Mick Vaught talks about attracting, interviewing, hiring, developing and retaining employees

Yeah, time passes. So many things get in the way. We seem to be busy, right?

Yeah. And there's another one in the same direction. Life is what happens when you're planning other things.

Maybe if you give everybody a bit of an idea of your background from in the industry and education, what you've been doing for the last 45,50 years. Oh,

That German example is a perfect one. It's called Metal Shaft. And it's a path we've been so focused in America for the last 50 years on. Everybody's got to get a degree. And the statistics don't bear it out. Over time now, when we were talking getting ready for this, you're talking about five, six years to get a degree and half the people drop out and don't get the degree. And like my daughter, when she went to university, mother and father went, you know, she was probably embarrassed, didn't want us anywhere near, but she went and registered and they would only let her take three classes. And she comes back to her interfering father and says, OK, what do you mean three? So the two of us went up to the registration area and I said, this student wants to take five classes. You're only allowing her to take three. What's the deal? He said, well, our system doesn't allow us to register more than three classes to a student.

I said, what you're doing is you're programming a five-year degree right away.

I'm not going to pay for that. How do we get her to get more classes? Now, she graduated in four years in honors, didn't have a hardship at all. She had a job full time. But not everybody has that kind of a interfering parent, if you will. Wait a second. This isn't this isn't valid. And I think that's been happening in your recent experience and working with the school systems and STEM learning, which is really taking off now.

That was interesting. I wrote a... a piece the week before you did on lifelong learning relative to interviewing and hiring people. And it was kind of making a backhanded smack to you fill out a resume. The prospective employer looks at your credentials, checks your references, then arranges an interview, see if you fit culturally, you're a nice person, communicate well. But none of that touches on the skills that are required for doing the job. And to go further, I'm not sure that the person who's doing the interviewing knows what the skills are to do the job either.

Boy, oh boy, how do we get past that point? It's this whole education thing. My granddaughter did her undergraduate in three years, too. It's very workable. To your point on education, when I took my degree in the 1700s, it was $500 a year.

My grandson, he's a senior in high school, and he's starting to look at schools, and he's fining $40,000 to $50,000 a year.

ludicrous, Mick.

That's correct.

Yeah, what a statement that is.

I'm no longer being in a nine to five, eight to six, whatever job where you get trapped in things. You get trapped in routines. You get trapped in processes. Continuous improvement, as you know, is a very difficult thing to maintain and to keep excitement under. We've got a generation of baby boomers that you and I belong to that is. Our life expectancy is much longer than our parents and our grandparents. So rather than, you know, my grandfather was essentially spent physically when he was in his 50s. My father's 60s. I'm in my 70s. And I don't consider myself spent. Many people do, but not me. And we haven't transitioned. No. The younger generation. So we're risk averse. We're status quo protectors. We have our old fashioned command and control approach to life. And the younger generations, the Zs, the Alphas, the Xs, the younger millennials, they don't have anything to do with that.

And that's what takes me to that. You know, I mentioned Jack Hawkins at Troy University. Yeah. Saying that, you know, that people coming into university are likely in critical thinking, analytical skills, communication skills. And as I said to you, he's really concerned about leadership skills. But the chief technology officer, that function didn't exist 10 years ago.

And so now we've got data analytics, we've got artificial intelligence, we've got telematics, we've got sensors and all the equipment to know what the heck the condition is. We're going to have them in our bodies.

And at that rate of change, schooling, education, teaching is not keeping up.

Yeah. And, you know, years ago in South America, I was rather shocked that every five years, senior management was given a year sabbatical.

They could go anywhere they wanted, do anything they wanted, as long as they were in school. It didn't have to have anything to do with their job. They wanted them in the school to recalibrate their thinking pattern.

Five years. 20 years ago might have been an appropriate time. I'm not sure it's two or three years now.

Yeah. Well, Apple's, the iPhone has only been around, I don't know,10,12 years.

It's ubiquitous. It's everywhere. There's a wonderful YouTube called Look Up. It only takes three or four minutes. And it's a man walking down the street looking at his phone. And he, you know, he misses everything. And in this one particular case, he stops at the corner and he's lost. He's looking at kind of a mapping package. It's in Britain. And a woman comes across the street to him and he asks her. And everything goes on. And what happens is he ends up marrying her, has children, has a life. And then they go back to that walking down the street with his phone. And the girl crosses the street, the woman crosses the street right in front of him, but he doesn't look up. And he missed that opportunity altogether.

It's a really hard smack in the face about you when you're out in Charlotte. Look, there's people. Yeah, yeah.

They figure it out, don't they? They

I used to have, as you remember, a classroom that had tables, round tables, and there were four to six people at a table. And I used to do an exercise. Jay Paradis from Brandeis did this to me. And he was a lawyer and had a master's from Harvard or Yale. He was from both of those schools, different degrees. And you take the child's, a youngster's jigsaw puzzle that has maybe 10 pieces. So they're big pieces.

on each table a package. And we have to put this thing together. They're not allowed to talk. And there's no instruction. Similar situation. So we have five or six tables. Everybody's going to do one of these exercises. And we're going to time it. And we don't tell them that one of the pieces for their puzzle is missing.

And one of the pieces in the box that they have is from another table.

So they start and they, you know, they figure out how to do this thing on the table, again, collaboratively, but no communication. And then they figure it out and they start wandering around to the different tables and they can't talk. So they just have to, you know, sign language, et cetera. And they get it all done and we time it and we put it up. Then we change it. We tell them what the object is. We tell them what the impediment is. And we're going to time you.

And the time drops by over 80%. Wow. And the message I'm trying to get across in the room is clarity of instruction.

If there's a failure of execution, more often than not, it's a failure in communication.

Indeed. It blows my mind. In America, I think the statistic is it's 95% of the companies fail to implement their strategy. Indeed. And the number one reason is lack of understanding, which is communication. Teaching, learning, educating is all about communication.

And those young people are thirsty. I always say, you know, younger people learn like sponges. Older people are selective about what we want to learn.

Yeah, it's kind of tough in our industry. In your evolution from the early days after school to when you left the private industry, from a teaching point of view, it was pretty predictable what we did, wasn't it?

Yeah, it really does.

It is. My daughter's a teacher and she teaches grade seven English.

And she has six classes a day of grade seven English. 197 kids or something. So it's 30. to 35 people a class. There we go. And now as a teacher, think about that. I get to school and I start a class at nine o 'clock and at five o 'clock when I leave, I've completed six of them. They're identical. The only variation is the developmental levels of the students in the class.

Now, how the devil do I keep my mind fresh teaching? that same material for that length of time.

I taught education at university for six years, teaching people how to teach. And in all of the classes, and I think what you're referring to in every class I've ever been in, and it's kind of cute. I wrote a blog maybe a month ago called The Sage on the Stage. Oh, yeah. The teacher in front of the room. Right. But I would always ask, OK, I'm going to give you some questions. I want definitions. What's the definition of ignorance? And I wait and people don't read. This is early in the class, you know, and people don't know who the heck I am or what this is or what are we? What am I? What's ignorance? And so they fumble around and they get it. So we give them one. And the definition of ignorance, of course, is not knowing what to do.

And then I say, OK. That's cool. What's the definition of stupidity? Now, there's a couple of folks in the room, by which point they're tracking. And stupidity is knowing what to do, but not doing it. And then the third piece, of course, is insanity. And there's an attribution problem to that. I think it truly was Einstein. A lot of people say it was Mark Twain. And insanity has continued to do what you always done, expecting different results. So then I look at the classroom and I said, OK, fine. You're not going to be ignorant at the end of this class because I'm going to tell you what to do. So I'm going to give you a choice, each of you, to be stupid or insane. And looking around and listening to you talk, I don't think you're going to be living in a padded room. So how many of you are going to consider yourself stupid when you leave here knowing what to do and not doing it?

And that's the starting point where I'm, you know, and I'm a pain in the butt in the front of the room, as you'll remember.

I always love that. But it's, you know, it's the, there's a professor at MIT who teaches a class called The Secret of Life. It's mandatory for anybody to get a degree out of MIT. I think his name is Eric Lauder. He was the government employee who, was in charge of the project to map the DNA chain. Guy's brilliant. But he also happens to be a heck of a teacher. So this class that he puts on, there's three cameras in there. Everything's recorded. It's put up on the internet. There's people can take this class all around the world for free, get no university credit, but they get the learning. They have the same tests, the same TAs are evaluating the tests, et cetera, et cetera. You go to MIT, it's at least 50 grand a year for education. This is free. And he's one of the best teachers in the world. And I think you're going to start seeing that with a combination of virtual learning, classroom learning.

Where the superstar opera singer, there's a superstar teacher. And those folks are going to be worth their weight in gold.

I'd say the enterprise of the university, the enterprise of the business of education, it's going to take a different twist.

One of the interesting byproducts of COVID, and there's been many, and I tend to look at them as being extremely positive because we were in a microcosm and forced into a different view on many things. But one of the things in COVID was that parents became much more aware of what their children were learning.

And they were horrified. They didn't know what was going on. Now that children are back to school, the parents aren't letting it go like they did previously. So they're much more vociferous at school board meetings. They're much more vociferous in questioning and parent-teacher meetings, etc. Yes,

And the teaching community doesn't seem to be very happy with that. They don't like oversight. They don't like somebody telling them that this is not a good deal. In Hawaii, where I am, it's very distressing. We have the lowest paid teachers in the country. And like you said a little bit ago, a lot of the teachers were leaving.

And the gig economy, Uber, a lot of teachers, and I know several, drove for Uber after school until dinner.

You know, it's ludicrous. The state government finally said, OK, fine, we're going to give you a bump. And all of a sudden, a lot of teachers came back. That's that's cool. But we I don't know that

what it is that our children should learn. And I don't know who's doing that. You mentioned when you got out of university, you had to do a budget. Well, I never had any of that stuff in school. Understanding leases or contracts or. getting a mortgage or we don't get any of that. Why isn't that in the school learning period up to high school? If 50% of the people do not get a degree and that's a high number, it should be higher than that. When they leave high school, they better have life skills. It's not just reading, writing, arithmetic. It's living skills too. Planning for a pension, planning for healthcare, planning for... buying a car or a mortgage. It's a very different world. And we aren't helping anybody. Yeah,

One beautiful example of that, Mick, is the Khan Academy. Millions of people. He started with preschool to graduating from high school. Indeed. And, you know, this is an interesting story. He went to New York City as a man working on Wall Street and his nieces were having trouble at school and his sisters were saying, can you help? So he's put stuff onto a video and that's morphed now the tens of millions of students. My grandkids, my daughter, a teacher in the summer when they're out of school, they're taking Khan Academy classes. It's to supplement their learning, to overcome gaps, et cetera. But the other thing that it leads to is we need it. a better public-private combination. Business has to engage more earlier with the schools to make sure that they know what's coming out and schools know what's expected.

Guidance counselors in high school, I never, we didn't have them in my day, but that's a very beneficial and meaningful job function at a school for a child, for a parent.

You know, I came out into the workforce in 1968, and it was a very tough market. I wanted to work for IBM. IBM wasn't hiring. And one of our neighbors ran a company, and he offered, and I accepted. He gave me three or four days of testing in his HR department. I'd be a really good farmer, by the way. But these things are pretty good now, much better than they used to be. But in the course of this, I went and got a job and did work. And I skied. And my mother got a phone call from the parent of one of my students at McGill. And, you know, didn't he take math physics? Yes. That's how I got into this industry.

So today, I haven't got any idea how you go, but I've just received a resume from one of our friends for her grandson to get into the workforce. And it forced me to think about, wait a second, what do they do now? How do you work?

not funny.

is. I'm not berating the fact that you were laughing about it, but holy crap. No, it is not. It's a serious issue.

Excellent paper, man.

You bring up a beautiful point. So that's three generations of people, grandparents, parents, and children. The grandparents' view of the child's education that their parent is choosing doesn't fit our norm, doesn't fit our model. So we're suspicious of it. We're skeptical of it. We don't interfere. We're not allowed to interfere. So that's fine. But look what happened. So my great, my grandmother raised me for the first roughly four years of my life because my parents both worked. Well, she got a master's and she taught her whole work life and started in a one room schoolhouse. But she could speak Latin, speak Greek. And I wasn't much of a fan of school. My mother was the vice principal of the school that I went to, and so she chose all my teachers. I couldn't get away with nothing. And then I go to high school, and I'm free. My mother is free. Here we go. So here comes grade nine. I'll never forget it.

I had a Latin teacher from England on an exchange. Miss Morgan was her name. She's since passed, so I'm okay with this. I took geometry for the first time. And both those classes. The first semester we had three. I got 38% because I refuse to memorize. I either learn it or I'm not interested.

Well, we had an interesting thing between my three generations, my grandmother, my parents, and me. In the city, it was called work. In the country, it was play. We had a country place about an hour out of town. Well, I lost my privileges to the country place, and I was dropped in with my grandmother every weekend.

And I ended the year with an average of 76. So she obviously did a good job. But yes, what what she did to me on learning was you don't have a choice about growing as a person, about increasing your understanding of things. You haven't got a choice. Now, you can choose not to, but that stops. your development as an individual. And is that what you want? That, you know, your best year of your life is when you're 14. And from that point on, you're there or going down. And how are you going to be relating your life skills to your children if you happen to have children? You have a responsibility here to continue learning, which is why we call these series Lifelong Learning. I love it. Yep. I love it. They leave school and they say, that's it. I'm done. I don't need to learn anymore. How wrong is it, particularly today, at the rate of change? It's just amazing.

Drinking from a fire hose. It's absolutely amazing. I'm so pleased, Mick, that you're being involved with this and sharing your wisdom with the audience. We're trying to create a platform where people can go and... get questions answered. And your mention of Germany versus here and the transition from India and China and how we're competing in a world now, everything is helter-skelter. So thank you so much. I hope the audience gets as much benefit out of this as I do.

Well, thank you, Mick. And thank everybody for listening to this lifelong learning session. I look forward to another one in the near future with all of you. Aloha. Thank you for listening to our podcast. We appreciate your support. Should you have any thoughts or comments, please don't hesitate to contact us at www. learningwithoutscars. com. The time is now. Mahalo.