for a new skill.
A long forgotten skill is the
Library card box or index system.
One
of my earliest memories was visiting the library and watching with interest the
dexterity and speed shown by the librarian in wading through masses of cards
when we brought books back or took them out. I remember peering over that
wooden counter, watching this fascinating process at work. Something about the
pin point accuracy with which she found the correct card in seconds, gave me a
love of card systems and administration.
This consistently accurate process was repeated by different people
over a long period of time and was supported by the post cards that arrived
when we kept a book out too long.
The operational processes I design now are influenced by this simple,
but efficient process. I continue to keep things simple with low
technology. I always add some
alphabetical reference to turn concepts like vision and mission, into concrete
steps. This helps everybody to follow
the steps and ensures standards are met. Funnily enough, I use cards now to help
employees meet organisational standards.
With
an aim at the top, and a simple evaluation of the bottom sandwiching ideas on
how to implement it means you can guide people to do things; and that stemmed
from that library experience.
The
other memories I had were of my extended family. I happened to have a
grandfather who was the deputy inspector of schools. All of his children were
teachers. I was groomed from a young age without realizing it, without feeling
that it was a burden to develop skills that were useful in a career. Reading was
the first one, but even with reading we were never allowed to do more, or
rather less, than reading.
Reading was the lowest form of activity in our world. That included
reading good books and no comics. Of course when we visited friends who had
comics, the first thing we did was shoot off to find their comics. And they
still mention it today that we were the family who always used to read their
comics rather than spending time with them.
There
were expectations that were set for us and the other thing that I remember was
a toy that I loved. This was an old adding machine that I bought out of my own
pocket money at the age of 7 years and I absolutely loved it. It was a gorgeous
green colour and those keys depressed most satisfyingly as I pressed the buttons.
And as I turned the handle, if you went forward then it added. If you want it
to multiply, you had to turn it a few more times. And I learnt the principle of
adding. Wonder of wonders- when you went backward with the handle it subtracted
or divided.
But that game taught me the principle of numeracy.
Today,
that is the first skill we test when we are looking for young entrants to a
career. Without numeracy you are unlikely to have a whole lot of other skills, like
systems, to be able to make it in the career.
This numeracy extended to my mother mentally adding up lists of
numbers. My father, on long journeys as a geologist, constantly calculating and
re-calculating the expected time of arrival. And we used to groan and mock him
for doing that, but it taught me the power of memory and the power of a number
ability.
School and education system has become crucial in the world. All over
the world there is an immense amount of money and time spent on making it more
and more effective.
More pressure is put on the teachers; more pressure is put on the
system. In my father’s days there were probably 5 inspectors and deputy
inspectors of schools in the whole of Namibia. Sure there were fewer people.
But we’ve now made more people, we have added more layers; we have made the
whole education system very complicated. It is a complex system in pursuit of
the whole child- physical, mental and emotional. And I am not saying it’s wrong,
there is a push to make education better. But without the skills that your
mother gives you, education is not going to work well.
You need to be sitting outside reading a book; you need to spend time
with your siblings before you go to school and when your reading is only
looking at pictures or having your sister read to you, those skills are important.
My mother spent time taking us on journeys, where we sang together and
I am no singer, but we learnt rounds, we learnt how to sing in harmonies and
that taught us systems.
The networking
with my siblings, with friends, allowed us to learn socializing and communication.
We hated it when my mother invited friends over and we were expected to traipse
over and spend time with people we didn’t want to be with. But we were forced
to be polite, to be interesting, and to be interested, because we were supposed
to make them feel welcome in our home.
But it taught me networking; it taught me the art of creating a
classroom or a team that felt part of the group. Now, I enforce that basic communication
which you just did earlier, to look at people, to smile and say something
positive. If you cannot do that, you will not learn customer service, you will
not learn team work, and you will not learn any of those things, because that
is the fundamental requirement to communicate. If you want to go onto a career;
supervision, management; the communication is only going to get more
complicated and you need to deal with it early.
At school I was not a great scholar but I managed to sail through. I
went into the A stream because my numbers were quite good, and I was quite
cocky about it. And we used to look down at the other students in the practical
classes. Now that I run my own business: typing, bookkeeping, the two subjects
I would never have done, have become crucial. And if you see the pile of
financial slips weighing down my desk you will know that I wish I had done
bookkeeping at school. All of these transferrable skills have become important.
You might think what on earth an elephant is doing on the screen
briefly? But in our country, a third of employment and a third of our economy rests
on the fact that people come to see that.
Now
managing that scenario is not easy because that is in a community conservancy
and people live there, people who have a life, who are growing crops to feed
themselves. While so many tourists love that, the people having their crops
eaten are not so sure about this. It does bring money in the country. So how do
we manage that system? And this is where the skill of networking, of
communication, of win-win comes in, and we need to learn those.
This is not only our problem. All over the world we have this problem.
The big problem in Africa is that we have more youth. Europe and
America have a decline in the number of youth compared to old people. We are
the opposite of them, and we have a problem on our hands that we need to deal
with.
A really interesting study that many of you might know is the Marshmallow
study. In the 60’s and 70’s, 6 year olds were given a marshmallow. “If you
leave it for 15 minutes, you will get another one.” How many left it? I often
wonder what I would have done as a 6 year old.
The interesting part is in the following 40 years. They pursued those
children to see where they got to and I would like to read to you what the
findings were 40 years later:
“The children who delayed eating the marshmallows were more likely to
have cognitive and academic competence, as well as improved ability to cope
with frustration and stress in adolescence.
In middle age (that’s us), they were also more likely to be buffered
against the development of a variety of physical and mental health
vulnerabilities. There are things like a
high body mass index, cocaine or crack use, features of borderline personality
disorder, anxious over reaction to rejection, as well as marital divorce or
separation.”
They have proven self-discipline is crucial. The key to self-discipline
is transferrable skills, the things that will give you a career, and not just a
job.
So how do we do something about this?
In our world we have brought in a different way of bringing up our
children. We have said that they need to be creative; they need to be allowed
to pursue their creative side. And that is true. But why did we drop a
structured environment? Because without a structured environment there were no
unwritten rules that guided them as to what they should be doing.
What we are doing now, is that we are taking youth who have left
school, have not studied anything. Either left school with, or without,
graduating. But we need business to be functional. So we are taking children,
checking whether they are ready with their numeracy and their communication.
And if they have a positive attitude we are training them pre-employment.
The numbers are frightening. Probably 10% of the applicants are taken
onto the course. Of those, probably 5 of them make it to the end of a very
basic entry-level, pre-employment course, and they are offered employment. And
the change in those young people, when they suddenly see a future ahead of them,
and not just a job, is incredible.
It is possible to change that and we will continue to do this and make
it a bigger project here, to bring children into careers, and not just jobs. And
we could only do it by giving them the transferrable skills that so many of us
were lucky enough to get as children.
These
are a group of children, youths (at my age they are children but technically
youths) in Henties Bay, a town up the coast, who will be opening a store next
week, who came from that town. The majority of them had no work, no future, but
there they are last week preparing the store to open next week. And they have a
future within a chain of stores. And that is what we can do.
But in the long term, what are we going to do to prevent us getting
huge groups of youth who are looking for work, but the economy cannot absorb
them, because they don’t have skills? The economy wants them, but skilled.
And this is where we need to re-strategize our education system. We
have overburdened the education system with things that the studies from Stanford,
the Marshmallow study, and the follow ups show, that we clearly are too late.
We cannot wait until children hit the education system to skill them. Educate
3R’s yes: Arithmetic, Reading and Writing, but skilling our children for a
career starts with us.
We have a saying in Africa that “It takes a village to raise a child”
and we have lost that. We stand back; we don’t want to say anything.
But we need to push the government to start spending the money, not on
education so strongly, but on the development of the family, and of a functional
society that decides what is happening.
Because I want to remind you all; those children are going to be
running the world when we are pensioners, and are they the ones that we want in
charge when we are no longer able or willing to make decisions?
Thank you
