Noah D. Arney

Tag: training

  • Changing Employee Cohorts and Retention

    Originally two twitter threads: thread 1 thread 2.

    It took everyone a bit of time to notice this year, but the labour market shortage is basically being driven by mass retirements over the last two years, just not where you think (is the cultural moment for a Madisynn MCU reference past? Probably). Employment stats time. All of this is some back of the napkin calculations from Stats Can’s info on people accessing retirement benefits and leaving or entering the workforce.

    We know people have been pushing retirements a bit later, and recent stats back this up. In the last 9 years, as this has been happening there’s been an average of about 100K new retirees under 65 in Canada. It took a dive during the pandemic of 8% and 10%. So more people retiring a year or two or five later than they used to. As with every other economic shock, the pandemic made more people avoid early retirement a little. So fewer people retiring under 65.

    What you might not know though is that the number of people retiring at 65 went up during the pandemic, up 5.4% for men and 6.6% for women. Interesting, yes? So during the pandemic fewer people retired early, but more retired at the standard age.

    But we also have stats for those who stayed in the workforce well past standard retirement age. For those still working at 70 or above the retirement numbers during the pandemic jumped over 300% for men and over 900% for women. It’s not quite as drastic for the 66-69 group, but it’s still significantly increased. So all those people who delayed retirement before the pandemic decided this was the right time to retire.

    The question everyone was asking as this labour market tightening happened was: where are the workers? Well the people who were working well past retirement age have now retired. And that might not seem like a lot, but it’s about an extra 100 thousand people (over 65) leaving the workforce over the last last two years than was expected, and that’s not counting the over 5,000 people in the 20-65 age group who died in Canada from COVID.

    So the Baby Boomers are retiring, as was foretold. We expected this. But, even more impactful, the incoming age cohorts are shrinking, the current group of teens is 20% smaller than the current group of new professionals. The preparing for retirement cohort is the same size as the new professionals cohort, so the labour shortage isn’t going to go away any time soon, because the group of replacement workers coming up isn’t big enough to make an impact.

    What does this mean for retention then? Employers need to adapt, because young people have something they haven’t had since before 2006: options.

    What was a shortage in manufacturing, construction, and retail in 2018 has now hit health care and professional roles, and it will just keep going. I’ve been thinking a lot about this with the discussion regarding work-from-home, return-to-work, quiet quitting / work to rule, skills gaps, and the labour shortage.

    If you want your employees to go above and beyond you need to offer one of these things:

    1. intrinsic rewards: motivates staff to want to do more, like work that is impactful or fulfilling or helps them grow and develop in the ways they want to.
    2. extrinsic rewards: pay for the extra time and effort either through overtime, bonuses, or other tangible rewards.
    3. career development: people will do more for you if their positions are secure or if they have a path to promotion.

    Once upon a time these three were considered standard in a professional role, but over time as the number of professional roles have grown, they’ve decreased. That probably was because of labour oversupply. Retirement age got later and more people finished university so the total # of people wanting professional jobs went up much faster than the number of jobs. But that started shifting about 4 years ago, and rapidly in the last year.

    The retirement bump that was promised in 2000 didn’t materialize until right before the 2008 recession, so the cohort ready to move into those jobs didn’t get them as they were cut. But the seeds of the labour shortage were there. 2012 saw an outlier level retirement group. After that things cooled off for a few years, then in 2015 they started picking up steam again, and by 2018 statisticians could see that there was going to be a labour shortage. COVID19 layoffs obscured it for a while, but now that those layoffs are over we can see the result.

    The labour shortage that was expected in 2000 didn’t happen, the one in ’06 was offset by the recession in ’08, and the delayed cohort of young people was more than enough to cover what should have been a shock to the system in ’12. But demographics keep marching on.

    We’ve expected it 22 years, and now it’s here, and that’s a very good thing for young people (if inflation and housing prices don’t destroy the gains). Employers, look at those 3 things, if you don’t offer them, then your employees will get snatched up by an employer who does.

  • Education and Weight Lifting

    There is a huge difference between training and education.

    There is nothing wrong with job or skills training. But, both have the same limitations: they are, by necessity, narrow and tightly defined. We must not allow “education” to be taken by either of these cul de sacs. 

    Training is necessary but limited. It focuses on a narrow concept and teaches that. In the next generation job training will be only partly useful. A person who needs to change jobs five times can’t do a two year training course every time. Which brings us to education.

    What is the purpose of education?

    Education teaches to expand the mind and allow it to become flexible. It must be a way of broadening horizons, introducing new ideas, and helping people learn to be adaptable. It supports training in that if that person has been taught how to learn quickly, and how to be flexible then they could learn each new skill set in a fraction of the time, and perhaps with only a minimal amount of skill training as opposed to one to two years. Some people are innately good at this, but not everyone is, and that’s why formalized education exists.

    Now there are many factors that affect this. I don’t plan on hashing out what education is here because others have done it much better, and in much greater depth than I ever could (I was going to give links, but honestly there’s been so much written about the history and purpose of education that I can’t even summarize it here, and that’s ignoring everything before 1960 (aka most of history)).

    Dr. Steven Conn, a professor of History at Ohio State University, has a very thought provoking article in The Chronicle of Higher Education called “The Rise of the Helicopter Teacher“. It discusses the increase in teachers in American post secondary institutions making their classes easier for students. I’m not going to debate whether or not he’s correct, though I feel that this is exactly what Côté & Allahar feared was coming to Canada).

    Dr. Conn compares his take on grade inflation and decreasing academic standards as being similar to helicopter parents.

    Either way, like those parents who swaddle their kids in bubble wrap before letting them use the slides, too many faculty members now are scared to watch their students struggle and fail. Bad for their self-esteem, worse for my annual evaluation from my department chair.

    Having worked as a teacher in both a suburban and rural high school and having worked for eight years in post secondary student affairs I feel that I have a unique perspective on helicopter parents. In the high schools I worked in I had fairly frequent encounters with helicopter parents and I have to say that although I can understand that at the extreme end of the spectrum that would make it difficult to do my job properly, I think that for the majority of parents out there it’s just trying to help.

    But Dr. Conn does have a bit of a point here. Although the helicopter parent is trying to help, what they’re actually doing is making it harder for their students in the long run. It is like the student who has someone else complete an assignment for them, yes it technically checked off the box for completing that assignment, but they didn’t learn anything from it. And the point of education is not to get through and get a credential, the point is to learn, grow, and expand your horizons.

    Education, and a liberal arts education in particular, is just as useful as going to the gym. Lifting weights doesn’t prepare me for my job. Running doesn’t help with my career. Neither helps me with what I do for fun (mostly cooking, reading, and computers). But it improves my way of life by increasing my strength, helping keep me healthy, etc. Education strengthens your brain, it keeps it healthy, it makes your ability to learn more flexible.

    This brings up the problem of standardized tests. The problem with standardized testing is that it doesn’t allow you to judge learning, only content retention. It doesn’t look at complex thinking. It assesses the method of education but not the purpose of education. It’s like assessing health by how much you can bench press.

    We are now in a world where almost everyone is carrying a dictionary, encyclopedia, and calculator in their pockets. Why then is content memorization the key. Basic concepts are important, but beyond that the ability to understand, dispute, and analyze information is more important than memorization. Frameworks become more important as you need a general idea of what content fits where but, for example, knowing the exact year of a battle is less helpful than knowing the order of key battles and decade.

    Content should be used as a way of building skills and a way of gaining a general gist of an area but there is no reason to keep that content after it’s done its job.

    The point isn’t weightlifting, weightlifting is a means to an end. The point is overall health.