Employees dealing with trauma outside of work often carry that trauma with them into work, and we need resources to help them navigate that. What do we offer people experiencing trauma at work who carry that trauma into the rest of their lives?
Maybe the better question is, what do we owe them?
I’m cherry-picking the Microsoft note, but the same is true of every AI company out there. Unlimited Copilot interactions cost much, much more than $30 per month in compute costs. Someday, Microsoft and all the other companies will have to change their entire model to show any profit.
While there may be growth opportunities in blue-collar industries, you don’t suddenly become a plumber or electrician. It’s a long learning process that doesn’t scale well for that many unemployed people. This is reskilling at a massive, rapid scale, but we have to admit that whatever reskilling we’ve done in the past hasn’t been that good.
Do we expect what we’ve done before to ever match current and future needs? I don’t think it will, and that’s a problem that should be addressed. We need different, serious ideas, but I don’t see many of them out there.
I feel like we learned this in Econ 101, right? It’s a simple supply-and-demand curve. If you can’t buy the supply at the price you are offering, you need to raise it. Yet, the article goes on to talk about all the reasons why this isn’t happening, and they aren’t what you’d expect. It’s not just small shops that lack the resources to conduct salary research; it’s also very large, growing companies that don’t want to adjust the salaries of currently underpaid employees or are hesitant to commit to higher salaries long-term, etc.
In the end, though, those concerns are your problem, not the candidates.
There are many organizations that claim to have a learning culture, but the reality is very different. The real culture is that people are rewarded and promoted based on hourly billable or other targets, leaving no time for learning.
That’s your culture.
It doesn’t take much to stand out as a manager when no one is taking the time to even ask about the career goals of the people who report to you. The organization probably isn’t going to provide much in the way of talent development budget, but if you can just show you care and provide some mentorship, you’ll be outdoing 90% of the managers out there.