Jay Yoo

I am a geek. That is to say I am “an enthusiast or expert especially in a technological field or activity.” It’s always been that way. When working in corporate america during the 1990s I was always using technology far beyond any of my peers, many of whom were engineers (mechanical and chemical).  As a sales and marketing guy (at the time that was me) I was teaching engineers how to use Excel pivot tables? You would think it should have been the other way around, as they were the analytical ones.

I was often made fun of for my passion for technology and to this day do not connect with most of my older peers (+35 y/o) on finding ways to implement technology at every level of life to make it easier. They just do not get it.  

In today’s hyper-connected world, access to the best and brightest is just a “click away.”  Also, the interconnectedness of IT platforms (eg. ecommerce and fulfillment centers) continues to rapidly make routine/repetitive manual labor obsolete.  The bottom line is that avoiding technology, and not teaching your kids to fully embrace it, may not be the wisest thing.

This article from the Economist sums it up nicely by challenging the merits of just getting a higher education:

There are good reasons for thinking that old patterns are about to change—and that the current recession-driven downturn in the demand for Western graduates will morph into something structural. The gale of creative destruction that has shaken so many blue-collar workers over the past few decades is beginning to shake the cognitive elite as well.

Today, it’s not enough to simply get an education and hope that someone will hire you and show you the “way.”  The “way” is a fast moving target; unless you come to the table yourself with more than an education (i.e. tech skills, subject expertise, creativity) your position in the pecking order is diminished significantly by default.  Employers can find someone with your knowledge set in New Dehli, Bangkok or Ho Chi Minh for a lot less (1/4 the cost) and this trend is only going to continue.  You have to offer more than “knowing something;” you have to be able to “do things.” 

Thomas Malone of MIT argues that these changes—automation, globalisation and deregulation—may be part of a bigger change: the application of the division of labour to brain-work. Just as Adam Smith’s factory managers broke the production of pins into 18 components, so companies are increasingly breaking the production of brain-work into ever tinier slices. TopCoder chops up IT projects into bite-sized chunks and then serves them up to a worldwide workforce of freelance coders. These changes will undoubtedly improve the productivity of brain-workers. They will allow consumers to sidestep the professional guilds that have extracted high rents for their services. And they will empower many brain-workers to focus on what they are best at and contract out more tedious tasks to others. But the reconfiguration of brain-work will also make life far less cosy and predictable for the next generation of graduates.

Parents, if you want your kids to be competitive in the work force of the future, reading books, doing well in school and emotional quotient work may not be enough. They are going to have to compete with nations that are throwing away textbooks to learn on an iPad. Just imagine what this mass immersion in technology will mean for a country and their ability to hyper-connect their citizen’s lives to the world. It’s is rather mind blowing and I would say we are at the brink of a major tipping point in human evolution with our ability to learn, teach others and get things done at light speed and with more accuracy.

The deterioration of the middle class in America is obvious and people are going to have to find a new place in a “global” pecking order.  Simply getting a degree is no longer going to assure graduates will get a good paying job. If you are not fully immersing your kids in technology, and showing them how to manage change to be more efficient in their own lives, they already have a huge disadvantage in this fast changing world.  

Don’t be afraid to teach your kids to be a geek.  They will be able to “do things,” and just might go out and start their own company rather than finding a job.

via The Economist