Hi there, I love it when my readers share interesting stories they have read with me in the media and I felt so strongly about one article that I have decided to do a post all about it given how it relates to a global problem that so many countries from China to the UK to South Africa are facing: youth unemployment. My reader Choaniki shared this story from the Observer which attacked PM Rishi Sunak for telling poorer, working class students that they should think more about getting apprenticeships rather than imagining that they simply must go to university to attain social mobility. The writer Martha Gill attacks Sunak for being elitist and argues that working class, poorer have as much right to dream about going to university, getting a degree in order to expand their minds and dream of a better, brighter future. However, there was one line that she wrote that I profoundly disagreed with and I quote, "if courses are failing to get people on the job ladder, they should be improved." My regular readers will know that I came from a very working class family but managed to attain social mobility in my adulthood, thus I am all for improving social mobility for the working classes; however when Gill placed the responsibility on university courses to make sure that they do get their students good jobs, that's when I think she is quite unreasonable. Given that youth unemployment is such a massive global problem today and that I've talked a lot about the theme of further education on my blog, I think this would be the kind of topic that I can shed a lot of light on, since Gill was talking about how those working class students (like me) could and should access social mobility.
Can you really place the onus on the university to get students good jobs?
It is completely unfair to place the burden on the university to make the courses so good that employers would be lining up to employ these graduates - the only universities where that actually happens would be those at the very top of the league tables like Oxford and Cambridge, but allow me to speak both as a business owner as well as someone who has been a gatekeeper for companies in the past, companies want to hire the very best people for the job. We don't have the time nor inclination to look at the details of the course that the applicant has studied in detail, we're not here to evaluate how bad or good the course has been - we simply want to know something far more basic than that: is this applicant stupid or clever? Hence the most common way we would ascertain that is by looking at the position of the university on the league tables, now just to illustrate how easy it is to do this, I know that my friend went to the university of York but I don't know off the top of my head where it sits on the league tables. So I did a Google search and it took me exactly 24 seconds to find out that it currently sits in 17th place in the UK universities league tables ouartt of 130 universities - a decent, respectable position. The rule of thumb we use is based on the principle that an intelligent student will have the grades to get into a good university whilst an incompetent student would end up in a university at the bottom of the league table. So the universities languishing at the wrong end of the league table would be struggling to educate students with poor grades whilst the universities like Oxford and Cambridge barely have to do anything with those students as they are already attracting not just the brightest students in the country, but in the world. In short, we use the university admission criteria as the measure of the calibre of the student and we certainly do not expect the university to 'cure' stupidity. To put it very bluntly, if you sent a stupid student to Cambridge as some kind of social experiment to give a working class boy a chance to have an elite education, he would not be able to keep up with the rest of the brilliant students there and would certainly fail all the exams. Even a great like Cambridge cannot magically turn a dumb student into a brilliant scholar - all they're doing is simply working with a cohort of students who have already proven themselves to be super intelligent. So if you were to ask the University of Buckingham (ranked 127 out of 130) why their graduates aren't earning as much as those from Oxford, the staff there would roll their eyes and say, "do you realize the quality of students who apply to our university. Like seriously what kind of miracles or magic do you want us to perform here then?"
But surely there is a valid point about improving the quality of teaching at universities?
Not really, as it is a moot point. Undergraduates do pay a lot for their degrees so they are looking for good value for their money, so for example, a science undergraduate would be looking to have access to a very well-equipped, modern laboratory and all that costs a lot of money. But imagine this rather unreal situation if a rich sponsor decides to give the University of Buckingham the best equipment and facilities that money can buy, the students walk onto the campus and think that they have just stepped into the most luxurious five star hotel, complete with a world class golf course and health spa which they can all access for free. The catering is also sponsored and the meals there are better than the most exclusive restaurants in London. On top of that, the university is willing to hire the best experts in all the subjects to work there, by offering the best salaries for their teaching staff. Would all that money invested turn the University of Buckingham into a world class university that can compete with Oxford and Cambridge? No, it wouldn't make much difference at all as long as the students who apply to that university are still those with terrible results. The best case scenario is that you create an expensive university that is the carbon copy of the exclusive "public" schools in the UK - oh the name is so ironic as Eton College is one such public school but it is so prohibitively expensive that it the fees excludes anyone who isn't ridiculously rich. However, wealthy parents send their kids to Eton not in pursuit of academic excellence, rather it is a status symbol to show how rich they are. Prince Harry was one of their most famous students and he a terrible student - he left Eton with two A levels, a B for art and a D for geography, only to be revealed that he cheated for his art exams as the teachers were so afraid that he would fail it that they helped him complete part of his course work. With those grades, he would have probably ended up at a university at the bottom of the league tables, that's why he went to join the army instead after Eton. Prince Harry had the best of everything money could buy at Eton, yet they had to resort to cheating to help him pass his A levels? So the bottom line is this - you simply can't polish a turd.
I do actually. We need to begin by accepting that there is a pecking order when it comes to every cohort of students when it comes to intelligence, there will be those who are the most intelligent ones, they go off to Oxford and Cambridge down to the most stupid ones who really shouldn't bother with a degree in the first place. Sorry if that sounds blunt but that's just the way things are.in that you cannot expect the university to perform magical miracles in curing stupidity. What you can do however, is to make sure that intelligent students from working class backgrounds do not fall through the cracks in their earlier education - throughout primary and secondary school, so they are identified as above average talents who are given all the help they need to go to a good university. So if you wanna help those poorer kids attain social mobility, invest in primary and secondary education so that smarter working class students will have a better chance to attain the grades they deserve. What Gill was suggesting was utterly stupid, you have students who end up in these universities at the bottom of the league tables and she expects them to perform miracles? Let's ask an important question - why did these students end up there in the first place? It is because they have suffered the consequences of a poor quality primary and secondary education, there are massive gaps in their training and knowledge which have led to them performing so poorly in their A levels and thus you cannot expect the university to fix those problems which they didn't even cause in the first place - no, we need to go back to the root of the problem and solve them back at primary and secondary level education. In the UK, the rich parents can afford to buy the quality of education that they want for their children but for the working class kids, it is the luck of the draw as they just go to the local school, hope for the best whilst expecting the worst. So if you want working class kids to attain social mobility, you have to start the moment they enter the education system at a very young age, not wait for the chronically underfunded education system to wreck years of havoc on them and then somehow expect the university to perform magical miracles to somehow fix everything.
Gill attacked courses like French and English literature, given that you speak French and actually do use French in your work, do you think her criticism was fair and justified?
I don't wanna say, "French is super useful, I've made a lot of money with my French language skills so you must study it." No, for me, I have a unique talent and ability to master foreign languages and that is why I managed to master French in short period of time to the standard where I can use it in the context of work to make a lot of money. You should pick a subject that you are not only very interested in but you know you're going to excel at. There's no point in saying, oh engineering degrees are useful, only to find that you not only have no interest in it but totally suck at it. Furthermore even if you could speak a language like French fluently, it doesn't guarantee that there will be companies lining up to hire you. I use French in the context of investment banking; now that's not what I studied at university but instead, I had taught myself everything I needed to know along the way after working for so many years in this industry. Likewise, I'm also fluent in Spanish and my Spanish is totally self-taught. In reality, there is little difference in my French and Spanish in that I'm fluent in both languages; whilst my accent may give away the fact that I'm not a native speaker of either languages, you can't really tell that I studied French at university whilst I have never ever had a lesson in Spanish in my life. Once again, Gill has been totally unrealistic in what she thinks students should expect from their degrees. Being able to learn French at university gave me the confidence to go on to acquire other skills that I found useful in my career; in any case I wasn't passively sitting in my French classes like a dummy waiting for the French teacher to explain everything to me. I was doing a lot of my own reading and research, I was watching French films, traveling independently around France, even getting part time jobs where I could use my French - at the end of the day, it doesn't matter what subject you're studying at university as long as you go through that process of independently acquiring the knowledge to master that topic. So once you have done that you have the tools to go on and acquire any kind of knowledge you need in the future.
That's right - as an undergraduate, you are expected to function very autonomously, in sharp contrast, the young children in kindergarten need the teachers to explain everything slowly and clearly to them. Thus if you're completely capable of figuring stuff out on your own and have the discipline to do what I did when I became fluent in Spanish without the help of a teacher, then you should not bother with university at all! Save yourself some precious time and money and get on with your career. In any case, let's remember that when you enrol for a French degree at a university, the university is responsible for teaching you French rather than helping you get a job upon graduation. If you're really smart but feel that you don't want to spend all that time getting a degree, then just drop out having made your point that you're clearly smart enough to gain entry to one of the world's top universities. But of course, you need to then focus on all those other activities that make you very employable and attractive in the job market without worrying about coursework and exams. If you want to go into a career like medicine or engineering, then you really need the degree or you won't be licensed to practice. But if you're doing something to do with languages, then what the hell do you need a degree for? You can either just get on with learning the language on your own (without the help of a university) or better still, just do a degree in something more useful than learn that language in your free time. I do agree that it is a very bad idea to do a degree in anything to do with languages because you can master a language without a university course. My friend Nadia is from Italy, she is 100% Italian, she speaks Italian as her mother tongue and nobody is going to ask her to produce a degree to prove that she is fluent in Italian - any employer would simply test her Italian to ensure that she is indeed completely fluent if it is an important component of the job. I have been roped in on several occasions to test if a candidate is indeed as fluent as they claim to be in French and Chinese. When I worked for a Peruvian company, they never once asked me to produce a single piece of paperwork to prove that I was fluent in Spanish - paper qualifications are so totally overrated.
But surely a degree would help considerably in the job hunting process, no?
How quickly you get a job, the kind of job you eventually get and how much you get paid for it, now all that depends very much on the individual and often it is those individuals who get a lot of help from their rich parents who get the best results whilst the working class students who get little or no help from their parents are left figuring all this out for themselves and thus struggle a lot more to get a decent first job. The degree the university gives you is only one part of a much bigger equation and Gill has completely ignored all the other vital factors involved in this equation. Of course, I have seen some very resourceful young people figure all this out for themselves - there's this young lady in Singapore who really impressed me. Let's call her Ms Wang, her parents moved from China to Singapore to give her a brighter future but they couldn't even speak English and were stuck doing some very poorly paid working class work to make sure she could go to university. They could only do that much for her and then the rest was up to her - she was super ambitious and understood the power of having the right connections. That was why she made a genuine effort to network with anyone and everyone who might be in a position to help her, I ended up crossing paths with her some years ago when I was doing some business in Singapore; back then, she was just an undergraduate but when I explained to her some of the business development plans I had in Singapore, she actually managed to introduce me to some very good clients and I never really figured out how an undergrad could get to know senior directors in the banking sector like that, but that's exactly the kind of privilege that a rich kid would have if daddy or mommy was a senior director at a bank and the parents would be able to call in a favour or two to help their child get an internship or job there. Ms Wang did so much networking, she also learnt French to a very high standard, she did loads of part time work to beef up her CV; she had done so much on top of what her degree demanded of her, there's a lot we can all learn from her. She was realistic, she understood that having a degree was simply not enough to land her a good job and thus she was prepared to do whatever it took to get her career off to a flying start - she didn't want to end up poor and working class like her parents.
Do universities have a careers service or office to help their graduates find jobs?
Yes, practically all universities will have a department like that but they don't have a magic wand to wave - they will tell you a lot of things that you already know like the importance of having some part time work to gain work experience or how useful it would be to speak a second or third language. But what the student does with that information is beyond their control - imagine if the student is told, "I can see you did Spanish for a few years at school, why don't you spend free your time at university working on it to ensure that you will become fluent enough in Spanish to use it in your future jobs?" A student may just end up doing absolutely nothing with that piece of advice whilst a caring parent will be in a position to apply a lot more pressure on the student to follow through on that advice, by sending them on a work experience placement in Spain for three months. A university cannot force a student to do something like that whilst a parent probably can. This is why students with parents who are both rich and caring are in the best position to get good jobs upon graduation, whilst in the case of Ms Wang, it was not like her parents didn't want to help her, they simply weren't educated enough to even begin to figure out how they could help her. So if Ms Wang went to her university's career services office, she would just be yet another student seeking help. They would tell her that an internship would be rather useful but they wouldn't try that hard to get her one as they're not that motivated to her help - the onus would be on her to find her own internship. Now, contrast that to a caring parent who is committed to making sure that sure that their child does indeed get the best possible internship. There is simply no comparison and that's why people like Ms Wang are at a huge disadvantage - the odds were set against her and she had to work far harder to get to where she is today compared to the other young people who had rich well-educated parents who offered much help with this process.
Should 'useless degree courses' be scrapped then?
Yes and no. There is an element of 'buyers beware' when it comes to degrees - the onus is on the student to do their research about what they're getting into when they enrol in a course and this is actually just a straightforward business transaction between buyer (the student paying for the degree) and seller (the university providing that course). If both parties are entirely happy with the arrangement, then there is no need for the government to intervene to prevent that from happening, even if that degree course can be deemed 'useless' by some people. Allow me to give you an analogy to illustrate this point: my friend Howard took his children to see the new Barbie movie and his kids loved it, they then pestered him to buy a whole lot of Barbie merchandise - I took one look at that post on Facebook and just shook my head, I thought, "what a waste of money, three months from now, they're going to lose interest in it and all that expensive merchandise is simply going to disappear into a store room and collect dust for a long time until you decide to throw it out." Whilst I personally consider all that Barbie merchandise 'useless', should the government ban them? Should a third party intervene when Howard spends a lot of money buying all that to please his children? I don't think so - after all, it is a legitimate financial transaction between buyer and seller, Howard is very happy to spend that money buying those gifts for his kids and they are (for now) very happy with those gifts. The fact that I consider them 'useless' and 'a total waste of money' is not relevant nor is it a sufficient reason for anyone to intervene and prevent Howard from making that purchase. Likewise, I was in the supermarket and I saw a mother buying a huge packet of Haribo sweets for her son; I silently judged her for that bad decision Those sweets are full of processed sugar and her son was already quite obese, she really shouldn't be getting her fat son even more sweets like Haribo but would I go as far as to say that Haribo sweets should be banned? No, it would be a step too far, the mother buying those sweets is making a private business transaction and both the buyer (the mother) and the seller (the supermarket) are perfectly happy with the arrangement. Hence by that token, if a student enrols in a useless course then they have to take responsibility for that terrible decision.
But government intervention isn't something new - take the health warning on cigarettes for example.
At what point do you draw the line when it comes to things like that? People who want to smoke will just ignore those health warnings and smoke anyway. But let's take the example of the Haribo sweets - the manufacturer is mandated by law to put very clear information about what the ingredients are, what the calorie and nutritional values are on the packaging in order for the consumer to make an informed choice. If they read that information and still decide to go ahead and consume a product like Haribo, then that is their decision and right to do so. Likewise, any student can look up all the information they need about a course at a university before applying as all the information they need is available in the public domain. As a consumer, the responsibility is on you to verify all the information on the product you're about to purchase before handing your money over; that principle is exactly the same whether you are dealing with a confectionary product like Haribo or a course at Buckingham University. The buyer needs to bear some responsibility when it comes to their decision to do that course and as long as the university is not guilty of false advertising, then there's no need for the government to intervene. But if a student is dumb enough not to have done sufficient research before signing up to a course at a terrible university, how's that any different from a fat person consuming even more Haribo sweets? A fat person consuming even more sweets is undoubtedly reflects bad judgment but at what stage should the government step in to save this person from making a terrible decision? Well, I work in financial services and I would expect the government to step in to stop fraud from happening - for example, if a salesman was misrepresenting a product and promising the investor returns that will never happen, in that situation, then please, we need the government to step in and stop that at once as it is a crime. But if a student wants to do a course in English literature at Buckingham university, that's not a crime even if it is a bad decision on the part of the student. I'll put that in the same category as a fat person eating too many Haribo sweets. I don't condone it but I wouldn't go as far as to ban it.
Why do students still enrol in courses at bad universities then? Are they somehow misled or deceived?
It would vary on a case by case basis but I would say that generally, the link between having a good degree and a successful career isn't that strong! Ultimately, it is because you need to be really good at exams in order to get into a good university and then graduate with top grades, but there really isn't a job out there where a company or organisation pays you good money to study like that. You are really young when you go to university, you could be as young as 18 and if your family is rich, then you can have the luxury of simply having those few years to figure out what you really want to do in life rather than putting all your eggs in one basket and counting on that degree to give you the means to get your dream job. Thus for some of these richer students, going to Buckingham University to do a very useless course like English literature is no different from Howard buying his kids loads of Barbie merchandise. Is it a good use of money? No, but they have enough money to spend on luxuries and they're not poor, so they really don't mind or care. Context is important: if Howard had spent his last £500 on buying the Barbie merchandise for his kids instead of say paying his rent or his wife's medical bills, then that will lead to some serious consequences. But if he was a very rich man with plenty more money in the bank, then he would not miss that £500 at all and if he could make his kids happy with those gifts, he would think that it was worth it. So in a best case scenario, someone like Howard's daughter may do badly for her A levels, end up at a terrible university but he would still use his connections to get her a really nice first job. But in a worse case scenario, a poor kid from a working class family may pin all his hopes on his degree as a path to social mobility, only to find that his degree is just not good enough to be taken seriously by people like me. Now that poor kid from a working class family may end up as Howard's daughter's classmate at the same university, but the consequences for them are quite different and thus Howard's daughter effectively gets away with being a bad student, whilst the poor working class kid is punished quite harshly for the same 'crime'. And no, of course it is not fair but life has never been fair.
If you have a degree from an elite university like Oxford or Cambridge, then employers will be lining up to hire you. But if you have a degree from a terrible university, then my question for you is this: why even bother? If I had such terrible A level results that I can't even get into a half decent university, then I'd not even bother with a degree and just start working immediately to have that 'too cool for university' accolade. There are so many useful things that every student can do to help themselves - learn a foreign language or three, get loads of work experience to prove that you can function in the real world, start networking and expand your network of professional connections, do loads of research about what your ideal career would be, step out of your comfort zone to grow as a person and develop your soft skills by engaging with people from a very wide range of social backgrounds rather than people who are quite similar to yourself.
You're just placing the onus now on the individual rather than improving the system?
You can wait forever for the unfair system to improve or you can take some concrete steps to help yourself today, trust me - the latter is going to be far more satisfying and rewarding than the former. You ought to take charge of the situation.
How can you justify taking that stance?
Ultimately we need to accept that there is a bell curve distribution when it comes to human intelligence, so there is a small number of people who are super intelligent and they are the ones who go on to become doctors, scientists, super rich businessmen or engineers who invent incredible things that make our lives better. Then you have the bulk of the population who are plain average and these are just the worker ants in our society who will not make much of a difference, they don't have that much brains but can be trained to do their jobs well enough to remain gainfully employed. Then you have those at the bottom of the food chain who are simply unemployable for most jobs apart from those which are the very simplest because they are, well, for want of a better word, just too stupid. That's the way our human societies have been for a long time and no, you can't take someone from the bottom end of the food chain and try to use education to somehow boost their IQ and turn them into intelligent scholars. Rather, a far more sensible approach to this issue is to make sure those doing the very worst working class jobs are treated fairly, such as by paying them a living wage and making sure their children get a decent education. You can call that a form of charity, I call that socialism - that's when we take some of the wealth from the rich in the form of various taxes and use that money to help the poor. Gill is barking up the wrong tree, by pointing the finger at the university and accusing them of letting the students down.
But what is the difference between a course at Buckingham University and a course at Oxford? The course material that Oxford uses is in the public domain - it's not like the students at Oxford have to sign an NDA never to divulge the course material to third party. The key difference in the courses boils down to the prestige that comes with Oxford as well as the fact that you're studying alongside other extremely talented and intelligent students - you will be inspired no matter where you look on the campus on Oxford. Oh look, there's Malala Yousafzai on her way to her lectures. But for Buckingham university, they cannot replicate the prestige if they are constantly attracting only the worst students to their courses and there's no point in raising the bar of entry, as no straight A student would want to go to a university without that prestige factor. So there's literally nothing the staff at Buckingham University about this reputational issue and as for being surrounded by the brightest students, at Buckingham you will be surrounded by quite the opposite, those who failed their A level exams because they were either stupid or lazy (or both). Needless to say, you would be hard pressed to find anyone in that cohort to inspire you. There's really nothing the staff at Buckingham University can do to fix either problems as they are not related to the teaching style or the course content - it all stems from the quality of their students and therefore Gill is totally wrong when she places all the blame on the teaching staff at these universities. Let's imagine we conduct a social experiment, we swap the teaching staff from Oxford to Buckingham and so the students at Buckingham university can get Oxford-quality teaching - would this then solve the problem of making them unemployable? No, because even the best staff at Oxford can't give these students a degree from Oxford - you can only get that if you have earned yourself a place at Oxford University and these students at Buckingham have totally failed to do that. Even if the Oxford teaching staff manage to get Malala Yousafzai to come in as a guest speaker, that's just for one day and you still have that problem whereby these average students are not going to learn anything from each other.
So you're blaming the students rather than the universities?
It's a complex issue but you can't even begin to solve such a big problem if you're blaming the wrong party to start with!
But staying with your 'experiment', surely it would benefit the students to have such Oxford quality teaching?
Not really. You're making the assumption that an excellent teacher can get any student to pass a really difficult exam but that doesn't happen in real life; the litmus test is if we could subject the students from Buckingham to an exam at Oxford - remember, we're dealing with students who performed very poorly for their A level exams. Would a few lessons with the very best Oxford lecturers allow them to fly through the hardest exams at Oxford university with flying colours? Of course not. They would fail miserably even if they had those Oxford teachers for three years. Let me give you an analogy, my father watches a lot of TV and that's all he does all day apart from his three meals. So once, I tried to establish rapport with him as I saw that he was watching a documentary about Korean pop culture on a Chinese TV station and so I thought oh I really like K-pop as well. So I watched it with him and when there was a commercial break, I asked my father what he thought about the programme that we had just watched together, my father really struggled to answer that basic question as he really wasn't paying attention. He was either half asleep or daydreaming (or both), he barely remembered that it was about South Korea but couldn't even remember anything about the interview with a very famous Korean actor that we had literally just watched moments ago. I was baffled at just how little information he gleamed from the programme despite the fact that we both watched it together - I learnt a lot, he learnt nothing. Just because my father watched the documentary doesn't mean he actually learnt anything from it, the same way just because a student attends a class doesn't mean they have actually learnt anything - that's why we have exams at schools and universities, to test if the students have properly understood the topic. Thus you can throw as many resources as you want at students from Buckingham University but will that actually lead to them passing more difficult exams? The answer is no. I have no doubt that the quality of the lessons offered by the Oxford teaching staff would be excellent but it's just that correlation between better teaching and these students actually being able to pass much harder exams that I find quite contentious.
How does this relate to rising youth unemployment then?
Too many young people are going to universities at a time when there simply aren't enough jobs for graduates out there, as a result many graduates end up doing jobs which they are overqualified for or simply end up taking a job that has absolutely nothing to do with what they studied. Thus for them, university was a waste of time, it didn't help with their careers - they are no better off with that degree. The only people to benefit from this situation are the universities who are providing these degrees that have totally failed their students - Gill's solution would be to put pressure on the universities to fix their syllabus or teaching methods so the students graduate with a much more useful degree. However I have already explained why this is virtually impossible, so the alternative is simply to get these students to seek alternative forms of further education that will lead to them being able to get jobs that do not need a degree. Would you rather be a gainfully employed electrician or an unemployed graduate? Now this should be obvious to most people, but the youth unemployment situation tells a different story. There is a complete mismatch of supply and demand in the labour market.
How did we end up in this messy situation?
It is only natural that all parents want their kids to go into the very best jobs, so they want them to grow up to become lawyers, engineers, scientists, investment bankers and other well paid prestigious jobs but if too many students get an education for that kind of job without taking heed of the demand for graduates in those industry, then we have created a problem that we are facing today of oversupply of graduates leading to youth unemployment. So if you have a degree from Oxford and you want to become an engineer, no problem but if you have a degree from the University of Buckingham, then you're in trouble. So unless you can get a degree from a good university in this context, my advice to young people is simply not to bother with a degree at all. That's why the person serving you coffee at Starbucks may have a masters degree, now where do I even begin to dissect what went wrong there? Why were these people duped into getting a degree in the first place? But then, how is this any different from the morbidly obese man still consuming too many sweets and destroying his health? There will always be some people out there making irrational decisions that will be make their situations worse. Whilst some of us are lucky enough to have family members who will guide us away from these bad decisions whilst others are either left on their own to make these awful mistakes or worse, have equally clueless family members who are responsible for pushing them into these bad decisions. The issue is impossible to resolve as most people would think, "oh that's a shame, a graduate working in Starbucks but that would never happen to me (or my child) - that may happen to others, not me." The government cannot be expected protect people who choose to take that mindset; after all, that's a decision that they have to take based on what they think their chances would be when it comes to going down this path of getting a degree and what kinds of job that degree would give them access to.
So there you go, that's it from me on this rather contentious topic, what do you think? What more can be done about these failing universities or is Gill simply blaming the wrong party? Why would a student sign up for a one of these courses at a university languishing at the bottom of the league tables then? Is there a need for government intervention or is this merely an agreement between buyer and seller on the private market when it comes to higher education? What more could be done to reduce youth unemployment today? Have you ever met a very highly educated young person who simply cannot find a decent job to match their degree(s)? Please leave a comment below and many thanks for reading.
I have mixed feelings about this.
ReplyDeleteFirstly, I disagree with for profit education. Look at the degree mills in US of A for instance. They will give anyone a degree who can afford to pay their fees, no lessons or exams required!
I think education should be a human right and it a public good so taxpayers should invest in higher education like certain EU nations are currently practicing.
That would give rich and poor people equality of opportunity. And not the current system (in SG and UK) where only the rich have access to tertiary education.
But then I again I never had a traditional undergraduate degree so I am unable to comment how my career would have turned out if things were different.
Unfortunately, I also believe that there are many jobs in modern society that don't require an undergrad degree. The shortage of staff currently is for blue collar service jobs in the F&B industry, healthcare, and construction.
And since I am not part of the Ministry of Education or Manpower I do not have the solutions to this mismatch of qualifications and manpower requirement.
But I have a solution which I think works for me, and many others who might be reading: develop transferrable skills. Mine happens to be Japanese language, photography, technology, psychology/sociology, amongst many other minor things like immense curiosity, a thickskin, writing skills.
This is a tricky issue as people tend to treat 'education' as if it is a monolithic entity. A degree in medicine from Oxford will open doors for you everywhere but a degree in history from Buckingham would do not of that - why? Because not all degrees are created equal and that's why we have to stop doing what Gill did in her article by talking as if they were. And the moment I point that out, oh I'm being elitist by favouring the graduates from Oxford and Cambridge? Well, let me compare this to the French system which may seem socialist on the surface but it still makes sense. University education in France is ridiculously cheap - you pay a basic administration fee but that's in the hundreds (not thousands) and even that is capped at 650 euros a year. And get this, anyone can register for the top universities and sit in on their classes, even if you're an idiot who doesn't meet the basic recommended standard. But what they do is a cull regularly: so they will give you a very difficult exam at the end of the term, if you fail, you may resit but if you flunk again, you're turfed out. It's like a computer game - you gotta meet the minimum standard (which is ridiculously high) in order to continue to the next level. So degrees are accessible to all - they're so cheap, but the elite universities still maintain their high standards as they ruthlessly fail plenty of first year students very early in the process to the point where most people who know that they're not worthy just stay away from such universities and the fools who overestimate their abilities would be turfed out along the way. That's why when I went on exchange to a top French university in the late 90s, this was explained to me - I was told to join a third year class which has been properly filtered by this process and avoid any first/second year courses. So on the surface, it feels fair but I do wonder how much money is wasted on those who overestimate their abilities and chance it at one of the top universities, only to be turfed out when they flunk their exams.
DeleteI was talking to this guy/gal on telegram who said he/she got offered a place in Oxford. I said that means that he/she was set for life. But he/she said not necessarily. I guess the job market really is that competitive now.
DeleteOxford opens doors and it really depends what you do with the opportunity. I'm sure there are extreme examples like the Astar researchers who were jailed for sex acts, forgery, etc.
There would also be examples like Eric Sim who failed maths in school and whose parents were hawkers yet he managed to rise up to be the MD of UBS.
Well getting into Oxford means that the odds are in your favour of course but success is not and is never guaranteed. It's like poker, you can win with a bad hand and you can lose with a good hand. Getting a good degree from a university like Oxford will make life a lot easier in the future for this person undoubtedly. But if someone with a degree from Oxford struggles in their career, my reaction would be sympathetic - it would open up a debate about book smarts vs soft skills, that transition between university life and the working world as well as looking at other factors in their lives. But if someone from Buckingham University ends up working as a taxi driver, I'd just roll my eyes and say, well what did you expect from someone who went to a university at the bottom of the league tables then? We only have so many years in our working lives, I say that as a man in his late 40s thinking, holy shit, I don't have that many years left before I retire, I'm not young anymore. Having people open doors for you and give you more opportunities just because you have a degree from somewhere like Oxford will undoubtedly make it easier for you to get your act together sooner rather than later in your working life. As for failing maths at school, I did write a post about how so many people think you need to be good at maths to go into banking when that's COMPLETELY FALSE. We're not allowed to do maths in banking for fuck's sake, everything from interest payments to NAVs to share prices - that's all calculated by computers so we completely eliminate human error. So whether you suck at maths or you're brilliant at maths is a moot point when it comes to banking, it's such a competitive industry that the one skill you need is soft skills/social skills to form great relationships with important people in the industry.
DeleteMy point is not that having doors opened for you is not good. You need to know what to do with that opportunity which is something not taught in school.
DeleteE.g. my elder brother went to RJC (RI now) and was offered a scholarship to NUS to study engring.
He went on to work in Citibank as an analyst. I have no idea why he didn't find success there but he is now working for a restructured hospital as head of Operations.
I took the exact opposite path going from healthcare to financial services FO.
So now the argument is whether I would have ended up like my elder brother by following the traditional route. Or would I end up like Eric by hustling and getting help from others, like yourself?
Since I am not able to go back in time to do over my studies, I can only move forward and hope I don't end up like my brother.
I hesitate to comment on your brother's situation as I don't know him but for what it's worth, his job does sound very much like a typical Singaporean civil service type job whereby the workload is high, you follow the rules, you take orders and you are rewarded for being a good soldier. You get to turn off your brain and simply say, okay boss what next? What do you want me to do? Whereas people in our line of work are meant to come up with our own strategies and I can see why certain people are attracted to certain roles - perhaps your brother is smart but simply doesn't have the kind of character to come up with new ideas all the time and he'd rather just turn off his brain whilst following orders. I am sure from the last few weeks you've come to realize just how challenging the opposite of that can be, but the fact that you've chosen this path tells me that you're more interested in taking charge of your destiny rather than just following the rules. However, I hope you realize (ref: when I shot down your idea earlier this week) that this is a much harder role as not all ideas are good and we're only rewarded for the good ideas we come up with.
DeleteFunny you should mention it, he was on the military for over 10 years, left for the private sector, then went back to the public sector after barely 3 years later.
DeleteI don't want to speculate on the reasons why, but I suspect he had gotten to used to a regimental working environment that private sector seems scary to him.
As long as he has found a work environment that suits him, that's all that matters. I think the key thing is that at the very least, he tried. Okay, so it didn't work out but at least he gave it a shot and I say, good for him for trying. So many people are stuck in mediocre jobs they are not completely happy with but don't have the balls to venture out of their comfort zone to seek something better. Just this month, I had 3 near misses with acting jobs - ie. I was the 3rd choice in one casting and the 2nd choice in two other castings Sure I was disappointed as it would've been nice to have been chosen but for me, it's really just a question of okay, at least I tried and whilst I didn't succeed, I'm grateful for the opportunity to merely try and that's good enough for me. So your brother tried something different, it didn't work out, okay so he switches to something else. At least he didn't stay in a position which made him miserable, so by that token, I wouldn't judge your brother too harshly actually. I hope he is happy where he is now.
DeleteI agree. It is like our friend Ms Clinton (not real name). She made mega-bucks in finance, found it not suitable for her, then stepped back to an IT position.
DeleteI kind kind of understand her reasons. But her mental health is more important at the end of the day. Maybe her husband is very rich so she didn't need to be miserable to make money.
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/super-intern-big-tech-hustle-culture-university-3674156
ReplyDeleteJust stumbled upon this article. When I graduated 20 over years ago it wasn't that competitive. How things have changed.
I still hustle alot now but that is just me. Lots of my peers would rather quiet quit or lie flat on their full-time jobs.
That's actually a good article and a wake up call to the youth of today about a) the importance of hustle culture and b) the uselessness of a degree. Learn to hustle and forget the degree.
DeleteDon't get me wrong, you still need to learn how to 'do stuff' - let me give you an example. I speak Spanish fluently, I don't have a single piece of paper qualification in Spanish given that it was entirely self-taught through a mix of traveling, social media, chatting with friends, looking stuff up on my own and self-study. When I need to use it at work, my boss never once demanded, show me a degree in Spanish language along with all relevant certificates. No, they're like, "okay this client is from Mexico, now get on the conference call in 30 minutes and speak to them in Spanish, if you fuck up and can't speak Spanish, then you're a fucking liar and you're fired." A lot about hustler culture is about getting shit down quickly and efficiently without having to go through the old fashioned route of attending a class and letting a teacher teach you stuff - you're not a 7 year old kid, so stop looking for the classroom. I get that, but a lot of Singaporeans don't; however, this article does show that things are changing. But then again, Singapore's a big place and we can't treat all young Singaporeans as a monolithic entity. You're always gonna have the more dynamic, brilliant hustlers (like those featured in the article) vs those who crave for the spoon feeding culture.
DeletePerhaps this is a sample size of one and thus not reflective of the situation in Singapore now, but I really really struggled with my nephew in this aspect of thinking outside the box. I remember when I was tutoring him for his economics A level exams, the format of the exam paper is that there's a section when they would give you a piece of news - in this case, it was a piece about what's happening in the South Korean economy, followed by a number of questions about what's going on there, based on the piece provided. But this is not reading comprehension li jie wen da, the answers a NOT found in the text and you're supposed to apply what you do know about the principles of economics to come up with an intelligent analysis of the situation and craft that into your answers to score points - let me be the first to say, it's not an easy task. It is demanding. But my nephew was like, why is the answer not in the text. And I cannot answer it, my teacher never taught us about South Korea. Woah, I gave him such a massive scolding for that. That was so extremely Singaporean. I did wonder how many Singaporeans are like him, totally unable to think outside the box; vs the new generation of hustlers as featured in the article you shared.
DeleteI get that and I am learning how to do marketing and sales currently by studying the good examples and emulating them to see what works for me. And I am also studying marketing/PR strategy (which is more high level CMO stuff) to plan an angle of attack so that my marketing effort does not go to waste.
DeleteNot saying that the old way of doing things don't work. The modern way is more efficient by all measures (time and money).
Ref your nephew, I get this all the time having to work with public/civil servants. They keep telling me you can't do it this way. I ask them why and the answer is always because it has always been done the other way. I ask them for a justification for the old way of doing something and am always ghosted.
DeleteWhich is to say that if these people had been in-charge, policemen would still be wearing shorts now. Because that is the traditional way.
Well, I can see that my nephew would just go into one of those roles in Singapore in the future, which actually is the norm rather than the exception. The fact is he blend in, he will fit in and that's the Singaporean way though the downside of that is that he's going to end up like my sisters - he will have a job that will require him to work very long hours, he will have a never-ending pile of workload to clear through, he will be always sleep deprived and his Big Mac index will be poor compared to someone like me. But then again, I'm the exception rather than the norm and what pisses me off with my family is that they don't know how to process the fact that I've done things so differently that has led to a ridiculously good Big Mac Index so they just conveniently shove it into their blind spot and ignore the fact that I've actually uncovered something that they do badly need in their lives. Then again, my nephew's brain is so fucked by the Singaporean education system I am not sure anyone can undo the damage that has been inflicted over the years. So I'm letting sleeping dogs lie when it comes to that issue.
Deletehttps://www.channelnewsasia.com/cna-insider/taiwan-youth-graduates-low-salary-unemployment-rents-taipei-3677681
Deletehttps://fortune.com/2023/07/29/chinese-youth-unemployment-full-time-children/
The reality in TW and China is so bleak. I get depressed reading about it.
Hey Alex, I totally agree with you there is only so much one can do to improve a university course to increase graduate earnings. If we look at the income distribution of UK society, only the top 10% of earners make 6 figures or more. Which means there are only enough high paying jobs for 10% of people in society, regardless of the quality of university courses. If we send 50% of young people to university, that's 5 times as many people competing for 1 high paying job. Better odds than the lottery, but still there will be more losers than winners.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I've graduated recently and started work as CTO of a startup owned by a law firm. I was the only software engineer for a couple months, till I made enough progress that my boss told me to hire an entire engineering team to help me deliver the product faster. Anyway, I'm surprised how unintuitive the hiring process looks from the other side now that I'm an employer rather than a jobseeker. Ms. Wang really had the right idea to network like crazy, if only more students had her initiative. Anyway, my boss explicitly told me "we need to hire someone quick, can you go back to your old university and look for a friend who is in need of a job? Someone you know is intelligent that you can trust? If you can't find someone, then we'll put out a job ad, but I prefer not to." The thing is, when I interview people, I don't even ask for what was taught in their university courses. Instead I'm looking for evidence they studied things outside of school, and spent a lot of time coding and studying maths in their free time. Also soft skills are important to me, if someone sounds either overly arrogant or unenthusiastic, then I don't want to work with them. Actually the person I hired didn't even go to a well known university for undergrad, and did an online masters(not as prestigious as in-person masters). But I interviewed him anyway because of a recommendation by a math professor at my old university who I told about the job opening. That professor helped me with a tricky equation in my research in the past, so I trusted him when he says this guy is smart even though he's not from a reputable university, and his resume had zero work experience on it. His resume was probably as generic as resumes went, he didn't have a single internship despite having a masters degree. But I liked how he talked about math in the interview, and he showed a lot of enthusiasm for the job even offering to do things I didn't require him to do. So I hired him and he's a joy to work with so far. However, this person has beat the odds compared to others who went to the same university as him, which has a 90% acceptance rate compared to <10% for my old university, and only because of his social connections. I wouldn't dare turn in a CV like his when looking for jobs, but he lucked out because my boss needed someone fast, and his friend knew me. I like the saying "luck is when opportunity meets preparation", and networking is a great way to make your own luck.
@Amanda, thanks for sharing!
DeleteWhat would you say the top 5 skills or factors are for someone to succeed in your industry?
Hey Choaniki. The biggest factor is probably a willingness to learn new things on the job. The reason why I didn't care what courses were taught in school is because the thing I'm working on is so new that there isn't a course for it anyway. I need an innovator, someone who can come up with a new algorithm, but is also willing to spend hours a week reading the right things without me saying what to read. Also there's day to day little issues that require some level of street smarts, like sourcing the right vendor for something we can't do in-house, and being resourceful enough to find a solution that isn't too expensive, won't take too long, and is of sufficient quality. Not too different from finance come to think of it, but with some minimum technical knowledge-how required. The thing is, it's very difficult to judge all this from a resume, which is why I rely on personal recommendations a lot more if there's no work experience on the resume.
DeleteAlso, competition is very high for software jobs lately because of the layoffs. I went to a tech networking meetup a couple months ago where someone told me he studied music as a bachelor's degree, waited tables for a few years before enrolling in a coding boot camp but can't find a software job. I could've offered him the job, but he was not charismatic enough to me at the meetup. Instead of selling himself and his unique skillet, he was just complaining he hadn't found a well paying job yet and was stuck in a dead end job with a mortgage to pay while in his 30s. The point of a networking meetup is not to complain to strangers, it's to put your best foot forward in case someone knows someone with a job opening. I didn't like his attitude, it sounded like he was desperate for money and a little entitled to a middle class life without any unique skills or enthusiasm. The person I hired hadn't found a job for 2 months but he was very upbeat regardless. Sure that could be fake and just "interview mode" since he probably took out loans for that online masters, but still he made a good first impression compared to the other guy.
@Amanda, it seems like the modern, high-paid jobs are more or less the same. No one will spoonfeed you and you are expected to come out with innovative problem-solving solutions on your own.
DeleteNow I don't want to add anything about doing sales in financial services since I am not the expert. But I am sure @LIFT might have a couple of points to add.
Hi guys, sorry I've been slow to join in but I've been reading your exchange here. Yes Amanda is 100% right in that this is indeed a lottery where you're gonna have more losers than winners - ultimately, you cannot have a system where everyone is a winner, everyone becomes a super well-paid boss of a company because that's just not how our capitalist economy works. Perhaps in a totally communist country where everyone is paid the same whether they are a deliver driver or a brain surgeon, but Cuba tried that and it totally failed. The thing about lotteries is that it is cheap enough for someone to just buy a ticket for a few dollars and it doesn't make them much worse off if they don't win, but to invest in a useless degree that doesn't really do much for your career, that's a hefty price to pay but so many people don't seem to mind/care what their odds are? Thus to place the onus on the universities to help these weaker students into better paid jobs, I'm just shaking my head. What do you honestly expect these universities to actually do for these students? As for what Amanda said about a willingness to learn, I wish to add please: it is not just a willingness to learn, but an ability to learn very quickly and learn independently. I don't want to have to show someone multiple times how to perform a function, I wanna show that person just once and they get on with it or better still, I know that I don't need to explain much as they'd just figure it out quickly on their own (and perhaps even find a super efficient way to do it). Thus for me, the way I prove myself in that regard is my Spanish language prowess: never took a class of Spanish in my life before, never had a teacher before, yet I am fluent enough to work in Latin American companies so that goes to show, I'm someone who just gets on with it and figure out stuff on my own in order to get the job done. This is probably because I have this pathologically deep distrust for teachers (given my parents are retired teachers) but this ability to figure stuff out on your own is gold dust in the world of HR departments - we like people who can figure stuff out on their own very autonomously and they are precisely the kind of people we wanna hire.
Delete@LIFT, except I argue most of the time HR doesn't know what the hiring manager or the company even wants (since they have 0 industry knowledge).
DeleteOne good example: at my previous position in a well reknowned university the HR actually recommended my former manager not to offer me the job. For stupid reasons I do not wish to mention here. But my manager stuck her neck out for me and I joined (only to leave so 5 months later, story for another time).
But know I get occasional work from that university as a contractor. So in a way it is still a win-win situation.
OK I am gonna write a bitchy comment so if you're easily offended, look away. What you're talking about is for a relatively working class role as an X-ray technician in a Singaporean hospital, whereby the HR department is going to go through all your paperwork to check your training, qualifications and experience. If you fulfil their requirements, then you get the job. It's not a question of whether or not they're trying to judge whether you're intelligent or not, that's a moot point in this process. If you're super intelligent but don't have the requisite training to work in the radiology department, then they cannot give you a job and teach you what you need to know. If you've been a dunce at school but somehow managed to get the right paper qualifications to operate an X-ray machine, then you leapfrog the intelligent candidate without the right paper qualifications. That's very much a working class approach to this kind of job. Whereas you've left that environment now, you're working in finance where paper qualifications don't mean a thing anymore. We're purely looking for intelligent people regardless of what paper qualifications they have (or don't have). The lady we just hired in Singapore aced her job interview and we didn't ask to look at her paper qualifications - she was charming, eloquent, articulate, she had the right accent (which is something I told you to fix, you can't speak English the way you do and expect to thrive in this industry), she was funny, confident, she knew when to speak and when to ask questions, she had fantastic social skills. We knew we wanted to hire her within 2 minutes as she was that brilliant and that's got nothing to do with her paper qualifications. OK she went to an Ivy League university but that's a moot point - she convinced us using her soft skills, not her paper qualifications. In my world, that's what matters whereas what you've described - well, I can only thank you for opening my eyes to what it is like to be working class in Singapore and I thank my lucky stars I'm neither working in Singapore nor working class today.
DeleteDoubling down on being a nasty bitch to you Choaniki: let's say on paper, you were qualified for the job but that HR manager told your former manager not to hire you. Then you've fucking failed, it's a major fail on your part. Sorry to be blunt, but that's on you - why weren't you able to convince that HR manager that you're the best thing since sliced bread? Why did you fail to win this person over with your charm, what happened to your ability to persuade someone to like you as this is very much what your job is today. You wanna work in financial services, then it's all about your social skills and ability to connect with people, even difficult people whom you really don't like. Oh the art of dealing with nasty people whom you hate but have to deal with regardless at work - that's a course they never teach at university.
DeleteOk the reason is more mundane than that. The HR claimed I lied on my resume by refusing to disclose my current employer with them. The problem was it was accurate 3 month ago when I first submitted the application and was promptly ghosted until the hiring manager reached out to me again. Besides I left the job after 3 months before completion of probation so again a moot point.
DeleteAnd it is true that all jobs I have applied for with the exception of the current one was working class so the bar is very low. Hence the quality of HR personnel are equally low as well. I doubt they would ghost a C-level candidate.
OK it was a mundane technical mix up about your state of employment then, resolving conflicts using our social skills is once again, something we need to be able to use in our line of work. At my kind of level, sticking with the woman in Singapore we have just recruited, we didn't rely on a HR department or HR manager to decide if she was worthy, the CEO himself made that decision with my help (and my recommendation), I then went to a third party who had worked with her in the past to find out what she was like in the work place, what she had achieved in the past and get a reference. The fact is in our line of work, we're so specialist that we wouldn't trust some HR manager who doesn't have industry specific knowledge to try to make any kind of decision. Whereas in a hospital, they simply have a check list: does this candidate have the requisite qualifications for the position that s/he has applied for? Yes/no, go through the checklist, it's very simple. Whereas for us to make a judgment call on this Singaporean lady, there's no checklist, it's just how impressed we were with her (and for the record, she totally impressed us, we were blown away with her social skills). In bigger banks, yes they will have HR departments but the people working there will at least have some experience and technical knowledge to know how to deal with the talent in an efficient manner. Once again, it's very interesting to learn about your bad experience, but I just rolled my eyes and thought, that's all so typically working class.
DeleteHey guys. Yeah there is a whole gauntlet of tests to pass when interviewing for a high paying job compared to a working class job where a minimum level of qualifications are needed. Hey Alex I presume the new employee you hired has an American sounding accent after living in America for at least 4 years, she must've been very charismatic to charm the ivy league interviewer as well. Anyway, my job interview for my current role was 4 months paid part time work to code a proof of concept A.I model for what the company wanted. At that point my resume didn't matter, it was only a question of whether my code worked. The quant interviews I had were a battery of 7 rounds of either math or coding interviews. Best explanation wins. And of course, none of this stuff is taught in university. I also just had a terrible interview where the candidate answered "no" to every question I asked about whether they had X,Y,Z skills. His excuse was the university didn't teach him that. I don't care because he had 2 weeks to prepare for this interview with the job description already given to him and he didn't even bother to Google how to code a simple python script with the skills I needed. Total lack of preparation... Of course I didn't give him the job. Because it was my friend, I actually gave him the bad news and additional feedback at the end for what he could've done to impress me. His takeaway was "and I thought just having the degree was enough...it's not." Yeah for real it's not, the real world demands soft skills and initiative, none of which are needed to get a degree by itself.
DeleteBy the way, regarding the topic of university degrees and whether or not it can get you a job, I have this one friend named "Yvonne"(not her real name) who has a similar story. She has a degree, works a job requiring a degree, but the job pays the same as what McDonald's pays. Why? Because there is an oversupply of graduates ready and willing to do this type of skilled work, so the wages naturally go down. Anyway Yvonne told me that she is the first in her family to go to university and that her parents both have working class jobs (I won't say what as not to identify her). She also told me her parents said to her "wow you have a degree. Any degree will do to get you a middle class salary. It doesn't matter what the degree is. You're set for life." As someone who came from an upper class family, I was told the opposite, that a degree is not enough and if the only thing you can write on your resume come graduation is that you have a degree, then you will end up unemployed and have wasted your entire undergrad. So I had to explain to Yvonne why other people with degrees make more(or less) than her even though they both have the same paper qualifications. And her response was "but I work so hard... shouldn't I deserve more money?" and then I had to explain to her the concept of supply and demand, and soft skills in working with people/networking, and getting them to like you, etc. Her reply was "my parents weren't around to teach me this, and neither did my professors at university." I think these kind of street smarts and knowledge of the industry is what is missing from university education that the rich kids have a huge knowledge advantage in. And the thing is, Yvonne told me she was a straight A student in high school and undergrad. Yvonne complains regularly that she lives paycheck to paycheck, but I don't think the reason she's poor is that she's stupid, it's just a lack of soft skills and street smarts holding her back. The thing is, Yvonne and my new hire both went to very similarly ranked universities within 5 miles of each other, and are roughly the same age. But my new hire has much better soft skills and street smarts than Yvonne, and that's why he's getting paid almost triple what Yvonne makes.
DeleteAlso, the person who I interviewed today, who is a computer science major, actually asked me during the interview "how did you get a CTO position for a software role when you aren't computer science while I can't even land a job?" Lol I was mentally rolling my eyes at that. How did I get the job? My job description was not even related to my major or my research area, but I spent 2 weeks reading a textbook about A.I and practicing making my own algorithms for 6 hours every night until I mastered the skills I needed for it. Meanwhile, my interviewee didn't even prepare for our interview, despite having the more relevant major and way less requirements to fulfill since it was only an entry-level internship rather than a full-time CTO position. I suppose he thinks he deserves my job more than me just because he has the more relevant degree, but I know he certainly can't do my job as well given he failed our technical interview. Yeah Alex it's not just willingness to learn, but how fast someone learns and if they can even catch the concept in the first place. Every time I tell my friend to practice creating some original project, his reply is always "it's hard, I don't know where to start." Maybe he just doesn't "have it", which is why he's clinging so desperately to the notion of degrees being all that is necessary.
Hi Amanda, some details of the lady in Singapore. She lived in America for 18 years, mostly in New York and has an American accent, but it isn't that strong. It's more mid-Atlantic than hardcore NYC. Like she doesn't sound particularly American but comes across as posh and very well educated. And she in fact attended an Ivy League university in the US, the interviewer Peter was British and quite frankly, I have absolutely no idea if Peter went to university or not, or what he read or where - none of that matters at all in finance. You just have to be utterly, totally brilliant at finding ways to make money through investments and no course at any university can teach you that - either you're brilliant like Peter or you are not suited for this industry. I always say, if the professors teaching banking/finance courses at the universities are so smart, then why aren't they working in banking themselves, why are they stuck in a teaching position then? Likewise, I work with Peter because I have this certain international flair to my approach of problem solving in this industry given that I speak so many languages - that's what I bring to the table. Amanda, you and I are highly intelligent and capable individuals, but if we applied to drive a bus, we don't have the right license to operate a vehicle that size and thus we would be rejected from that job even though we're both clearly highly educated and intelligent - such is the nature of working class jobs. It's just a box ticking exercise whereas in my industry today, we don't care about qualifications: if you are genuinely brilliant, we'll just hire you first and then create a job for you. What Choaniki talked about was from another world - a very working class world where it is just a box ticking exercise by the people in HR. You and I are so far removed from that world, but it's nice to be reminded that it exists, to remind me of how far I have come from my very working class roots.
DeleteI read your story about Yvonne - I was like that actually, in fact that was the situation that my both my sisters and I faced. Sorry to be blunt, but I earn a truckload more than my two sisters. In absolute terms, I earn more and am a lot richer but where I really stand out is my Big Mac Index, I work approx 2 to 3 hours a day (today I did approx 30 mins of work, not bad for a Friday) and that's pretty normal for me. So if you look at my hourly rate, I am earning more than my sisters despite the fact that I clock in at about 12 hours a week compared to their 75 to 85 hours a week. So my productivity is through the roof compared to theirs. Even if I earn exactly the same as them, they work on average about 6.67 times longer hours than me and surely, even if they had to work twice as long, you would be raising your eyebrows already but 6.67 times?!?! Where do I even begin, good grief. Well the key difference was because I did loads of gymnastics - that meant I learnt to prove myself beyond the exam system. My own parents really struggled with school when they were students, so they had this mentality of, "if you didn't dedicate every waking hour to studying, then you will fail your exams and be doomed for life, as the exams are very difficult." I didn't agree with that because if you were an idiot, then no amount of studying was going to change that and if you were super intelligent, then you don't need to study all that hard - it would be evident to the right people that you're worth hiring (ref: Peter and that classy Singaporean lady). . But no, my two sisters were so obedient and they always did as they were told, so they followed my parents' instructions of "no social life, no sports, no outside distractions, you must only study and do nothing else". Sure they had good grades and went to university, but struggled like your friend Yvonne in the working world. Whereas I went to the army where I experienced a totally different world that opened my eyes to what life was like outside the school, I then moved abroad to study in the UK and I got to learn so many things that my two sisters never had the chance to, I had so many fantastic experiences that they were deprived of because they followed my parents' terrible instructions of "you must only study and do nothing else." They are both civil servants today, the second sister is doing better than my eldest sister because she was naughty enough to dare to have a social life and do things that normal teenagers did whereas my eldest sister was so timid and totally obedient she would never ever dare to defy my parents - oh dear, she paid a very high price for that. The irony is that in defying my parents by having a social life in her teenage years, my second sister reaped so much more from that in terms of where that took her in her career because of the social skills she developed in those years. Whereas I went the furthest because I was able to break away from that very toxic environment and reinvent myself in the UK. The irony is that you can look at the way my siblings and I turned out and pinpoint exactly what the factors were. So for your friend Yvonne, yeah her family was like mine, but her fate could've been very different if she had dared to figure stuff out for herself instead of betting it all on a degree.
DeleteI guess I was lucky to have never gone to university and gotten a degree than. I would probably have ended up like my elder brother who went to RJC then NUS. He is now a public servant working in some government hospital.
DeleteYes if I had been anything like my sisters, then I would have gone back to Singapore, used the fact that I was a scholar at a good university to get a job but that would've led me down that same path to end up in the same kind of job. But instead, I turned my back on my degree and went into a field where nobody cares if you have a degree or not, all that really mattes is your social skills and whether or not you can convince people that you are intelligent. It is a world away from Singapore where applicants are asked to submit their full academic records right down to primary and secondary level as if that's the best way to test if the candidate is worthy for the position they're applying for. I had a choice between the two routes and I picked this one. Ironically Choaniki you were forced down this route by default - it's not the easier one but since the other one isn't open to you, you're on the same road as I am now. Good luck!
DeleteI wouldn't say I was forced down this route. I chose the path. So I jumped with my eye fully opened. I won't blame anyone but myself if things didn't turn out well. But I am also stubborn and won't give up trying.
Delete18 years in America, I think you've mentioned this lady before, but regardless having a posh American accent does help a lot in finance. It's sad for people who grew up with other accents, but if I were to learn say French or Chinese to do business in France or China, I know I'd have to work on my accent too.
DeleteYeah come to think of it, working class jobs are so abundant(because they pay crap) that most of the time all you need are the right qualifications to land the job. High paying jobs are not abundant so it's more like a gymnastics competition where the most creative idea wins, and there are more losers than winners, compared to sitting a school exam where the maximum score is 100 and the answer is the same each time. Oh gosh I now realize why the computer science undergrad I interviewed has such crap soft skills, he's an international from Asia. His parents probably told him only his GPA matters, while I never even asked or cared what his GPA was during the interview. Yeah Yvonne comes from a very similar background to you Alex, she even has one very abusive parent. But unlike you who broke away from your parents during NS(or earlier), and realized they were stupid and you need to follow your own advice to succeed, Yvonne still clings to her parents' advice. She's starting to listen to me in developing her soft skills at work, and asked me to help her write a resume so she can change careers. Maybe it's not too late for her. The reason why she's changing jobs is she's financially dependent on the abusive parent and wants to get away from them, but can't on a paycheck to paycheck job.
@Choaniki you could've stayed at your old job but you weren't happy there at all.
Delete@Amanda I am glad you're such a positive influence on Yvonne. You're a good person, I hope Yvonne realizes & appreciates that! I watched a CNA documentary on the struggles of graduates in Taiwan struggling to find decent work upon graduation (Choaniki's recommendation) and it really sucks for the young graduates in Taiwan. 54% of young people in the work force between the ages of 21 to 35 have a degree at least and not all of them can go into 'graduate' jobs which command the kind of salary that would match their expectations. Given the massive oversupply of graduates in the work force, starting salaries are painfully low because companies are not motivated to pay more when the young graduates are just grateful to secure a starting position (even with very low pay) as they can at least see a path to success when so many are driven by debt and desperation to work as food delivery drivers. The documentary followed a graduate who was delivery food driver, he was riding on a moped in the pouring rain in Taipei making a few dollars with each delivery and that was just, like woah - is that what you went to university for? But if you go down the route where I went down, I don't think anyone cares if you had a degree or what you did at school. I tried to look at Peter's Linkedin to see if there's any information about his education and there was none - it simply isn't important or relevant to what he did. So whether or not he went to university is a moot point as it simply doesn't matter in his world today.
Hey Alex, thanks! The thing about Yvonne is that even though she doesn't make a lot, she's still doing highly skilled work that requires brainpower and ideas. The only issue is she doesn't have a PhD, because otherwise her pay would jump up a lot. In her industry, the PhD is a form of gatekeeping, where it's years of low pay before a 3-4x increase. I tried to convince her to get a PhD, since her boss has a PhD and makes so much more than her, but she didn't want to commit to 5-7 years of low pay in graduate school because "at least her current job gives her a 3% increase every year." Okay now that sounds ludicrous to us when 3% a year over 7 years amounts to at most a 30% increase, not counting inflation. But to a working class girl like Yvonne she's not willing to take a chance on more studies then roll the dice looking for a job afterwards even if it's a potential 200-300% pay increase. Someone like that is too scared of wasting time on a degree and being unemployed instead of accepting her current lot. So I had to work my soft skills to convince her to make incremental smaller changes instead, like applying for a job which pays 30% more than her current role and needs no extra training. Even then she was hesitant, saying her current role offers such good benefits compared to her previous jobs(the real working class jobs which are low skill). So I had to tone it down even further and say "looking is free", till she finally looked and saw there are better options out there.
DeleteOh I have been following the situation in China. It kinda reminds me of 2008 in the west except the people out of work are solely young people and not the old. The COVID lockdown really screwed with China's economy. Even Peking university graduates have to turn to food delivery. I heard what is even sadder is that people over 35 aren't even given interviews. I suppose the only recourse for these young jobless Chinese is to change countries, but even then that costs money and is out of reach for the people who need it most.
Y'know I don't really have a solution the problem of graduate unemployment. If 50% of everyone goes to university, but only the top 20% of jobs require a degree and pay enough for the student loans to be worth it, there will inevitably be losers. Unless we switch to a Norwegian or Swedish style economy where even a tour guide has a masters degree and has a high minimum wage, with university education being free and low risk. But then you have the people on the high end complaining they're underpaid, and will move to a more capitalistic country that rewards their ideas. As long as these people are a small minority the society won't collapse. But China will never go there, because they are too obsessed with being number 1 in the world. They will never risk making the people at the high end unhappy, because they wanna be leaders in science, technology, finance, and business. But the downside to this mindset is, what about everyone else? Society cannot function without bus drivers, waiters, cleaners, plumbers, electricians, farmers, bartenders, etc. There is never a perfect system where everyone is happy. In Norway the people in the middle and bottom are generally content, while people at the top are unhappy. While in China the people at the top are very happy while the bottom and middle are struggling. I think how Sg handles this issue is to at the bare minimum make homeownership accessible to all. So that even a poorly paid hawker or bus driver can say they are a proud owner of a hdb flat and feel some sense of accomplishment. In the US it seems the biggest complaint of the middle class is when they can't afford to buy and can only rent a home.
DeleteWell, interestingly enough, I am still writing my latest post and it is based on a conversation I had with my friend 'Rhys' who is a Welsh version of Yvonne. Look out for that, akan datang. And graduate unemployment is a huge problem worldwide, there is no simple solution to it. In China, you have graduates with masters degree doing working class jobs like food delivery, good grief. But I see you remember that my hiking guide in Norway had a masters degree in something like biology (or some related biomedical field) and I'm like, huh? What's the point? Sure he needed a few languages to speak with his tourists climbing that mountain but otherwise, that's a total waste of time and resources for someone like that to get a masters degree and not use it. Oh he got quite defensive about the purpose of education (hey, we had a lot of time to kill getting off that mountain) and I was rolling my eyes, as of course we're in Norway and his government subsidizes everything for him. But compare that to an only child in China whose parents are poor farmers, they've sold everything they own just to allow their only son to go to university in the hopes that his degree will give him a much brighter future, only for that son to do food delivery in Beijing for peanuts despite being a graduate. How terrible is that for not just the graduate but his parents. It is natural for such parents to want a better future for their kids but betting it all on a degree is a terrible idea.
DeleteOoh I wonder what happened to Rhys. I think you mentioned him before way way back. He was in a very similar situation as Yvonne making peanuts, but you clearly saw potential in him. When I discuss career stuff with Yvonne, because she's Christian, she once said to me "talking to you about this feels like a blessing from God. I feel like my life is gonna change." To me, an atheist, it's just an unfortunate side effect of capitalism that working class kids don't have the social network to teach them how to land a white collar job, that when they do get some advice they think it's their lucky day. But also, its hard for them to disclose their financial status and that they need help from someone else who isn't struggling. Yvonne never told anyone in the friend group about her money problems until she lost her phone in an Uber I called, and I spent my entire Sunday tracking it down. Afterwards she told me if I didn't find the phone she couldn't afford a new one because she lives paycheck to paycheck and came from a working class family. If she hadn't told me that, I wouldn't have tried to give her career advice. I suppose her losing her phone was a blessing in disguise? One interesting thing I found out is that although it's normal for me to ask people what their parents do and for me to reveal what mine do, Yvonne told me where's she's from, casual friends have no idea what each other's parents do. And she said the reason for it is that it's rude to ask in case the parent is an unemployed drug addict or in prison. Well, regardless of pride, if people don't have more information, they can't help.
DeleteAs for that Norwegian hiking guide, yup the Norway government is spending money to educate people not to do a specific job, but just to keep them happy. It's no different than someone paying for gymnastics lessons who will never compete in the Olympics or a national competition. However, instead it's the Norwegian government paying for years of full-time study instead of a few hours a week of lessons. Although I do applaud the ambition of working class kids and parents in China, inevitably there will be losers because there aren't enough jobs for all the students going to university. But I don't think people care because the life-changing reward seems worth the risk. It's basically a white collar version of squid game. Singapore avoids this by limiting public university places to 30% of the cohort, but even then they're under voter pressure to increase that number, and somehow the voters aren't thinking how it will affect the graduate unemployment or underemployment rate.
Oh Rhys is a different Welsh friend whom I've never discussed before - I did talk about getting another working class Welsh friend into finance but he never had the guts to step out of his comfort zone. He's still working in food production and that's a very working class job - you know, all that lovely food that appears in your local supermarket from cakes to bread to muffins, it all comes out of a factory somewhere local and he is working on the production line (that's not even supply chain management, he's lower down the food chain) and I'm like, you're too smart to do a job like that and that's where he still is now. But with Rhys, he used to do sales for a high-end luxury clothing company before the Pandemic. - that business died during the pandemic as people weren't shopping for luxury clothing then (lockdowns, where are you gonna go all dressed up?) so I thought, okay you have experience doing luxury sales, go back to that. But no, he took a job in the F&B industry where he is paid by the hour and he's still doing that today - I'm like, whaaaaaat? You can bring a horse to water and all that, in my post I'll explain why I can't help Rhys - even if I did manage to get a job for Choaniki in finance, but he's facing the really steep learning curve in a hostile and unsupportive environment. Such a transition is bloody difficult and that's why someone like Rhys can be tempted to take a step back, accept an 'easier' job for less money. Rhys came to me only this year and I'm like, I must have known you for like 12 years, why didn't you ask for help sooner? Thus that's why I can see the similarity with Yvonne - if Rhys had told me that he was going to accept a job in F&B (that would tantamount to giving up on any concept of a career), I would have tried to talk him out of it. But no, he went to do it anyway then complained about it to me years later. What did he expect me to do at this stage to fix that situation?
DeleteThe Singaporean government has seen what's happening in China and other places, but what has happened of course is that if their children cannot make it into a public university, they will simply pay a lot of money to send their kids to a private university, a degree mill for a piece of qualification not worth the paper it is printed on. But working class people are too stupid, they say stupid things like, "but without a degree, you won't even be considered for the job as you cannot get past HR as they will not even consider non-graduates for the job". But my point is if you have a degree from Mickey Mouse university vs an NUS graduate, you simply don't stand a chance so the fact that you invested so much time, money and effort on your Mickey Mouse university degree only to be trampled over by the NUS graduate every single time is a reality you are going to have to face when you enter the work force. My response to that is to seek an employer who is a lot more sensible (and fucking leave Singapore if you have to find a reasonable employer for crying out aloud) when it comes to paper qualifications rather than waste your parents' hard earned money on a Mickey Mouse degree.
I just had an epiphany. Those who can do the job don't need some university certificate telling them they are qualified to do it!
DeleteNow I know @LIFT has been mentioning this on his blog ad-infinitum. But knowing and truly understanding are 2 different things.
Just less than 1 hour ago I was having dinner with a personal finance blogger Dawn Cher aka SG Budget Babe. So her full-time job is not related to finance but she sells pre-employment screening (due diligence) services to corporate HR.
We connected on LinkedIn and when she read my (partial) employment background she saw that I switched over from the healthcare to financial services industry and she was naturally curious as to: 1) How I got the job 2) How did the company decide I was suitable for the position.
So I told her the thing is that you don't need a relevant degree to go into financial services, and provided her with some examples. I also showed her a counter-example (my elder brother) that just because you are super smart and have a finance background does not mean you are cutout for the job.
Just to emphasise how difficult (or challenging) my job is. Just over this weekend I attended a personal finance event for retail market. Since this is a free event, @LIFT likened it to 'going into the rubbish dump and hoping to find something of value'.
Yet I managed to connect with 7-8 director or founder level people at this event and also learnt many financial concepts and gain fintech or platform knowledge in the meantime. Truly 3 birds with 1 stone.
I don't think any university course could have prepared one for such a task there is no script or strategy to approach it. Either you improvise or you come away empty handed.
Comfort zone is an accurate word! It's not just working class people, anyone can be too afraid to make a change because they don't want to be uncomfortable in an unknown environment. When you say sales in a high-end luxury clothing company, do you mean a person working in a Burberry store? I have a feeling that maybe Rhys' savings dried up during the pandemic so he was desperate for any job and took one in FnB. During the tech layoffs some workers couldn't land another tech role and have been unemployed since November. I've also given up big opportunities before without telling anyone, but that's because I didn't grow up in an emotionally supportive environment where there was someone interested in my problems. Yvonne is in the same boat, she showed me the very abusive things her dad says to her. No wonder she has such low self-esteem. I know she doesn't need to be rich, or even be a homeowner, but at bare minimum she just wants to make enough to pay rent to live alone, and have some savings for emergencies.
DeleteAlso, it is very hard to convince Yvonne to make changes, because she'll make so many excuses about why she doesn't like a certain change, or that maybe the change will lead to something worse. And I had to say to her "look, it sounds like you really don't want to make big changes, or any change for that matter. But to change your life situation, YOU have to change your habits and lifestyle too. There's no such thing as a free lunch. Also the status quo just isn't working. If you want a different life situation, you will have to give up some things in order to gain others." Alex, me and you understand the concept of sacrificing one thing now in order for a big payout in the future, and that's why we make a lot of money compared to the average joe. But it's a very difficult concept for young people to grasp. Also, in my new role I sometimes have to make a decision between doing something easier that benefits us in the short term because it's done faster, or make a time investment attempting something more complicated that will pay off later when we're ahead of our competitors. Well I'm CTO so I do have to make executive decisions regarding the long and short term direction of the technology, but nobody teaches this skill in school. It sounds like Rhys and Yvonne are taking the short term option of entering a job with a low barrier of entry even if its less payout. But me and Yvonne did have a long conversation about "short game vs. long game", and she admitted she's been playing the short game her entire life because there was just no money to invest long term, though she will try to think a little more long term from now on.
Hi Amanda, a really short reply for now: when I say high end, I mean starting price approx US$3000 per item, then it can go into 5-figures. That makes Burberry look cheap in comparison. It's the equivalent of working in a car showroom - you're still doing sales and facing customers, but the ticket price per item is so high that even if you just sold a few cars a month, then the commission is enough to add up to a handsome sum.
DeleteI don't know if the people working in a Burberry shop actually get any commission per item sold, but I doubt they do because the customers are flocking to the shop already because the brand is so well known. People turn up at a Burberry store because they are already fans of the brand screaming, "take my money already!" In those circumstances, you don't need to incentivize the staff to sell to customers who are queueing up to spend money. Whereas for what Rhys did in the ultra-luxury high end clothing business, the brand was only known for being crazy expensive and you wear it because poor people cannot afford it and it's not like it was that nice (I saw his wares but didn't buy, it was not good value for money). Such is the nature of high end luxury sales, Rhys needed to use his social skills to persuade the client to spend that kind of money whereas those skills are not required of your typical shop assistant on the shop floor in a Burberry (or other luxury brands) store that already has a very strong brand identity (achieved through decades of effective marketing).
DeleteOh wow then this must've been very high end, sorta like trying to persuade people to buy a ferrari or lamborghini. It sounds like the type of place where the prices aren't even listed. I definitely don't shop there. Yeah Burberry's more upper middle class than extremely high end. I've seen some Burberry items go up to $3000, but it's not the minimum.
DeleteRegarding Mickey Mouse degrees, I guess only the poor would fall for it because to them certifications are pretty much commoditized, a CDL is the same no matter where you got your training or which test center you sat at. So the working class then extrapolate that logic to degrees as well. However unlike CDLs, degrees are not commodities at all. A degree from Oxbridge is going to be valued a lot more than a degree from London Metropolitan University because it's not like a CDL certification where anyone who signs up can sit the course. Then these working class people who think a degree from NUS and a private university are the same are the ones who are most disappointed later on when the degree isn't enough to get the job.
But even then I think where you get your degree from in relation to jobs is correlation or at best a minor causation. I'm quite happy with my new hire even though he went to a low ranked university. He has the necessary hard and soft skills for the job. However, I'm not happy with my friend the undergrad CS major at my old university, who thinks he should be entitled to a job with no hard or soft skills just because he attends a university with a < 10% acceptance rate. As if getting into an elite school is enough. He even asked me how should he network with people to get a job, and I said "find an interesting project you're passionate about, work on it, then tell other people about it. If they find your project interesting, they'll ask to work with you." But he didn't like that answer, he doesn't seem to grasp the concept of "what can you do for me?" in networking. At this point I don't even care where someone went to school to hire them, if they can pass my technical interview without sounding like an arrogant entitled asshole (being nice is so important), we're good. But to go from a resume in a pile of resumes to being given an interview, one must find a way to stand out in a sea of generic resumes. Yeah maybe an elite school name can get you to the interview stage, but it won't help you any further than that.
Oh he worked for a designer who would have celebrity clients - so this designer would show up and ask you, what would you like? Shirts? Suits? Special occasion and then create something totally bespoke for you using the best of the best. The kind of people who would splash out $3000 per item under those circumstances are very few but when Rhys did find a client, he earned some nice commissions of course but gosh, the number of people lining up for that designer's service was short. After all, even if you wanted a bespoke suit, prices can start at around £500 to £600 a suit - you don't need to go up to the thousands but that's what Rhys dealt with. He worked in that field for a while and I thought, okay, he knew what he was doing then the pandemic hit and well, you know the rest of that sorry story.
DeleteAnyway I'm now in an industry where it's all about your connections, it's got nothing to do with your degree. I recently had a woman contact me - I met her for a meeting in Dubai last November when she was working for a different company. She had left that company and set up her own company, she then got back in touch with me as I had left her with such a good impression (she's French and I dealt with her in fluent French) that she was like, hey I've got my new company, let's see if we can do something together Alex. Did she ask me, "what university did you go to? What degree do you have?" Absolutely not, we simply had a chat over lunch and I charmed her enough to make such a good impression, she remembers me 8 months later. Now that goes beyond being able to speak French, it was all about leaving people with a good impression - they don't teach you that at university, these are social skills.
@LIFT, I have been building up my network like mad these past few months. Within 3 month I have almost tripled it (started with 30 included clearing dead weight) now it is almost up to 90.
DeleteI am reached out to some people offline including one lady from a family office. Hope when meet her end of this month she will decide to connect with me on LinkedIn.
Oh so Rhys works in Haute Coutoure in the sales department. Yup that skillset would definitely translate well into finance where clients are also persuaded to buy very expensive products. Actually it's even more niche than finance so he'd have more clients if he switched industries. So is Rhys asking your help now to find a job? I presume I'll hear more about that in the next article.
DeleteOh that's great you left such a good impression that that woman contacted you to work with her and her new company. Lol asking what university, what degree, and what GPA would be so Singaporean to ask. I heard the French really love their language that when they see a foreigner speak it with great proficiency they instantly like them more.
By the way, I also had a recent networking moment. I'm in Boston to visit a friend who just started a job at MIT, and she invited me to a dinner party with her work friends. I wasn't even thinking of networking at all, I just wanted to get to know her friends, but I explained what I was doing in my new job and a guy said he works on something similar and showed me some tricks he was using to make the algorithm run better, and now I have 3 new things to try at work tomorrow. Nobody even asked me where I went to school either, they did ask me where I was from because it was a very international dinner party with multiple nationalities. I remember I once used a resume check service to apply to quant jobs, and the person said it's good to put some interests outside of work like sports or other hobbies. I kinda get why, if you can't demonstrate you function well in a social setting, then that implies you're a SWOT with no social skills. Maybe in Singapore they don't care, but in the West one is heavily penalized for a lack of social skills, and less penalized for not going to the right university or having low grades.
Rhys did ask me for help and I said no, sorry. With Choaniki, at least the angle was clear: that company had no one in Far East Asia and he was their guy for Asia. But with Rhys, I don't have an angle for him. I managed to help Choaniki get a job in finance but there's just no way I can do that for Rhys. I think your dinner party demonstrates the difference between how things function in the West and how things are in Singapore. This just makes me glad that I am no longer in Singapore and can thrive in the West.
Delete@Amanda, if there is one takeaway from LIFT's blog I can say is that you can lead a horse to water but not force it to drink.
DeleteI now know not to provide unsolicited advice or help to anyone.
If I were you (and im not saying you should do it) I would let Yvonne be. You can't help her. Let her 'God' help her then.
I presume Rhys is a British guy who is probably monolingual, so he wouldn't stand out in a sea of other British guys trying to get into finance. Oh I love the social functions in the west, in Asia they were kinda cringe when companies had corporate social events. Also I'm going to an A.I conference in san Francisco next month (company is paying for the trip). More networking to do. If I was an Asian SWOT, I just wouldn't function well at any social events and make zero connections. Maybe Asians don't see it as important as keeping your nose to the grindstone and working on the technical stuff, but it's far more productive for someone to bring up something you missed than to try to do everything on your own. There's a bigger emphasis on team work in the west than in the east.
DeleteI also found out my friend secured a professor job at one of Sg's best universities(NUS or NTU, I won't say which). I kinda wonder, since she lived in the west for close to 5 years, is she going to bring that culture back with her to NUS/NTU? But my friend, despite being Singaporean, is extremely social and an extrovert who is very open with strangers. She just randomly had the idea to make a dinner party just 3 days ago. I knew her from undergrad, so she was never an Asian SWOT type who was obsessed with studying and nothing else. It was always dinner parties or movie nights, and working on cool projects. I think she'd be a joy to have as a prof in Sg, her classes would be very fun and creativity focused.
Rhys is totally fluent in Welsh, but that's a totally useless language in the world of finance.
DeleteMind you, I am also fluent in Welsh, but I never get to use that at work: for me, I primarily use French and Spanish, then also a little Mandarin and German.
DeleteY'know Choaniki, I was thinking that even if a real angel came down from heaven dressed with a halo and wings and tried to talk my friend Yvonne, she'd probably sooner doubt the angel is real instead of following the angel's white collar career advice. Because the angel's gonna have some harsh criticisms and demand a lot of changes. Self-change is so hard to achieve because it's a bitter pill to swallow.
Delete@Amanda, self-change is very difficult for most people because they are closed minded. To effect self-change, self-awareness is first needed. The person in question need to be aware that they are going down the wrong path. The after recognising the fact that they are wrong, the person needs to stop doing that same thing and change course. This usually mean they need to ask an expert for help. Most people's ego won't allow them to ask for help. Then after receiving that valuable advice that person has to finally take action to carry out the change. All these are almost next to impossible for the average person to carry out. Much easier to bitch and moan instead of taking accountability and take action to change their course in life.
DeleteYeah a lot of people want to believe in magic or religion because they want to believe the world has to change for them and not the other way around. I used to have terrible soft skills and fucked up my Stanford interview as a result, even if my resume on paper was enough to get me an interview(only 10% of gradschool applicants get one). Actually I started commenting on this blog not long after that when the pandemic started and I was bored at home, and over time have developed and practiced social skills so much I can at least function at social settings instead of being scared to talk to people. Tomorrow I'm going to Microsoft's Boston HQ because my friend wants to introduce me to another friend interning there. She also offered me a spare desk in her office so I can work my remote job with reliable wifi while I'm here. I could never imagine just being really good at talking to people at social events can lead to these career benefits only a few short years ago. Previously I used to hate people not good at the science who used charisma to get jobs because they got ahead of me. What I should've done was learn those skills from them sooner instead of being pissed and complaining the world is unfair
Delete@Amanda, actually @LIFT has been my informal career coach (all FOC) for over 6 years.
DeletePeople that come here with a closed mind just post hate mail (which is prompted deleted) and go back with their lives.
It is so much easier to hate a successful person than it is to take personal accountability and ask for help.