The gap between businesses and education is widening.
And it won’t get any better.
When I wrote “MBA Disrupted”, I reminisced about the global MBA programs in the introduction.
Harvard, Cornell, UPenn may be awesome, but tens of millions of global students are exposed to different principles, and the bottom 50% are often outrageous.
Imagine applying to work with Jason M. Lemkin – a global SaaS influencer and community with a $400M exit, basically the go-to guy for anyone building an enterprise sales team.
Coming fresh out of college, for an internship, and claiming enough expertise (0 days) to lead strategy.
For Jason.
I get these awkward conversations more often than not with:
– Recent graduates
– Tech talent
– Marketers
– Foreign applicants
Still living in the 2021-2022 world of everyone hiring remotely with VC funds piling over all businesses on the planet, with consumers staying at home and shopping on Amazon and buying SaaS subscriptions with less time to spend out and stimulus checks to splurge on things.
It looked weird early in 2023, virtually ancient mid-2024, and out of line as we’re approaching 2025.
The truth is:
1. Businesses NEED people and don’t hire because of misaligned expectations.
2. Expectations are off because of the 2020-2022 balloon that popped after, and we’re now back 5 years ago (more for software engineering).
3. Companies can’t afford to pay well for lack of experience and low quality. The numbers don’t make sense.
4. Agents and automated assistants aren’t making the case for paying for “strategy”.
5. Individual contributors this year in multiple segments make more than managers – because there’s been too much overseeing and babysitting work that should have been done anyway.
The job market tension won’t improve until career expectations get aligned with the macro data.
This should be a class taught at school at the very least aligning business needs to career opportunities.
Or should we just call this Economy 101?
