Business Leaders to Young People: Be More Professional!

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When voters go to the polls tomorrow, jobs and the economy will be in the forefronts of many of their minds. Has the Obama administration done enough to support the faltering economy and the American worker? We’ve debated the question plenty on BNET lately, but ultimately voters will decide. But if the administration hasn’t done enough to prepare young people in particular for work than it hasn’t been for lack of ideas.

Last year Business Roundtable convened an independent commission of business leaders called The Springboard Project to make recommendations to the administration on how to better prepare entry-level workers for their first jobs. They concluded young people coming out of college lack the communication and analytical skills valued by employers.

Now this year they’ve come up with a solution for the short-term at least. In partnership with the HR Policy Association, Business Roundtable just released JobSTART101, an online course for students and graduates that’s designed to give them a handle on the nuts and bolts professional skills they may never have learned in college.

The course consists of a series of earnest videos in which people look into the camera and confess their early business failures (stained khakis! excessive chattiness!) and suggest how to get with the corporate program, as well as a workbook that offers both solid questions to think about (”Do a Google search of your name. What are the first three results? When you click on these pages, are you entirely comfortable with the information that appears?”) and some rather patronizing exercises such as,

Read the following e-mail message from 23-year-old Jerry to his supervisor. List four things that could be improved to make the message more professional, and then rewrite it in your own words.

To: Chuck Thompson From: Jerry Vasquez Subject: Friday Chuck, what up? Wanted to let u know that the Sears client called and said she will be in an hour later tomorrow morning. She says she isn��t used to the traffic here yet, LOL. I wish she had planned ahead, tho. Its going to throw off my whole schedule for the day.

To me some of this seems condescending (also deeply uncool and lacking in humor — surely they would have gotten more of an uptake if they’d made this funny or fun?) but then again maybe I’m naive. Plenty of business leaders have complained about Gen Y’s writing skills, and maybe more of my peers are woefully under-prepared for the basic facts of working life than I realize. What do you think, are young people really this unprofessional? Are many likely to voluntarily use this resource? And will the ones who choose to spend time on this really be the ones who need to?