Forgive me for going anecdotal for a moment. In 1995, having already lost two jobs to the recession and my affinity for parlous startups, I took a job as an administrative assistant at a non-profit. This had its upsides--the work was light enough for me to complete the worst novel ever written in the English language during my spare time. But it was tedious and offered few prospects for advancement. Like most non-profits, this one had a flat management structure: there were senior men who had been hired in from outside, and junior women who did their typing and filing.
It was not my cup of tea. On the other hand, I did like to eat regularly, and there were surprisingly few more lucrative opportunities for recently minted English majors.
Thus did I make one of the best and worst decisions in my life: I signed up for a course to become a CNE--a Certified Netware Engineer. I'd done some light network administration at the startup, and I thought I'd like to make a career of it.
The IT types among my readers are cringing. No one gets hired because they took some low-rent course and passed a computer adaptive test. Indeed, back in the day, hearing someone officiously announce that "I'm a CNE" was a warning sign not to let them anywhere near your network. It's like having a job applicant hand over their eighth-grade graduation certificate. Of course, everyone qualified has one to stick on the resume, but they don't talk about it, because it's not even a basic qualification. Anyone whose main qualification is a CNE knows just enough to be extremely dangerous.
But I didn't know that at the time. I financed a $3,500 course on credit cards, and dutifully trooped off to class four evenings a week. I passed all the tests. Then I found out what any professional could have told me: without actual work experience, no one would hire me.
My classmates were all in the same boat. Lik me, they had found themselves in career dead-ends. Unlike me, they weren't 22-year-olds who could live at home. They were people who had been made redundant by technology or competition: payroll machine operators, verizon line workers, office managers, various salesmen, secretaries who could type 100 wpm in an era when bosses were increasingly doing their own typing.
I got super lucky. The place where I'd trained was doing a corporate training startup, and they needed someone who could a) type b) work for low pay and c) futz with the network. The startup lasted for three months, then, like my jobs before, shut down. But now I had job experience. It was the tech bubble. I was laid off for less than twelve hours: I found out at ten, called an employment agency at 10:45, went on my first interview at 1:00, had two job offers by that evening, accepted one on Friday, and started my new job on Tuesday at a 30% bump in salary.
The rest of my class, nine months later, was mostly still looking. One other guy had found a job in technology. The others had wasted $3,500 and five months.
This is basically typical of job retraining. Students are overoptimistic. Schools encourage them in their folly while collecting checks. And employers demand real-world experience that training can't give. It works best on people near entry-level, and those with complementary skills. But that rarely describes the people most in need of retraining, like displaced autoworkers who have spent decades at semi-skilled labor no longer in demand.
Government programs do no better, possibly because they can't run trucking schools and electrician training programs themselves, so they end up contracting out to private parties like the school I attended (which did a lot of BOCES training for the state of New York) or hybrid institutions like community colleges. Educational output is hard to measure: much depends on the student themselves. So we tend to measure inputs instead. Or we measure outputs--"are they employed six months after graduation?"--without controlling for quality of the jobs.
So I'm not surprised to find out that when you actually do try to measure the impact on student lives, government training programs have a dismal record. This comports with our experience in the 1980s, when we tried to retrain people out of the rust belt, and the 1990s, when we tried to do the same for people displaced by trade. Yet whenever we experience a dislocating crisis like the auto collapse, all the pundits are out again calling for job retraining. They're not stupid or disingenuous; they just don't have any better answer for a very tough question.
But given my own experience, it strikes me that we might do better by targeting employment--offering employers a subsidy for hiring displaced workers into a job that pays $10 or more an hour. For skilled work, you might need to pair this with training. But that would give the workers what they actually need--a job on the resume and a new skill--rather than a useless diploma.
Copyright © 2009 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
Megan: you're quite right that job retraining has a pretty weak record of success. But I suspect that part of the reason is that we rely on it to do too much. It's one thing for a 24-year old to retrain in this or that skill; but a 59 year-old grandfather in Akron who who's been operating machine tools all his life is probably not going to make a go of moving to Provo to seek work as a graphic designer. I personally think part of the answer -- and I think it would be a fairly cheap answer as it could be largely self-financed -- would be government-sponsored wage replacement insurance designed for older workers (that is, if you hadn't reached a certain age you wouldn't be eligible).
Congrats on the upcoming nuptials, by the way.
So a corporate, for profit university? Several companies call their facilities a "campus" because they structure things similar to a university, or at least they like to market it that way.
But it does bring to mind a couple examples. Honeywell has a large "university" in India where people both receive training and work on various engineering projects for Honeywell.
I know, anecdotally, or a few "universities" in China where they are basically a school-factory. Teaching and pumping out products (or art) in the process.
So we could either have large corporations that hire on more interns with the help of a government subsidy like you suggest, or traditional universities would be well served to actually do something useful (profitable) with the talent they are shaping.
This all entirely confuses the word university. I think we put too much job emphasis in a university degree. The apprentice/vocational method would be a better approach to a job oriented education. Universities should really be considered what they are, a place of higher learning that help educate you and shape your critical thinking skills that may or may not be of some use in a future job.
I think it's common for individuals to feel that there is some important skill they are lacking and if they only had that skill they'd be able to launch their career quickly (this happens in both young and older age as far as I can see).
So many certification and training programs prey off this, as well as universities. I'm sure there are some programs out there that truly teach an individual the necessary skills to graduate and promptly get a job and know how to grow that job into a long-term career. I just don't know of any. The programs are focused on teaching abstract skills that accumulate several industries real-world experience into broad graphs, charts, and words that can be put onto a screen.
For instance, ever take a course in project management? It's the most ludricrous educational program IMHO. Project management is one of the broadest skills in the world, but teaching a course in it is basically trying to put into words about 1,000 soft skills that need to be instilled.
I think a far more valuable offering would be internships/apprenticeships managed by a centralized institution. To Megan's point, she had a certificate but no experience. Why not run an institution that focuses on getting someone 6 months or 1-2 years of actual experience performing a duty. That is far easier to hire than someone who did well in a classroom.
On that note, my final anecdote. My 4-year bachelor's of science provided me with almost no practical skills or knowledge, except one thing: I was accepted into an internship as a Research Assistant at Johns Hopkins school of medicine.
That 6 months of experience culminated my degree and was the real-world experience that contributed to my relative success. If I hadn't been fortunate enough to land that opportunity, I would probably be stuck in a dead-end job making 1/2 of what I'm making now.
So why aren't educational institutions focused on setting up internships/apprenticeships? I'd think that now more than ever a host of industries would be looking for unpaid (however lowly skilled) workforce to form a symbiotic & short-term relationship.
Just my .02
Joe
Some schools do have co-op programs. (The ones I know of are in engineering but that doesn't mean there aren't others.) But it's probably not as common as it could be.
It's not common at all, though I did recognize that it does happen (look at Medicine for instance, in which the internship/apprenticeship period is years).
My little brother is entering into college in a few months and his first semester has been handed to him.
Intro to Theatre, a literature course on diverse populations, history of america course, a biology course, and a generic major-specific course.
He (or more accurately, his parents) are paying $7000 and 4-5 months of his post-high school life to be taught things that have no direct impact or benefit to his ability to thrive and prosper within society.
If we made all existing forms of government-sponsored education aid (grants, loans, whatnot) dependent on demand for the chosen specialty in the economy, the situation would change right quick. Hey, we could even use the existing DoL process for certifying the employment based immigration applications! :-D
The suggestion at the end, subsidized apprenticeship basically, is way too smart to be enacted broadly. The education/licensing establishment would fight it tooth and nail.
That's all well and good, but you are still subsidizing private industry. I thought Conservatives wanted big business to be left alone. And that you didn't want your taxes going to big business? The other part is the slick pickings of internships in this kind of economy. Lets face it, companies do a lousy job of grooming future employees.
I really don't support it, but it is much smarter than the actual alternative always proferred.
Except that like most neato ideas that pop into Megandome wage subsidy is really very, very old. Currently, Section 51 of the IRC provides subsidy for hiring various targeted people; before that there was 50B, as well as any number of other state & Federal programs.
you are still subsidizing private industry
While I'm skeptical of the whole idea of subsidized apprenticeships, I can't agree with the above. Presumably, the private industry can't make a profit by employing interns/apprentices while paying them a reasonable wage (or, in many cases, even while paying them anything). Thus the first $N/mo of subsidy will go straight to the apprentice.
'Course, putting myself in place of a hiring manager, I'd want the subsidy to be way above $N to even bother with the whole thing. And then it puts apprentices in competition with productive employees, and ultimately drives down the productivity. Must be the reason for my skepticism...
This is what I don't get. Why don't employers look at as investing in the future of their business? They are training future employees. That is if they make it a good place to work.
Calvin,
Companies do do this, but not every unemployed worker is worth the effort without the subsidy.
Why don't employers look at as investing in the future of their business?
Because of the poor ROI? I admit my experience is limited to software development industry, but AFAICT most of the value from on-the-job learning (I detest the word "training" as applied to engineers) goes to the employee. Most of the risk and cost, OTOH, goes to the employer. Of course this situation dovetails nicely with the fact that the ultimate success depends on the employee almost 100%. In the end, you have employees investing in their careers much more than employers investing in their human capital -- which is extremely volatile anyway.
Why don't employers look at as investing in the future of their business?
Because employees, unlike, say, lathes, cannot be bolted to the floor.
Because employees, unlike, say, lathes, cannot be bolted to the floor.
...or made to work productively by turning on the switch...
It seems like companies can protect their investment, at least in part. I worked at a financial company that paid for advanced education, but if you took classes on their dime and then quit within a certain time period you had to pay them back. Prorated over three years, I think.
Protecting investment by contracting that employees either work for some many years, or pay to break the contract... it sounds good, but I've seen it fail in a lot of cases. If your newly trained employee turns out to be brilliant at the new job, then they are either:
1. snapped up by a competitor for enough money for them to pay the fee, and still come out ahead, or
2. you have to bid their wages way up to keep them, or
3. their new employer is in Europe or Asia or somewhere and you can sent the demand for a break-fee to their old address if you like wasting stamps
4. you can set your lawyer on them, and if the courts agree (sometimes) then in about 3 years they will agree to paying the break-fee at a cost/month that barely covers the interest
Of course, the mediocre and poor employees stick around.
Taking a step back, the better approach might be to enact policies (e.g., lower taxes on businesses, plentiful, low-cost energy for energy-intensive industries, etc.) that would encourage more companies to set up shop here and create high-paying, blue collar jobs. Those sorts of companies often do their own training for new employees. I don't think Toyota, for example, required its assembly line applicants to have taken any sort of certification in auto manufacturing before applying.
I agree completely.
"They're [the pundits calling for retraining] not stupid or disingenuous; they just don't have any better answer for a very tough question."
The pundit class hails mostly from the press, academia, think tanks, and the higher levels of government and private industry. They are white collar folks with extensive educations who would be horrified at having to do even one hour of the type of work that, say, the autoworkers perform. There is more than a whiff of condescension when this pundit class urges more government spending on retraining for laid-off blue collar and low-level employees.
And since I think most of the pundits know retraining doesn't work, they're being dishonest as well as patronizing. Sorry, Megan, but that sounds like disingenuousness to me.
The retraining programs are useful in the sense that they give displaced workers something to do while they adjust to the reality that they're going to have to find a different job than what they had before. If we didn't have those programs, we'd probably have a lot more protests and protectionism than we do now.
...government-sponsored wage replacement insurance designed for older workers...
I can anticipate one of the objections to this sort of thing is:
Fair point, but the reality is that not enough engage in this sort of behavior. Perhaps we automatically enroll all workers in a program by, say, age 30 (you could join earlier if you wanted to, but automatic opt-in is the way to go, say the behavioral economists). It wouldn't be mandatory, but it would clearly makes sense for non-managerial/professional workers (ie., those who tend to suffer the most from labor market volatility) to participate. You'd have to pay in for a certain number of time (say, 25 years). You wouldn't be able to access the funds until after a certain age. And there would still be restrictions on top of that (first check doesn't arrive, say, until 12 months after your last unemployment check arrives).The point is, the real problem for older non re-trainable workers isn't that they can't find work. The problem is that the work they can find doesn't pay well. The type of program I'd like to see probably wouldn't be enough to live on by itself -- but it would be enough to plug some of the gap between the thirty bucks an hour you used to make at the auto components plant, and the twelve bucks you're making at Walgreeen's.
And of course for those who end up not needing (or, rather, not being able to use) this program, it is yet another redistributionist trick.
Count me in on the side of saving and investing. If you don't need those emergency funds, you can always blow them on on champagne and caviar or something...
But Jasper, we already have a wage replacement system: it's called saving and investing over the long term to deal with problems such as job loss.
Don't forget the fact that the government discourages this behavior. The Federal Reserve to be exact. If people saved, the economy would be a lot smaller then it is. And the government can't have that.
If people saved, the economy would be a lot smaller then it is.
Isn't that a form of the broken window fallacy? Presumably the most common form of savings are [long] stocks and bonds, directly or indirectly (through banks and mutual funds). That money goes back to the economy as capital. Is consuming more McMuffins, [Mc]Cadillacs and McMansions somehow more efficient?
I don't see how condemning young adults to never starting a career -- because any decent position that doesn't require a degree would go to the laid-off autoworker who comes with a subsidy -- is all that much better than the alternative. Those young adults will be in their late 40s someday, too, and now they'll never have had the opportunity to save and prepare for job loss the way the people Megan wants to subsidize did.
The problem is that you don't what your next job is going to be. I'm sure the government will be even worse at this than individuals. I'm sure there would be plenty of training opportunities in "green" fields that no one in the private sector plans on using. General skills would be more helpful than specific skills. On Megan's point, providing money to employers to train displaced employees may be the best answer.
But given my own experience, it strikes me that we might do better by targeting employment--offering employers a subsidy for hiring displaced workers into a job that pays $10 or more an hour.
Or (crazy idea) the government could just cut taxes and regulations that make $10/hr jobs so expensive. And it could stop extending unemployment so people would be inclined to take those $10/hr jobs.
What regulations? And lets just cut taxes to zero while we are at it. Free lunch for everyone!!
the first paragraph quotes Megan. sorry 'bout that.
Part of the reason that a CNE or similar test is worthless as a means to getting a job is because it is incredibly easy to cheat on them. There are a ton of sites on the web where you can buy an "exam dump" of all the questions, and just memorize them. If your only goal is the certification, it's a hell of a lot cheaper than actually taking the class. Most IT hiring people are going to assume that you probably cheated if all you have is a cert and no experience.
The other thing is that training in IT will teach you how things work in the perfect test environment of the class, but not in the real world where 8 different sysadmins have set things up with duct tape and baling wire, and end users have done things that you didn't think could be done.
I'd like to see more apprenticeship programs; particularly in the skilled trades. An electrician learns a lot more when she's working with a master electrician on the job than she will if she spends all her time in a classroom.
A machinist needs a mill, lathe, grinder, or CNC to work on and, ideally, a tool-maker to teach him, as well as a good grounding in math, blue-print reading, and metallurgy.
Just like doctors do residencies to learn from experienced doctors.
It seems that government sponsored internships combined with training would be most useful.
However it also seems that the big problem for many people - especially the over 35 crowd - is that even with new skills and experience you still have to move to find a job. Yet depressed areas are the very places where it is hard to sell ones home. So the issue of transportation is a non-trivial issue.
Incentivizing small business would be ideal to create alternative jobs in depressed areas. You'd think with the new information economy and great shipping options this would be easy. Yet congress the last 10 years has done a lot to make small business startups difficult. (Changing the way depreciation on machines are handled being one of the biggest problems) Obama hasn't changed this and arguably is going to be making it worse with some of his policies.
No.
The problem Megan encountered (CNE) was that the signals she was sending with her newbie certification were "I'm a newbie and I don't know anything about networks."
Government sponsored interships will just reinforce that signal.
When someone else pays you for your network admin skills, you can then signal, "hey, this person thought I was worth paying, so should you."
There was a related WSJ article the other day that basically said if you are laid off, you will have a hard time finding a new job. Currently employed, no problem. Lots of anecdotal evidence (!= data) of HR folks saying they only consider the currently employed. And a subsidized position is not going to signal what "currently employed" signals."
Every guy over the age of 16 knows it is easier to find a girlfriend when you already have one.
Every guy over the age of 16 knows it is easier to find a girlfriend when you already have one.
Is it? That's been my problem then. I must have skipped that class in guy school.
Where training (or retraining) is at least potentially useful is when it is building on something you know and moving you to a slightly different career. I heard a story about a laid-off roustabout (a worker on oil and gas drilling rigs)who was training to become a wind turbine repairman. The two jobs are fairly similar. I'm guessing that, having experience in one of them will help you get the other.
The problem is when you need to make a complete career change. I did this, but I had to get an MBA to accomplish it (and needed to find a field in desperate need of warm bodies!). For the proverbial 50-year-old auto worker, a complete change is necessarily going to be very tough, and retraining won't help that much.
Someone once told me, "No matter what your job title or description, you are always an independent contractor."
That's the best career advice I've ever heard. It is up to you to get yourself trained and marketed into suitable positions internal and external to your current employer. Don't wait for someone to take you by the hand to your dream job.
The machinist or autoworker is in the best position to understand the future needs (or lack thereof) of his/her current employer. You have to really have your head in the sand to not see looming layoffs way before even management admits it to themselves.
You are also in the best position to know the current and future needs of your current industry and any related industries.
Hey, the buggy-whip industry didn't die overnight. The buggy whip maker's employees knew it was a dying industry before practically anyone else. Each employee had a unique skill set and was in the best position to decide when/where to move.
If you really want government retraining, go with vouchers.
[quote]You have to really have your head in the sand to not see looming layoffs way before even management admits it to themselves[/quote]
Not in the case of some UAW members of my acquaintance, who have informed me that a) they work for the union, not the company and b) swore that the impending bankruptcies were purely concocted by management to trick the union into contract givebacks. 70 years of an entitlement mentality is hard to erase.
We're missing one of the key issues, and that's "seniority level." Megan was able to make a switch for several reasons, one of which was that she didn't require a Senior Network Engineer's salary. She was OK coming in at the lowest rung, which is what a CNE Certification was OK at. If just...
Contrast that with the worker who has been on an assembly line for 25 years. Because of unions, he's making $85,000 or more a year. He has a kid or two in college. He has a lifestyle he wants to maintain.
He's not open to taking a basic Cisco certification and parlaying it into $38,000/year (if that).
Even if the new-tech jobs are available - and they rarely are when a whole industry collapses - you still have to bridge the gap between old-pay expenses and a zero-experience entry level position.
Then you spent two years getting an MBA at Chicago to qualify you to do what...? Be a blogger.
And yet all of us in the comment threads do for free what Megan gets paid to do. Who's the schmuck again?
One of the best things that could be done to make retraining/transition/whathaveyou easier for displaced workers is a mass pogrom of all HR personnel.
Contrast that with the worker who has been on an assembly line for 25 years. Because of unions, he's making $85,000 or more a year. He has a kid or two in college. He has a lifestyle he wants to maintain.
Here is what I don't understand. In my business you can be 28 or 58 and make 125k a year as long as you have skills X,Y & Z. Your age and seniority really don't impact your earnings.
Contrast this to a public school teacher or other union member. She might make 32k to start and top out at 90 after 30 years - all for teaching 2nd grade or working the line. Now, are you really any better as a teach or assembly line worker with 9 years of experience vs. 13 years of experience? Shouldn't all teachers/factory workers with, say, 3+ years of experience make 65k... if that is the median income for that job?
This concept of senority based pay seems to make it very hard for people to move from one position to another as they would need to work their way up the seniority ranks again.
Actually... I seem to recall someone did research on teacher effectiveness and seniority. They found that effectiveness plateau's after about 5-10 years. Meaning that most teachers, after about 5-10 years stop getting more effective. Basically that means it makes *no* sense to increase seniority pay after that point... but they do... a lot.
The trick in industry is that generally, you see the same curve. You pretty much top out at a job pretty quickly. Where most people climb the ladder in the non-union private sector is by moving up the leverage curve (management, various leadership roles, more leveraged individual contributor jobs, project management, etc).
"employers demand real-world experience that training can't give."
In my opinion, this may well not be correct.
What employers actually demand are employees with sufficient skills to do the current job that is required and to be able to continue to do the job as the environment changes.
The problem is that "training" hasn't historically provided employees with sufficient skills, so the employers ask for "real-world experience" as it has a better track record of providing people with those required skills.
That doesn't mean that training, by definition, -can't- provide it, it just has a lousy track record of providing it.
Part of what is needed, IMHO, is a better feedback loop from managers that can't fill roles into the training programs that are theoretically designed to train people to fill those roles. They, theoretically, have the correct incentives to engage in the creation of meaningful simulations, proper assessments etc.
Regards,
Jonathan.
This is the flip side of unionization. It creates a false sense of security in workers, and it, at times, demands that workers get paid more than the value that they bring to the position. When it no longer is teneable, all parties suffer.
Unions would better serve labor if they put realistic demands on the table, put more effort into skills training for the workers they represent, and be open to automation within their industries. Those dues could be paying the displaced worker's training.
There was an article on today's Miami Herald online that Florida has too many unemployed workers and not enough cows. But the retraining might be too tough.
That's just shifting the unemployment to people who aren't "displaced workers". If the job is there, somebody will fill it - why prioritize the laid-off worker from a dying industry? From an economic perspective, it makes much more sense to spend training dollars on a 22-year-old with a non-marketable major than a 55-year-old ex-auto worker who'll just be coming up to speed when it's time to move to Florida and fish all day.
Also, changing careers later in life is an adjustment not every is willing or able to make. I'm going to go from a senior machinist to an entry level help desk jockey? Oooooh, sign me up! And the unemployment benefits system discourages stepping down. I know a couple who have both been laid off from the mortgage industry, but neither will take a job making less money than the old one because if it doesn't work out they'll get less money from the government.
Rob Lyman:
Why don't employers invest in the future of their business?
Because employees, unlike, say, lathes, cannot be bolted to the floor.
Max: or made to work productively by turning on the switch....
The Pro sports do pretty well at both of the above, and the military
does even better, or used to, when I was in the Air Farce.
The price was higher for officers: Six years instead of four, but,
as one of my relatives testified: "They put me through College and
Dental School, and I have no complaint about serving my time."
The military has advantages over the private sector:
On the one hand, Its employees cannot quit, must obey, and can be punished for poor performance.
On the other hand, management answers only to the CINC, who does
_not_ answer to stockholders.
On the Gripping hand, if Celente the Prophet has it right,
there will soon be no shortage of volunteers, and lots of work
to be done, rebuilding the country.
http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/3421
Far be it from me to critique anyone else for being curmudgeonly, but seriously? Your experience of the nonprofit world was that English major women had few opportunities for advancement while men ran the show and promoted their own?
I don't know what time and place this was, nor the type of nonprofit, but in the northeast in 2009, female English majors are more than holding their own in the nonprofit sector. I mean, I think the field is about 70% female in my region, and that includes management/executives. And most of us seem to have backgrounds in the liberal arts.
I'm over 30; I've been in sexist work environments and work environments with barriers to female advancement. The nonprofit sector isn't among them.
I think your experience was colored by the fact that you took an administrative job. There's no logical path for advancement there. Admins don't stay stuck, however, because they're women; they stay stuck because the experiences isn't readily transferable to more responsible positions. If you had entered the nonprofit sector in a development or policy capacity, I can't imagine you would have the same perspective.
Training is most effective when used as a development/job recruitment tool by governments. Several times, our county government has essentially told potential employers moving to the area that it will subsidize training at the local community college for their employees. In other words, instead of proactively training employees then turning them loose into the job market, they apply for the jobs and get them based on the quality of their work record (their ability to be good employees, not their skill level), and the employer knows they can get trained on the government's dime.
Besides, technical training not paired with immediate job experience is pointless. I took some Java classes online several years back, and I could barely write "hello, world!" today. On the other hand, I took some security classes, and could tell you most of what I learned. The difference is that I put the security classes to work right away, whereas I've only barely used Java since. (Just the way the jobs worked out.)
Retraining is a myth. I agree with the author totally, except she understates how lucky she was to find that job. She was helped out tremendously by an economic bubble which should be dampened in the future.
Not only that, but given the fact that she writes well and obviously has a decent thing going on with this blog, I would say she is at the very least a moderately-driven individual. That is not normal. Normal people are lazy and want to do the minimum.....that may be the overall reason retraining doesn't work.
Perhaps the reason retraining is often a waste is for the same reason a lot of educational expenditure is a waste. The process is one of trade between the educators and the student and in some trade one side gets the better deal. In this case it's teachers, professors, and instructors that get the better end.
It doesn't really take 12 years to educate a child. A university degree shouldn't take 4 years either. Most people don't even use most of what they've learned so why do we bother. I'm one of the few that actually uses what I've learned (Bachelors in computer science, finance weighted MBA, some economics, and now I do algorithmic and qualitative work in finance after many years in computer companies) but I have seldom worked along side people who on a daily basis apply educational course content on the job.