Most parents wonder what advice they should be giving to their kids as they grow up and graduate high school. What should they tell them to study in college, what school should their kids go to, what type of career is safe and what type of organization they should be working for.
My advice to these parents and their children, is that we all should be like taste testers when we are young and first entering the workforce. We need to sample different things while we are young to figure out what we are passionate about, what we enjoy and what we care about.
Forcing someone to study something that they do not care about and don’t have that connection with isn’t going to yield success in the long run.It is unrealistic to think that students are going to graduate from high school or college before they have ever held a full time job, and that they are going to automatically know exactly what they want to do and they are going to work for one organization the rest of their lives.
The expectation throughout high school and college shouldn’t be that the students are going to pick one field to go into for the rest of their lives, rather it should be a time to explore, experiment and test different opportunities to get a feel for their likes and dislikes. It is OK for us to be like taste testers and to sample the different opportunities that are out there to discover what it is we are passionate about while we are young
So at the end of the day, my advice to young people is to think like an entrepreneur; learn how to learn, think about how to go about things yourself and don’t be afraid to be like a taste tester.
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My new book, The Employee Experience Advantage (Wiley, March 2017) analyzes over 250 global organizations to understand how to create a place where people genuinely want to show up to work. Subscribe to the newsletter here.
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