Nov 19, 2024
Michael Horn, co-author of "Job Moves: Nine Steps for MakingProgress in Your Career," joins us to discuss the changinglandscape of job searching and career development. He introducesthe "jobs to be done" theory, emphasizing the importance ofunderstanding individual motivations and seeking progress in workand life. The conversation explores the distinction between careerprogression and career progress, highlighting the need forpersonalized approaches. Horn offers practical advice for jobseekers, employers, and educators including reflective careerplanning for individuals and strategies for attracting andretaining talent, such as conducting "entry interviews" andcreating more effective job descriptions. This episode providesvaluable insights and actionable steps for job seekers andemployers as they navigate the evolving world of work.
Transcript
Julian Alssid: Welcome to Work Forces. I'm Julian.
Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin, and we speak with theinnovators who shape the future of work and learning.
Julian: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforceand career preparation and offer practical solutions that can bescaled and sustained.
Kaitlin: Work Forces is supported by Lumina Foundation. Luminais an independent, private foundation in Indianapolis that iscommitted to making opportunities for learning beyond high schoolavailable to all. Let's dive in. Welcome back to the show. Today,we're diving deep into a topic that's been on our minds lately, howthe changing world of work is impacting job seekers, and what itmeans for those of us who support them.
Julian: You know Kaitlin, it used to be that career paths werepretty straightforward. You'd go to school, get a job in a specificfield, and kind of climb the ladder, but now things are so muchmore dynamic, and job seekers really need to be the drivers oftheir own careers. Absolutely.
Kaitlin: Absolutely Julian, and that's where our guest todaycomes in. Michael Horn, along with co-authors Ethan Bernstein fromthe Harvard Business School and innovator and entrepreneur BobMoesta has been researching and testing a new approach to jobsearching, one that recognizes the need for flexibility,adaptability and a deep understanding of personal motivations.They've captured their learnings in the forthcoming book, job movesnine steps for making progress in your career, which is beingreleased in November of 2024.
Julian: I'm really excited to hear about this newapproach. I think it's going to be incredibly valuable for ourlisteners, those leaders in education, workforce development andand business who are guiding the next generation of workers.
Kaitlin: So let's get right to it. Please join us in welcomingMichael Horn to Work Forces.
Michael: Thanks so much. It's great to be with youguys.
Julian: Great to be with you as well, Michael. And before wedive into the conversation, we want to share some more about yourbackground. So in addition to your forthcoming book, Job Moves, Inaddition to forthcoming Job Moves, Michael is the author of severalbooks including From Reopen to Reinvent: (Re)creating School forEvery Child; the award-winning Disrupting Class: How DisruptiveInnovation Will Change the Way the World Learns; Blended: UsingDisruptive Innovation to Improve Schools; Choosing College; andGoodnight Box, a children’s story. He is the co-founder of and adistinguished fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute forDisruptive Innovation, a non-profit think tank, and teaches at theHarvard Graduate School of Education. Michael co hosts the topeducation podcasts Future U and Class Disrupted and is a regularcontributor to Forbes.com and writes the Substack newsletter, TheFuture of Education. Michael also serves as an executive editor atEducation Next, and his work has been featured in outlets such asThe New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, HarvardBusiness Review, and NBC. Michael serves on boards and advisoryboards of a range of education organizations, including ImagineWorldwide, Minerva University, and Guild Education. He was selectedas a 2014 Eisenhower Fellow to study innovation in education inVietnam and Korea, and Tech&Learning magazine named him to itslist of the 100 most important people in the creation andadvancement of the use of technology in education. Michael holds aBA in history from Yale University and an MBA from the HarvardBusiness School.
Michael: Yeah, I'm thrilled to be here, too. Don't hold the bioagainst me, I guess, but it's been, it's been a fun ride getting doa lot of things with a lot of you know. You both know a lot ofthese organizations. There's some great companies out there, greatnonprofits doing some really cool work. So it's been fun to beaffiliated and connected with them in different ways.
Kaitlin: Absolutely. Well. And we really appreciate you takingthe time to join us today, Michael, and as we get started, thoughwe just gave your bio, we would love to have you tell us more aboutyour background and in your own words and your most recentwork.
Michael: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I got my start in this world ofeducation and helping people improve their opportunity to live apurposeful life at the foremost of their potential. By accident, Iwas a student at the Harvard Business School, took ClayChristensen's class on disruptive innovation changed the way I sawthe world. And he, one day, literally said, want to write a bookwith me about public education. And I signed up for it, and itchanged my life. We started the Clayton Christensen Institute. And,you know, initially was a K-12 focus, over time, became a highereducation focus, because I realized a lot of the problems in K-12education were pretty hard to solve because they were dependent onhigher education, and higher education had a lot of challenges, asyou both know from the work that you've done in that arena. Andthen you look up again and you realize, well, higher education isstruggling because the workforce has some challenges, right, andit's dependent on there. So you start working there, and I thinkthat describes a lot of my journey. If I'm being serious about mypurpose, which is helping all individuals build their passion andlive lives of purpose, then working right across that spectrum isimportant. And Ethan and Bob, they both were mentored by ClayChristensen as well. Bob Moesta founded the jobs to be done theorywith clay. They worked on that in the mid 1990s and Ethan, he's aprofessor now at the Harvard Business School, but he was a studentof Clay's at the Harvard Business School, and Clay was one of hisdissertation advisors, actually. So the three of us sort of wereunited by that, and then started having conversations among thethree of us, which led us to this book, all in very different pathsto it, but, but it's been, it's been a really coolcollaboration.
Julian: I didn't realize that you would all that you all havethat connection with clay. That's, that's really cool. So, so whatare the problems that you're solving for in Job Moves which, whichis, is geared to job seekers.
Michael: You know, the big thing, I would say, is that weobserved, and not just in the data, right? You see the millions ofpeople quitting during the Great Resignation, and then roughly atleast 50% of them said, Actually, we regret that job switch that wejust made, we're not landing in places. We see a billion peopleworldwide every year switching jobs. Hundreds of millions of themare disappointed. We know from Gallup and Pew and others that twothirds of employees are disengaged at work. Up to 60% of them arequiet quitting. And the reality is we looked at it, and frankly, welooked at it in our own lives, working with individuals, just allthe advice to help people make progress in their career just wasn'tworking. And so the big thing we said is, how do we help peoplemake progress? Because they are telling us that they are trying touse their careers and jobs and as they move through the labormarket at increasing rates. Now every four years on average, andGen Z seems to move even faster than that. They're using this tomake progress in their careers and lives. But just the evidence ispretty clear, most of them are not succeeding, and so how do wehelp them make meaningful progress so they can, you know, have theoutcomes that they want in their lives, with their families, intheir communities, and on the job.
Kaitlin: I loved that that notion in your book, Michael, aboutpeople seek progress in their lives and their work is part of it,right? I think that that notion just rings so true as we're aswe're getting into this conversation you mentioned earlier on, thejobs to be done framework, in line of thinking, can you explainthat a little bit to our audience around what is what? What is thejobs to be done theory?
Michael: The jobs to be done theory originated, as I said, inthe 1990s when Bob actually brought to clay a puzzle, which was, wehave more data in the world. And even today, we have even more thanthat about, you know, which demographic is likely to buy a certainproduct or service, but it doesn't seem to be helping anyone. Andtheir conclusion, as they looked at it was, it was allcorrelational noise, right? It doesn't actually explain the causalreason why someone says, today's the day I'm going to switchbehavior, or I'm going to make a purchase, or I'm going to buy thisservice. And you know, as you all know from your work at SouthernNew Hampshire, today is the day I'm going to say, Okay, I'm goingto stop doing what I was doing. Or I'm going to, you know, continueto work and enroll at Southern New Hampshire University. Like thoseare big switches. And what we realized is, it's rarely the productor service itself that they're desiring. It's more that they'retrying to make progress in a struggling circumstance in theirlives, and they hire something to help them make progress, right?So it sounds simple in some ways, but it's basically like peopledon't want quarter inch drills. They want the whole, the outcome,in a certain situation where that would be useful to them, whetherit's hanging a painting in an art gallery or, in my case, you know,punching a hole through the wall to pull some Ethernet cablethrough that you know no one's ever going to stare at. And if youunderstand the circumstance and what progress looks like, then youcan much more effectively design things that help them accomplishwhat we call those jobs to be done in their lives. So it's verydemand side focus, as we say, it really wants to understand whatdoes progress mean for that individual, and how can we betterdesign experiences to help them unlock that progress.
Julian: Picking up on that notion of progress then, in the book,you highlight career progression versus career progress. And so canwe? Can we dig in a bit deeper there?
Michael: Most people say, well, career progression, I get it.We're moving up the corporate ladder, the career ladder. You startas entry level, you move to mid level, you start to have a teamreporting to you, director, right? You sort of we have theseframeworks in our mind. But the reality is that as people's lives,as evidenced by the jobs that they do or don't take often andalmost never, mirrors these days that career progression right? Andit's because we make decisions out of an effort to make progress inour lives for all sorts of reasons, right? You know, sometimes, youknow, when I stepped down as the executive director at the ClaytonChristensen Institute, it was because I think we've talked aboutthis Julian, you know, I had twins who are one year, and I waslike, you know, I want to have a more flexible life. I don't wantto have a team reporting to me. I want to be there more on morepresent. I'm going to step aside from this job on the paper likethat didn't make any sense from a career progression point of view,but from a progress in my life perspective, understanding all theforces acting on me, it made perfect sense. And so that's reallywhat we're trying to unpack here is that for some people, yes, theyare on the career progression career ladder, and it is synonymouswith what progress means to them. But for most of us, and I wouldsay well over 75% of us, our sense of progress is not the same asprogression, and progress is really what we call a demand sidephenomenon as viewed from the individual employee, whereasprogression is viewed from the perspective of org charts andcompanies and things of that nature.
Kaitlin: Yeah, I love that notion of tying back to the jobseeker and the individual and their life circumstances, andallowing the room for, as your book outlines, for people to reallysit back and say, Wait a minute. So what happened in my last job?Move right? And that reflective component, I think that's a reallyinteresting piece of this book, is like pushing people to reallysay, well, what, what did I do last time? And why? I'm interestedto hear a little bit more about what made you start at thatpoint.
Michae: Well so I'll tell you, and I'll give you the actual fullorigin story, which was in 2009, Clay Christensen said to EthanBernstein, you need to come to my class today. There's this guynamed Bob who's going to do this thing that you need to come see.So Ethan shows up, not having any idea what he was in for, and hewatches Bob do an interview about when someone purchased somerandom product or service. I don't, I don't know what it was. Andbasically the interview is about something you've already switchedon. And the reason for that is we say, as you know, in the book, wesay bitchin ain't switchin. And we complain all the time, but like,we actually want to know when someone makes the big choice tochange behavior, to change what you're doing. What were the forcesthat were acting on them that caused them to make that switch? Andso essentially, the interview, it uses criminal forensicstechniques, and we basically use it to create a mini documentary ofthe last time someone switched behaviors in whatever area we'reinterested in studying. So Ethan watches Bob do this, and he goes,oh my God. I just earlier this morning, was counseling someone whowas asking for job advice, career advice in my office, and I hadthat person in there for like an hour and a half, and I realizedwhen I watched Bob do the interview that my advice was completelyworthless because it was completely decoupled from their situation,their struggles, their sense of progress. If I had just interviewedthem like Bob, just interviewed someone there, I would have learnedso much and could have given so much better advice. And sohonestly, that was the origin of the collaboration between Ethanand Bob, and Ethan created an entire class around it, and so as aresult of that, we've been able to, as you know, study literallyover 1,000 individuals changing jobs to build this data set aroundwhy did and it starts with, why did you last change? Really, tounearth those forces, and once you understand how they work in yourlife, then you can start to pull them forward and recognize thepatterns going forward about what might be causing you to seeksomething new right now.
Julian: So just to kind of now, put a little spin on this, givenMichael, given that our audience is composed of many of the peoplewho are educating and hiring individuals, what are some of the keyconcepts that are relevant to them? I mean, I was, you know, wereally was struck by the whole concept, for example, that you layout of like employees hiring their employers. What does that meanfor those of us who are hiring and training and educating?
Michael: Exactly? And I'm sorry I buried the lead when you askedabout the jobs to be done there as well. Because Originally wewanted to call this book, Hire Your Next Job, because the bigswitch here, right is that we as individuals have agency in ourlives, and you actually hire your next job. And the publisher saidwe hate that title, because no one thinks about the job market thatway, and we're like, oh, but you do? You do hire your next job, andthis is the big switch we want them to make. And so the bigargument in the book, right? For individuals, and I'll get to theemployer side in a moment, but for individuals, is if youunderstand that you actually hire your next job, meaning youchoose, do I want to work here for the money that they're going topay me for the title that they're going to give me for theresponsibilities, et cetera, et cetera, right? That's a choice youmake. And so yes, employers are hiring you, but you are also hiringyour employer and the job you take. And there is a two way streetthere that we too often don't recognize, and when you do, itempowers you. Now for employers, the implication there is, hey,actually, even though people haven't thought about it this way, ifyou look at behavior over the last couple decades, it isincreasingly clear that more and more people feel empowered to hiretheir next job because they're leaving, they're quitting, they'rechanging careers, right? We employers talk about this all the time.We would invest more in our workforce, except they're only here twoyears, and then they jump to something different, or what if theygo to a competitor? Et cetera, et cetera. And so our big argumentto employers is we actually have the root causes in our data set ofover 1,000 job switchers of what causes them to say, today's theday I'm going to change my job. We know why employees quit insharper detail, I would argue, than we've ever seen before. And soif you can understand the progress that individuals are making whenthey decide to hire your job, how do you create a workplace thatpeople want to rehire each and every single day, as measured intheir engagement, their productivity, right, their excitement forbeing in the job. And so out of that, and I will be super honesthere, we have three conclusions of what we think this means foremployers, of how they can do it differently. And we've reallytested the heck out of this in the individual side. We have nottested the heck out of this on the employer side. And so, like,what I hope is employers read it and be like, Those are three goodideas to start, and here's two more. Or here's how I would perfectthis, or here's how I would shape it. Because I think there's aworld of things. Is my guess that employers would do differentlywith a real understanding of why people are hiring their companiesin the first place, why they are firing them ultimately, and how dowe become places that they want to rehire each and every singleday?
Julian: I think I may be seeing your next book.
Michael: Or maybe we'll all collaborate together.
Julian: Sure!
Kaitlin: So yeah, I mean thinking we’d love to hear you talk alittle bit more about what those recommend, what those preliminaryrecommendations are, Michael, recognizing that, as you said, maybethey not as well tested, but especially as we're thinking abouttalent development and retention, and what does it look like to asyou said, have employees rehire their jobs every day, and havetheir jobs kind of shift and mold with them in their lives as theyprogress. What? What are what you know? What are your preliminaryideas? What are some moves that employers can start to make torespond to that reality?
Michael: The first one I would say is, you know, we know whatexit interviews are when people it's their last day on the job, butif there's someone you really wanted to retain, an exit interviewis way too late. Number one, you can't do anything with the data.Number two, the data is probably false, because no one really wantsto be in an exit interview. They just want to get the heck out. Sowhat we say is interview them on the way in about why they hiredyou. So the interview that I just described, we are trying to teachpeople and give them a free assessment to jobmoves.com that you canuse with all of your employees, that they can actually use to say,Okay, now I understand these are the forces, the pushes and pullsthat caused you to say, I want to work here. So that's number one.Let's understand why they're here, and once we do then, if youthink about it, every single performance review, every single timewe're meeting with management, they can say, hey, I remember thatone of the reasons you left your last job and came to work here wasbecause you felt like you were being micromanaged, right, reallystifled by your boss. You know, are we falling into that samepattern here? How do we make sure we avoid that? I remember thatyou really wanted to stretch into these capabilities, you know,develop your management responsibilities or something like that.You know. How are we doing giving you those opportunities? I wasmentoring someone the other day, and he said he hired his currentemployer, because he wanted to do product development that wascustomer facing, really get out with customers. And two and a halfyears in, he was only doing product development on internalsystems. He was going nuts. Well, if you knew. That on the frontend, you know, you wouldn't have lined him up right and made thatmistake. So he's looking to leave. So that's number one. Numbertwo. Job descriptions, as you know, have become hopelesslyconfusing and burdened and meaningless, I would argue, becauseessentially, the way we create them today is we take the jobdescription of the last time we hired, and then we add all theskills and experiences and things that our competitors have, andthen we get around in tables and think about all the other thingswe could use to filter people out, and we write those in as well.And so you get, like, laundry lists of meaningless job descriptionsthat by the time you finish it, you have no idea what this personactually does on a day to day basis, or what the real skills at theheart of the job are. To some extent, we're copying, and this isEthan, because he comes from the HR world and his research at HBS,but you know, he's saying, like, look, these job descriptions,they're probably not going anywhere, because they're essentiallylegal documents to allow us to hire and fire employees and justifyit legally. But if that's the case, let's create shadow jobdescriptions at the very least, and rather than, like, listing, youknow, eight years of experience for an entry level job, good luckwith that one or, you know, the bachelor's degree requirement orcritical thinking communication, which are like great buzzwords,but I have no idea what they mean in practice in this job. Let'sinstead just write down what's the day to day and week to week, youknow, experiences like in this role, and can I find people who havedone the sorts of things that I, you know, want them to do in thisjob so we can do a better job of finding fit on both sides of theequation, so no one's misled when they when they show up on dayone, and it's completely different from what they expected. Andthen the last thing is number three. When we sort of say the firsttwo things, a lot of chief learning officers, chief human resourceofficers, they'll say, Well, we know all these things, but stupidmanagers, they won't do it. And it's because, I think it's asking alot of managers to sort of remember, oh, the reason someone youknow came into this role was they were trying to escape thesethings and move toward this. And now I have to incorporate it in mymeetings and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, like, it's a lot. And soour push is, let's work smarter, not harder, by embedding thesethings into our actual HR systems. So let's embed the reasons thatthey left their last job, for example, in the performancemanagement systems. Let's actually understand right on the HRreview cycles. Let's have this be part of the form, so that we cansay, How are we doing against your goals and your reasons that youhired the company initially, things like that, to really make itsystematic, as opposed to ad hoc, hopefully will help us betteralign, you know, what progress means for an individual with whatprogress means for a company, because, you know, you got to hityour KPIs too, so that we're all swimming in the same direction.And by the way, if at some point it diverges, we can have a reallytransparent, upfront conversation about it, as opposed to somethingthat's acrimonious. Because the one thing I know is true is no onewill be in a role forever. That's just, that's not the way theworld works. That's not the way humans work, and we will never bein a role forever. So let's just acknowledge that up front, stopmaking it something taboo, and have much more transparent, openconversations with each other.
Julian: So Michael, going back for a moment to the to theindividuals who are seeking employer here their next job, many ofour listeners are particularly focused on low income, firstgeneration, you know, college students, people who may be new tothis culture, if it's we're talking about the US and just justwondering, you know, and process that you describe in Job Works isvery reflective. I mean, it's takes a lot of sort of soulsearching, and it's very holistic, and, you know, and what aboutfolks who are maybe hard pressed, you know, and racing fromactivity to activity, just trying to get through the day orpaycheck to paycheck? Does it apply? Have you looked at thesefolks? Have you thought about how this might work?
Michael: I'm so glad you asked the question. So a lot of theresearch was actually on frontline employees and people in bluecollar jobs. So we know that the process works with them. Thatsaid, You're right, the biggest thing that they face is timepoverty. How do you carve out the time? I will be super honest, inmy view, it's more about finding the right next step for someone,as opposed to you have to do all nine steps. And so what I mean bythat is, I think there's a bit of a choose your own adventure whenI when I'm counseling someone, and I'm probably on the phone, youknow, once a week with someone who's looking for career advice, Itry to listen to where they are, understand what their questionsare, and then I try to give them the one. One Step or maybe two,that I think will really unlock progress at this point. And so Ithink that's number one is, if you're, you know, working withsomeone who's low income or has multiple jobs and is just, youknow, trying to make ends meet, what's the leverage point you can,you know, you can use at the right time to help them unlockprogress and get a deeper sense of what they're trying to achieve.And that's the last chapter of the book. Is like, pay it forwardfor mentors, right? And so I hope that's helpful. Is like, and Idon't know if it's shared with all my co authors, but my own beliefis, like, you don't have to do all nine. It's like, find the rightone for you at the time. Some people, I think, are so consumed byjust sort of, they're on the hamster wheel, right of job to job,and sort of thinking, Oh, it's about boosting pay and so forth. Andwhat you realize, if you step back from it is, if you're notenergized in your job, you're not going to do a great job, whichmeans you're never going to get that promotion to get more money.To me, in that situation, like the most impactful thing you can dofrom our process is look back at your past roles and just figureout, like, what what drives your energy and what drains it, so youcan get a clearer sense of like, oh, I should avoid, you know, eventhough it's like, you know, pays $1 an hour more, I realized frommy past moves that like, I'm gonna stop showing up to work, or I'mgonna quit after two months, because it doesn't align with whatgives me energy. So that can be, like, a huge boost, right? Becausenow I get, as you know, again, job seeker of limited time. Thisactually doesn't take a lot of time. It's like, over the course oftwo weeks. Anytime you think about, oh man, another meeting withblah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I remember that sucked in my last jobto write it down. And by the end, you have, like, a collection of,like, very small insights that add up to something really big. Andyou can say, oh, wow, I really hate it when I have to be in ad hocmeetings without knowing in advance that it's going to show youknow, again, I'm making it up. But you know, some people who are inshift work, for example, some of them maybe don't mind gettingcalled to the manager, you know, on an ad hoc meeting with nonotice, right? Because you get to pow wow with friends. Others,it's like the worst thing in the world, because I had lined upchildcare in the following way, and it was dependent on me beinghome at such and such time, and now you just blew up my entireschedule. What the heck do I do? And so I, you know, that'ssomething I think that can really give you a lot of insight intowhat does and doesn't work for you, to make sure I'm not going totake a job that that, that, you know, makes me do that thing. Andyes, there's going to be other trade offs I do make, but like, I'mgoing to optimize around these one, two or three things that reallyare important to me.
Kaitlin:It's really helpful to hear how you think about, youknow, which kind of which one, which steps do you need mostimminently, and being able to build from those steps, you know,proactively, without necessarily needing to follow all nine. Sofollowing up on that idea, and you're already giving us so manykind of practical steps through what you've outlined, but I wouldlike to give you the chance, given that our podcast name is WorkForces, I'd like to give the chance to we're going to specificallyask this question about being forces in this effort and around howcan education and business leaders develop better strategies forsupporting employee growth and development, and you've already saidso much. But if there's anything else you'd like to add, I wantedto throw that question out to you.
Michael: I appreciate it. Well, I'll say on the educator side, Ithink number one, I actually think you can embed the nine stepsinto your programs. It'd be an amazing way not just to revampCareer Services. Frankly, but also a really clever way. I think youknow talking to the people who did this when Southern New HampshireUniversity, like a project based College for America, rightcurriculum? How do you make sure that we're prototyping work beforeyou actually take the job? Because that's also one of the bigthings of the book is like, how do you learn before switchingrather than after you've switched? Because by the time you'veswitched too late, you know you're in a bad situation. If I canlearn before switching. And so I think coupling some of theinsights with the book with real work based learning for educatorscould be incredibly powerful, and I hope to see that for employersagain. I mean, I think we have the three steps, but I thinkprobably the bigger thing is, you know, as a manager, as a mentor,as someone seeking to guide those on your team, how do you havethat? Right? You know, I see the struggle you're having. Let's havethe right conversation at the right time. Rather than trying tooverload your working memory with like the, well, you have to do aninterview about the last time you switched jobs. Otherwise, wecan't have the conversation about the no, right? Like that may bewhat's required, but it often won't be. So it's like, oh, you know,the big thing is, you don't know, you know Julian, how to pitchyour career story in 30 seconds. Let's teach you how to tell yourcareer story. That's the value add you need right now, really,using the process as a way to shape your conversations. Because,again, personal experience, but also, you know, a lot of peopletalk about this, most of us give really lousy job advice for themost part when we're asked. And we hope this gives you a templatefor how to do it better.
Julian: Yeah, it's so great to hear you lay that out. And it'sfunny, because so much of what you know, this podcast and Kaitlin'sand my work is about, is making switches. And so, I mean, even asyou were talking, yeah, jobs, but this is a conversation thatswitches the way we think about learning. That switches the way wethink about how we spend our free time. I mean, it's just, it's awe've got to get to a better place.
Michael: Actually, can I bend your ear both on that for onesecond? Because it's, it's sort of my view that we are talking alot, as you know, about skills based hiring, both in work andhigher ed. But I think what we mean by that all of us have verydifferent conceptions of it right now. And my own view throughwriting this book is like, if we think it's going to be some sortof technocratic exercise where, like, I have an assessment thatdefines critical thinking and like, and somehow I fit these. It'snot going to happen, because employers have no idea what the skillsare called at the heart of their successful employees, nor shouldthey, and we don't know how to do those stuff. But what we do knowhow to do is like, oh, you know, in this job, this is somewhat,this is a task, or this is an experience, something you know,someone does many times. Okay, so in the education, how do I buildopportunities for someone to be able to do that over the course oftheir educational career? And then, you know from that, oh, I see Iactually have to build your skill or knowledge in this thing, soI'm going to have some direct instruction, you know, around thisthing, to build you up to doing this project or work based thing.And I think if we we can migrate if it's almost experience basedhiring as opposed to skills based, again, it's, I mean, it's, I'msort of bashful, because you guys kind of built this, but like, Ithink we can unlock a lot of this realignment that we want to see,and between work and higher education in ways that I think rightnow are a bit of a mystery to folks, and we're all trying to buildtaxonomies and languages, and I just don't think it's going towork.
Julian: Yeah, and I think, and that's why Job moves is so ofsuch great interest to us, and so exciting, because you'rebeginning to break it down, like, how do you practically take thesesteps? And I love that. It's a bit of a pick what works for you,whether your co authors agree or not. It seems very practical. Imean, for me, it's almost like an update of what I did when I read,What Color Is Your Parachute I, you know, I way too add tounderstand the whole thing, but I zeroed in on what is that I loveto do, that I do best, and that's kind of guided my career. Andevery decision I've made, very simple but very profound,
Michael: 100%. And I think I mean, our hope is this is honestlythe 21st century refresh of What Color Is Your Parachute is sort ofthe thing that I've had in my mind. It's much shorter than whatcolor is your parachute and to your point, it's okay if you don'tget every nine, all nine steps right, like, it's okay if the petalflower and what color is your shoot parachute exercise doesn't workfor you. It's like getting the right leverage at the right time foryou.
Kaitlin: Yeah absolutely. And I would circle back on your otherpoint around, you know, I think this concept of experiential orscenario based hiring, I mean, I think it rings so true, especiallyin light of the fact that so many job,. I mean, any job isinherently multidisciplinary, multi skilled, right? You can't say,Okay, well, if you have skills in this one area, then yes, you'llbe successful. It's if you take on this situation, right? Whatskills are you pulling on in order to be successful? And so thatreally, that that rings true to me, as especially as we see, youknow, the emergence of different types of technology that cansupport some of our work. And what are the skills that are becomingmore and more essential as as you know, AI and other tech formskind of take shape and have increasing influence.
Michael: 1000%. And really quickly off that, like, if the rateof change of what work is accelerates, our only way to keep up toit is not to codify it in some overly technocratic way, but to givepeople actual experiences using the AI and things like that to keepup with it. And I think then the answer to folks who say, Well, youknow, people from privileged or upper income backgrounds, they'regoing to have more chances to get those experiences true, which iswhy I think education has such an important role to play here,because you can actually embed this into your program so the lowincome students are not left behind in this era.
Kaitlin: Absolutely. So Michael, as we wind down thisconversation today. I mean, I feel like we could, we could continueto speak about this for much more time, but given that we'rewinding down, how can our listeners learn more and continue tofollow your work?
Michael: Yeah, absolutely. Well, if you want to check out moreabout the book, it’s at jobmoves.com. It's got a free chapterthere, the intro, as well as the assessment I talked about and someother tools and ways to purchase the book. And then if you want tofollow me, I'm on all the social networks. At MichaelBHorn, whetherthat's X or LinkedIn or even Instagram, I'm not on Tik Tok. Butthen you can always follow me at Michael B Horn on sub stack at thefuture of education or my website, michaelbehorn.com
Julian: Thank you so much, Michael for taking this time. It'salways so great to talk with you, and it's kind of an update and avery important one, I think, and can't wait for this to get outthere to the world.
Michael: Appreciate you both. Thank you.
Kaitlin: Thank you. That's all we have for you today. Thank youfor listening to Work Forces. We hope that you take away nuggetsthat you can use in your own work. Thank you to our sponsor, LuminaFoundation. We are also grateful to our wonderful producer, DustinRamsdell. You can listen to future episodes at workforces, dot infoor on Apple, Amazon and Spotify. Please Subscribe, Like and sharethe podcast with your colleagues and friends.
