Admission Sync

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Words to ponder from What Would Dad Say

Why What You Learned in College Doesn’t Work Well @ Work.

Our sales leader, Paul Moquist, is the best sales manager and trainer around. Over the years, I have seen him teach countless young people about sales. It is not uncommon for ex-employees to look him up years after working for him and relate their successes. He is like  the English Literature  teacher you had in high school who had a lasting impact on you.

Anyway…he had an interesting topic yesterday in his daily training session. I will try to paraphrase it here because I think it is relevant to others, too.

In college, he said, you go there to learn lifetime type skills and knowledge that will make you a prepared, contributing citizen. Even so, most people graduate without a clear pathway to a job.

What you do learn in college are how to play video games, use Facebook, MySpace and InstantMessaging. I think it is fair to say that for a lot of college people today, these four things occupy a significant part of their activities. It is fun, it’s a way to maintain contacts with new and old friends…it’s entertainment, even. But it was learned at college, in large degree. Keep in mind, that you were paying for college.

So, now fast forward a few years. You are just getting started at work. Let’s say you are lucky to find a company with a good product line, and a training program for you. This company is now paying you to learn more about their version of ‘work.’ It’s not like college where you paid them, and you chose to practice your MySpace layout skills. This new company of yours is now paying you…and teaching you how to do better work, with the end goal, of course, to make you a contributing employee.

But you learned these other skills in your recent past – the my space instant messaging hey dude my turn at halo - type skills. And it is awfully hard to break these habits.

Just try to remember that these are not work skills. Your mastery of them won’t help you much later. Think about the other things you could be learning and try to stop the addiction while there is still time. Tivo ahead to when you are forty years old, do you want to be a master at MySpace and have more friends than even Tom…or do you want to have some other skills too?

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