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Narrator: OTAN, Outreach and Technical Assistance Network. Work Ethic, The Building Blocks for the 21st Century Workforce. OTAN Technology and Distance Learning Symposium, 2020.

Josh Davies: Good morning, and thank you all for letting me be a part of the opening of the symposium here for you. I know that today and tomorrow are exciting days. There's a lot of stuff to talk about, a lot of really cool things that are coming.

And I wanted to get the opportunity to introduce myself and talk a little bit about some things that I think are really cool but probably nobody else does. Why? Because it's not always necessarily the sexy things that are out there, but it's some foundational stuff that we find that really drives where we're headed.

Now, for those of you who are unfamiliar, I've worked for an organization called the Center for Work Ethic Development. How many of you know what the Center for Work Ethic Development is? Have you heard of us?

[laughter]

Two of you, OK. Thank you both for being here. OK, I realize we're not exactly Amazon or Google or some of those other household names.

The Center for Work Ethic Development is an organization. We're based in Colorado. We partner with organizations around the country and around the globe, whether or not that's in secondary education, post-secondary, adult education, workforce, non-profit, community groups, corrections, anywhere and everywhere people are helping to prepare people to enter into the workforce. We help partner with you to help you do what you do better.

And with that, we really drive everything around research, around data, because we know that's what speaks the loudest. So with that in mind, I want to start off talking about a study that we did with employers. This is a really interesting study because it's a longitudinal study over four years.

Four years in a row, a group called Express Employment surveyed 1,500 hiring managers across the United States hiring for all sorts of different roles-- entry level, mid-level, senior level, all sorts of career pathways all over the country. Asked the hiring managers a simple question. When you are getting ready to hire somebody for a new job regardless of what the job is, what do you think is the most important skill or attribute in making a hiring decision? And gave them a whole list to choose from, and then they ranked them from one being the most important all the way down to least important.

What was very interesting about the study-- it was four years in a row that they did it-- the answers changed wildly between years with what the hot-button issues were, what the key phrasing was, except this. The number one answer never changed. Interesting, also, the one that came in last never changed. Everything else varied wildly.

On the screen here, you don't get to see all the options because it would be way too many. But you get to see six of the answers that were here. One of them is what employers said was the most important for four years in a row, and one of them is what they said was the least important for four years in a row. We've got attitude, education, specific skills, job experience, work ethic, and work history.

What I'd like you to do right now, in your heads or on a piece of paper, I'd like you to think about what you think employers would say was number one and what you think they would say was the least important. And no pressure, but you have seven more seconds to make up your mind. We've got a lot of information to go through today, OK?

All right, so let's start at the bottom because that tends to be where I hang out more than anywhere else. Anybody have a guess for what you think employers said was the least important? All right?

Audience: Work history.

Josh Davies: Work history. Who else agrees, work history? You have lots of people. Why do you think work history is so low?

It doesn't really matter what you've done. It matters what you can do is what she said, right? I don't care so much about where you were before. I care about what you're going to do for me moving forward. That's becoming more and more important especially as people are getting new skills and technology is changing. The world's changing, right? Past is prologue. I care about what happens next.

Indeed, for four years in a row, very low, but wasn't the least. What do you think, Wendy?

Audience: Job experience.

Josh Davies: Job experience. Anyone else, job experience? A few of you. Why job experience so low, Wendy? OK. So what you've learned before isn't as important as what she thinks is number one.

And oftentimes what I hear from employers is I'd rather you not have job experience because I don't want to have to untrain you for all the stupid things you learned there before you go here, right? But not the lowest.

Audience: Aw.

Josh Davies: All right, what do you think back there? Education. Now, before we go any further, you know who's in this room with you, OK? So a lot of them between you and the exit.

How many of us are doing what we went and got our education in? My husband is an excellent mechanic, but he only went to the sixth grade. Does education prove that you are smart?

Audience: No.

Josh Davies: Does education prove your value? But it sure does help get you a job. We say that education is the key that unlocks the door, right?

Audience: Yes.

Josh Davies: OK. So any other guesses at what's number 20 other than dumb people? All right, what do you say?

Audience: Work ethic.

Josh Davies: Work ethic is the least important.

Audience: [laughs]

Josh Davies: I've never seen someone so resoundingly booed since I got off stage. All right, we'll get to that one later. What--

Audience: I think it's specific skills.

Josh Davies: Specific skills.

Audience: Yeah.

Josh Davies: Why? Anything you can teach, right? More and more, employers are saying, if you just send us somebody with the basics, right? I need somebody with a high school equivalency. I don't care where it came from. I will teach them how to do the skills for this job, right?

Audience: Exactly.

Josh Davies: Exactly, but wasn't number 20.

Audience: Oh, my gosh.

Josh Davies: For four years in a row, the least valuable skill or attribute was education.

Audience: Aw.

Josh Davies: And now you're like, now, tell me, why did we have this guy kick off the conference? Again, here's what I will tell you. It's not that education isn't important. What employers are telling us is that education is now a price of entry. You have to have certain criteria to even be considered. Where you got it, where it's from, those things are less and less important. But it's not going to differentiate you.

Employers are also telling us there's a pretty significant and growing disconnect between the job skills required in order to be successful in today's workplace and what's being taught at four-year university. Well, with that happy note, what do you suppose then was the most valuable? What do you think employers said was the number one thing?

Audience: Attitude.

Josh Davies: Attitude. Where my attitude people? Almost everybody. OK, cool. So we're going to go back just a couple of slides. For those-- anybody here teach English as well? Any English? OK, good, some English folks.

In my high school English, I learned a concept called foreshadowing. Foreshadowing is a literary concept where you bring things up that you then reference later. Say, for instance, the title of my presentation, which is Work Ethic. The name of the organization I work for, which is the Center for Work Ethic.

Now I have my opening slide that gives you an opportunity to choose one of the choices. The number one choice is?

Audience: Work ethic.

Josh Davies: You guys are brilliant. All right, yeah. I already see some of you attitude people in the room copping an attitude with me. OK, I got it.

Now, I don't want to tell you that attitude is unimportant. It is a critical skill. In fact, when we broke down what you mean when you say "work ethic," attitude was always at the top of that list. But what employers say is they value work ethic more than anything else. Interesting.

We know that work ethic is the most in-demand skill. If we can show our job seekers, our students have these skills, they'll be better off than anyone else. That's great for today, but here's what we know. Technology is rapidly changing. Things like AR and VR are going to transform not just the way we learn, but the way we work.

We know this. Jobs are going to be changing faster than we can possibly imagine. It's estimated that 80% of the jobs we'll be doing in just 10 years haven't been invented yet. If you don't believe me, think back 10 years ago. 10 years ago, you know what the number one selling cell phone was? A Motorola Razr. That's 10 years. The iPhone had just started to come out.

You want to tell me nothing can change. It can change dramatically, and it's going to completely change industries. When you talk to futurists about what jobs they think are most likely to go away, it's an interesting list. Here's the cool part. Number one job most likely to go away in the future? Telemarketers, yes!

Audience: Yay!

Josh Davies: But before you cheer too loudly, you'll still get all the telemarketing calls. They'll just be really smart robots that don't mind hearing no, OK? Now, what's interesting, though, as you look at this, number two on the list, accountants and auditors.

Audience: Wow.

Josh Davies: We don't oftentimes think about skilled tasks being replaced, but the reality is technology, artificial intelligence and automation, are not about taking low-skill jobs. It's about taking repetitive tasks.

As we talk about how we need to start thinking about the future, we don't know what the future has in store, but we do know this. Things that are repetitive are going to go away. Jobs that are repetitive are going to go away no matter what they are.

That's what's great about teaching. If we can stay doing what we're doing and not be repetitive, we'll never be replaced.

But here's the problem. How, then, do we prepare our students? How do we keep our adults with the job skills they need in order to get employment? What programs are we going to need to develop? What certificates are we going to need to do? How do we know about this uncertain future? We don't.

But futurists will tell us this. When you look at the top 10 skills necessary to be successful in the future, what is number one on the list?

Audience: Work ethic.

Josh Davies: Work ethic. We know it's the number one, most in-demand skill today, and it will be the number one, most in-demand skill in the future. So this morning as you talk about cutting-edge technology, as we talk about how we can help grow the work that we do and improve the lives of our adult learners, I want to talk today about one of the things that we have to embed in our programs, and that's work ethic.

So let's do a little work ethic 101 here. Let's get started. First of all, let's answer this question. What do you mean when you say "work ethic"? How do you define it? If I went around this room and asked you all to define work ethic, I think you'd probably have-- I don't know-- 150 different definitions of what you mean by work ethic.

When you ask employers, it's not one thing. If you go read newspaper stories about work ethic, here's what they'll tell you. It's all about putting in extra time. Work ethic stories in the newspaper are about athletes who put in extra time at the gym.

That's great. And showing up regularly is important. But it's not the only thing on that list, right? Because you all know this. You've all worked with that person who's the first person there every morning, the last person to leave, and the least productive SOB during the whole time that they're there, right?

They're just putting in face time with everybody, wandering around. Oh, my gosh. You don't understand. I've got so much work to do. I am so busy. I don't even know what I'm going-- I'm going to have to come in this weekend again. Oh, my gosh. I'm working so late.

You're like, hey, Josh, maybe if you actually did work instead of running around and talking about it, you wouldn't be so dang busy, right? It's not just about face time. It's about arriving on time, but listening, following instructions, having a willingness to learn, to do more than the minimum, to get along with other people.

What we found from our research, both through employers and the Department of Labor, was this. There are seven core skills that drive success. We need people who have a positive attitude, who are bringing that every single day, not letting a bad moment become a bad day.

We need people who have solid attendance who are there every day every time they say they're going to be. People who have good appearance, not just in the way they dress, but in how they interact with each other, the words that they use, electronic communication.

We need people who have the ambition to do more than the minimum, right? How many of you have students who come to your classes and ask this question the very first day? What's the least I can do and still pass, right?

They do the same thing when they come into work. Like, what's the least I can do and not get fired? We need people with more ambition than that.

We need people who are accepting of others, accepting of the rules. We need people who show appreciation for the people they work with and for and, to cap it all off, who have the accountability to do what they say they're going to do.

Now, coincidentally, because these all happen to start with the letter A, we tell people simply that what employers are looking for is somebody who brings their--

Audience: A game.

Josh Davies: --A game. Clever this morning. I like it, all right? That's what we talk about when we say what do we mean by work ethic.

So if this is what work ethic is, it's just basic common sense. Here's my question. What the heck is wrong with kids these days? What is the problem with this generation? We talked about common sense. It's no longer common practice, right?

When you hear about this about this millennial generation, it's the me, me, me generation. I'll zoom in on this Time magazine story just in case you can't read the byline. "Lazy, entitled, narcissists who still live with their parents," right?

Audience: Right.

Josh Davies: Boom, right? This generation is destroying everything. They're destroying car ownership. They're destroying marriage. They're destroying avocado toast. Every single thing they touch, they're destroying. You read all the stories that are out there. It's as if we will never be the same.

But as a research organization, we wanted to know what really was the root of this. So we got in and we started to do some research around millennials and around the opinions around work. We found some really important trends that kept emerging.

We found the same words being used over and over again to describe young people entering in the workplace-- that they're privileged. They're narcissistic. They're entitled. This generation was so different, so Life magazine said in 1968 about those dang hippies now known as baby boomers entering into the workplace.

Because the patterns we see with the words and the word choices are the same. What changes is the generation. Because every generation coming into the workplace is seen the same way.

We think that somehow, this technology is going to change it, that this one's different because everyone's taking all these pictures on their phones, that it has to be selfies all the time, right? Hold on.

Audience: [laughs]

Josh Davies: All right, everybody, smile.

Audience: [cheering]

Josh Davies: Hold on. There we go.

Audience: Yay!

Josh Davies: OK, good. Well, yes, technology is fun, but technology has been with us. It just has gotten better. Why? Because this technology was not the fancy smartphones. This technology that Newsweek was talking about in 1985 was the brand new shoulder-mounted camcorder, right? And that was somehow making people more narcissistic than ever.

And let's face it. Gen Xers, you know this. Somewhere in your parents' garage is a videocassette of every birthday you ever had that no one's ever watched. No one watches those videos.

Technology changes over time, but attitudes about young people in the workplace don't. In fact, when you start to get into it, the same things happen. So let's get into actual data. The Journal of Business and Psychology did a meta-study. So they combined 77 different studies on work ethic.

And here's what they found, that there was no statistically significant difference in the work ethic scores of any of the three generations.

Audience: Wow.

Josh Davies: However, I do want to point this out since we've been forgotten about in this entire conversation. As a proud, card-carrying member of Gen X myself, I'd like to point out, who finally is number one at something, right? Look at us, baby. Number one. OK, so, it's like, it's 0.03 points. So it's not like it's-- it's a rounding error. The reality is we're all about the same.

In fact, what's funny about these perceptions is how quickly they start to latch onto the next generation. For those of you who don't do generational research, here's the interesting thing. A lot of the folks in our adult ed programs are millennials because the oldest millennials are now nearly 40.

The youngest millennial's around 22, 23, meaning the youngest students we have-- 21, 20, 19, 18, 17-year-old-- are part of this brand new generation they have dubbed Generation Z. I just worry about the next generation who's going to be generation AA. That's my only problem with Generation Z.

Gen Z. The only reason I point that out is because now millennials have been in the workplace for a long time. A study came out a few months ago asking millennials what's your perception of Generation Z kids in the workplace. What do you suppose was the number one word that millennials used to describe this next generation?

Audience: Lazy.

Josh Davies: Lazy. It's amazing how quickly these attitudes shift from one generation to the next. What we find in our research is the reality is there's nothing unique about generations, but that we are facing a national crisis around these soft skills that's not generational. It's societal.

We work with some programs that do development of these skills in middle school, but we also work with SCSEP programs. It's a federal program. It's a senior citizen employment program where we're helping 50 and 60-year-olds get re-employed, and they're teaching them these same seven work ethic skills because we know there's a deficit across the board.

With that in mind, if we know this deficit exists across the board, it brings us to an important question that we have to ask. Can you teach adults work ethic? OK, let me try that one again. Can you teach adults work ethic?

Audience: Yes.

Josh Davies: You're like, I hope so, or else this is going to be a really bad opening workshop. Yes, we can. But we can't teach adults work ethic the same way we did it when we were teaching our kids work ethic.

What do I mean? When you teach kids work ethic, you do it by giving them penalties, right? If you don't do your work, you're not getting dinner. If you don't do this, you don't get to go out.

When we point fingers and we tell adults not to do things, that's fine for a short period of time. You better put that phone down. If you show up late again tomorrow, you're going to get fired. Oh, you think you're wearing that to work? I don't think so. Go home and change.

And we're pointing fingers and we're telling people what not to do. And that's fine. I'm staring at you. I'm mad. I'm angry. What happens when I turn my back? I don't even want to know what they're doing, right?

You can't punish adults into behavior change. It doesn't work. What we have to focus on instead is a simple concept known as WIIFM. We didn't come up with this, but I love it. And it's not a radio station.

WIIFM is this. What's in it for me? What adults care about is why it matters to them. Why will this make my life better? When you can attach that, that's when adults change their behavior.

When you look at the most successful things that we do, it's not because somebody wants to get a high school equivalency because they need a piece of paper. A high school equivalency - they're getting because of the value it has for them.

They're getting into this certificate program because they know that a career pathway in the medical field will help them, that Allied Health will help them not only just get a job, but get a career and make a difference for their families. They're not doing it because they love blood. Nobody loves blood.

They're doing it because they see the value at the end. In the same way, we have to help teach work ethic with this concept of What's In It For Me.

So how did we get here? How did we end up in this place where we have to teach the stuff that we should have learned in the first place? Why? Well, let me tell you this. It didn't happen overnight.

It's been happening, from our research, over the last 10, 20, 30-- in some cases, even 40 years-- where we've seen really just a breakdown of the places where we used to develop these skills in the past. Let's start. For most of you, where would you say you developed your work ethic?

Audience: At home.

Josh Davies: At home, right? Family environment where we're sitting around. We're talking about important things, the day. OK, who are we kidding, by the way? This is obviously an ad. No one's table looks this good ever. Even on Thanksgiving, ours is not this nice and clean.

But here's the interesting thing. One of the things that we find happening in the American home is a trend that started in the American office 10 years ago. I now refer to it as the Twitterization of conversation.

Anybody here have teenagers in their home? Some of you? Yeah, right? If your teen is in their room and it's time for dinner, do you yell at them to come downstairs?

Audience: No, you call them on their cell phone.

Josh Davies: You call them on their cell phone, which they won't pick up, of course. So then you send them a text, right? Like, food now. You may not even send them actual words. You just send the turkey leg emoji and they come down.

I was talking with a mom recently about this, and I was like, oh, do you text your kid? And she's like, oh, no. I don't do that. I was like, wow, you actually go get your kids? She was like, no, no, I just turn off the Wi-Fi.

[laughter]

Like, mom of the year, right? And we joke about it in our homes, but the reality is this started in our offices with email. We know this. We all had that time where we're in an office or a cube next to somebody, and we're sending them an email. Like, when do you want to go to lunch? Because we're too lazy to just actually lean back and ask the question.

And so it has no surprise that we're spending less and less time in actual dialogue with our own children. In fact, on average, how many hours per week would you think that a typical parent spends in meaningful dialogue with their school-aged children?

Audience: Two hours.

Audience: Less than an hour.

Josh Davies: We've got two hours, less than an hour. You're going the wrong way. Anybody think more than two hours a week? This isn't per day. OK, we've got some optimistic people in the back. Thank you. Thank you.

Well, it may surprise you that the typical parent spends 15 minutes a week in meaningful dialogue with their school-aged children.

Audience: They just want to know their grades.

Josh Davies: Yeah, just the grades. That's all I need to know. All determines whether or not you're leaving your room for the next month, right?

Now, here's the thing. As a researcher, I don't actually have any data that proves that this is bad. Anecdotally, I know it can't be good, but I don't have anything that proves this isn't good. Fortunately, there was some work that was done by another institution, University of Minnesota.

Audience: Woo!

Josh Davies: OK, we got three Gophers in the room. Nice. OK, good. Good, yeah. The University of Minnesota did a 25-year research project. They looked at youth, then analyzed them 25 years later to see what inputs early in childhood development had the greatest outputs in terms of later career and life success.

Was it their parents' income? Was it the ZIP code they were raised in? Was it their race? Was it their gender? They found none of those things was the best predictive indicator. What they found was was doing regular chores at home. So that's interesting research.

We then combed through some other research to figure out, are people doing more or less chores? This was interesting. So Brawn Research did a study where they asked 750 parents two simple questions. Question number one, did you have to do regular chores growing up as a kid? For almost all of us, we said yes. 82% of them said they had to do regular chores growing up as a kid.

These same parents that 82% had to do chores were asked, do you make your children today do chores around the house? Only 28% said that they did--

Audience: Wow.

Josh Davies: --to which I asked, why have kids? I mean, isn't the whole point just to get somebody to mow the lawn and do your bathrooms? I mean, is there another reason have kids? I guess, yeah?, OK.

This is a seismic change, though, in a single generation. And again, the University of Minnesota study found that it was the best indicator of future interpersonal and workplace success. Those of you who do have kids around the house, yes, feel free to take a picture and send this to them so that they know why you're doing what you're doing.

If you don't also want to read the entire almost 300-page research project, two key takeaways that I got from it. Number one, it didn't matter how difficult the chore was to do, just that it was done on a regular basis and there was a penalty for not doing it. And second of all, the younger a child does chores, the more impact it had on their future success. So just a couple of things for you to keep in mind.

Why is this important? Because most of us said that's where we developed these skills in the first place. And if we're not developing at home, whose responsibility is it to then teach us these skills?

Audience: Teachers.

Josh Davies: Teachers, our classrooms. How many people in this room are recovering secondary school teachers? Anybody?

[laughter]

OK. Yes, yes, I see you. I feel you. We're out there, yes. And here's why we're probably not there anymore. This vision of happy schools and lots of resources, right? Yeah, yeah, it's not even real back then either, right?

Here's the reality. Like it or not-- and I'm not here to talk about policy. I'm here to talk about unintended consequences. There's a lot of things that happen with education policy that create unintended consequences.

One of the ones nationally was the No Child Left Behind Act to create accountability in secondary education. A great idea, right? We want to have more accountability. Fantastic. How do we measure accountability?

Audience: With test results.

Josh Davies: Test results. We want to watch your improvement in test scores. Test scores determine which schools stay open. Test scores determine which teachers get raises. Test scores determine which principals get promoted. So what do you suppose schools focus on?

Audience: Tests.

Josh Davies: Tests. And as a result, we're testing more and more and more and more. On average, a typical high school senior today will have taken almost 100 high-stakes standardized test before they graduate. Your sophomore year alone, on average, nationally, you take 10 and 1/2 high-stakes tests that one year alone.

For me, the part that is most scary, though, is that we have preschoolers who take four high-stakes tests in their preschool year to start off the whole process. So if we're spending all this time testing, testing, and testing, that's taking up a lot of instruction. That's taking up a lot of focus.

At the same time, we have a counterfact that also we're dealing with, and that's this. And I know what those of you in the back of the room are saying right now. You're like, Josh, that is a terrible slide. I can't read it from back here. Don't worry. Heather's in the front. She's like-- Wendy's in the front. She's like, Josh, that's a terrible slide. I can't read it from up here either.

Here's what I'm just going to tell you. You don't need to know what's on this slide. Here's what you need to know. There's a lot of red and not a lot of blue. The red are all states that, over the last seven years, have had a decline in per pupil spending in secondary education. The blue states are all states that had increases in per pupil spending.

We're led at the top by our good friends in Oklahoma that lost nearly 23 percentage points per student. Don't worry. Look-- California, negative 13.1.

Audience: Yay.

Josh Davies: And this is not a good time to be in the top 10, just so you know. But regardless, we see almost all these states with double-digit increases. The blue states have small minor increases. There's really only one state that has had a significant increase over the last seven years, and that is North Dakota.

And I will tell you right, now all eight of those kids are getting a phenomenal education, OK? They're crushing, am I not? I'm kidding. There are more than eight kids in North Dakota. But this is about, with the discovery of oil and gas in Western North Dakota, it changed the state's economy, drove up property taxes, which is largely where they get their revenue from.

Regardless of where it is from, what we're seeing are declines in spending. So if you're losing money and you're putting more emphasis on testing, something has to give. So what types of classes are being offered less and less in American secondary education?

Audience: (Inaudible)

Josh Davies: Arts, foreign languages, PE. That's what all the news says. When you look at the data, here's what the data shows. There's only one type of class that has seen a significant decline over the last 20 years-- career technical education.

Why is that important? That's the work-based learning classes where we developed those skills. It doesn't matter if you didn't go into those fields.

A lot of you took career and technical education classes growing up in high school because that was just what you did, and you learned those skills as part of the process-- not because you wanted to get into auto tech, or not because you wanted to get into marketing, not because you were interested in family and consumer science. Don't call it home ec anymore. Because that's the reality. We develop those skills in those classes and, unfortunately, fewer and fewer students are getting those opportunities.

Even in our adult ed programs, we've lost a lot of career and tech ed classes. And part of the problem is this. In an era of declining budgets, CTE classes are expensive. They're hard to do, but the value far outweighs the cost, in my opinion.

Because if we're not developing the skills at home, we're not developing the skills at school, we're running out of places to learn these skills. But for most of us, the places we learn skills next was on the job, right-- those very first jobs.

Anybody in here have a really awesome first job? Very few hands are going up on awesome. What was your awesome first job?

Audience: I was a the dungeon master for a county recreation department.

Josh Davies: A dungeon master for a county recreation department. I'm going to assume, by the way, it's a role-playing game dungeon master and that you are not actually running a subterranean lair. I'm going to go with that one, right? What was your awesome first job?

Audience: I started my own company shoveling horse manure.

Josh Davies: Started her own company--

Audience: Woo!

Josh Davies: --shoveling horse manure.

Audience: [laughs]

Josh Davies: I get the entrepreneurial part, but literally, you're dealing-- never mind. All right, any other great first jobs?

Audience: I was the youngest furniture salesperson.

Josh Davies: The youngest furniture salesperson, that's pretty awesome. What was yours?

Audience: Putting books on the library shelves.

Josh Davies: Putting books on the library shelves, learning important skills like the Dewey decimal system. Right? That's critical today. Let's move to the other side. Anybody have a bad first job? Some bad first jobs around here? You're like, oh, god, yes. What was your bad first job?

Audience: McDonald's fast food.

Josh Davies: McDonald's fast food. How many of you had a fast food or some sort of food service job as one of your first jobs? It's estimated that the NRA says-- just, that's the restaurant association, not the rifle association. The NRA estimates that 40% of us got our first start in some sort of food service job. Though the vast majority of those people don't actually go into a career in food service, it's a great place to learn some lessons.

The bad news is as a kid, for those of you who never worked fast food, the smell doesn't come off your clothes, right? There's no question. All your friends know when you have had the shift beforehand. They're like, [sniffs]. Can you go home and change? Anyone else had a bad first job?

Sold those family photo packages over the phone, doing the telemarketing for a whopping $3.25 an hour. But you learn important skills, like learning to be told no a lot. Regardless of whether or not you had a great first job or you had an awful first job, those first jobs, for many of us, taught us valuable lessons.

Sometimes you have to do things you don't want to do. You got to show up on time. Sometimes your boss is a jerk. I need to get an education so I don't have to keep doing this job the rest of my life, right? Whatever those lessons were, we learned them early.

The problem is this. In America today, we are finding a huge gap in youth employment. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has been keeping track of 16 to 19-year-old employment since 1948. Since 1948, it averages about 50% to 60% of 16 to 19-year-olds are engaged in the labor market.

You can see that trend goes up and down a little bit, but it's a pretty consistent line until you get to the dot-com bust of 2001. Then it starts to go down. The great recession of 2007-2008 exacerbates it. It keeps coming down, and now we have cut that number almost in half to around 30%, 35%.

The scarier part is that the BLS estimates that by 2024, that number will be down to 25%, meaning that only one out of every four 16 to 19-year-old will be engaged in the labor market, will have a job. Wow.

Now, a place, though, outside of this space for a lot of 16 to 19-year-olds wasn't working year-round, but it was doing a summer job, right? Summer job's a great way to get some of that experience.

Well, here's the thing summer employment peaked, in the '70s, around 75%. It's been going down ever since then. Now less than 45% of 16 to 19-year-olds will hold a summer job.

So why is it that so few young people are working in America? What's the problem? What's happening out there? What do you hear?

We hear this a lot. Adults are holding those lower-income entry-level jobs for a variety of reasons. Maybe they need health insurance so they're working at Starbucks. Maybe the McDonald's is tired of replacing these kids every 15 minutes, so they're just going to hire a 60-year-old who they know has nothing else to do. Whatever it may be, we hear adults are taking them.

I heard somebody else say sports.

Audience: My kid plays sports.

Josh Davies: Mine plays sports. Here's where I get to drop my own. (IMITATING ELDERLY) Well, back in my day, you played football in the fall. You played basketball in the winter. You're in track in the spring. That's what you did. Those of you who don't have kids in sports right now, when is the sports season?

Audience: All year.

Josh Davies: All year, right? There is no in-season and out of season. There are tournaments happening all the time.

I talked to my parents who have kids doing sports. They tell me about all these weekend tournaments and all these things. I'm not surprised their kids don't work. I'm surprised they can hold a job still, right? It seems that all they're doing is driving around the country to go to these different tournaments. I'm like, oh, my gosh. It's crazy.

Here's what's interesting. Challenger, Gray, & Christmas analyzed the BLS data since 1994 to see what was causing this huge increase in youth disengagement in the labor market. What was it? What was making it drive?

And here's what they found. The number of disengaged youth went from about 600,000 to over 1.2 million. That's that blue line in the top. Here's what's interesting, is this red line. The red line at the bottom is this. I want a job and I can't find one. What do you notice about that red line?

Audience: It's static.

Josh Davies: It's static. It doesn't move, and it's pretty low. The whole reason that blue line goes up is it's almost perfectly followed by that yellowish green line. That yellowish green line is that I don't want a job and no one's making me.

Regardless of for whatever reason, this culture, this idea, this concept that youth should be working has gone away. More and more parents are saying, I want your academics to be your job. I need you to get the sports scholarship, or else I can't afford this ridiculous cost of college anymore, right? Exactly, right?

And that's why, by the way, I find that more and more parents are putting their kids in the most bizarre sports. Because they're like, actually, the odds of a lacrosse scholarship are much higher. I'm like, you don't even know what lacrosse is. I don't care. I've read the numbers.

What you find is that more and more parents are saying it's OK not to work. And here, the problem with that is then we don't develop those early job skills until much later in life. And I will tell you, it's a lot easier to deal and learn those skills on the fly when you're 16 at Burger King or McDonald's than it is when you're 24, 25, 26 and you're in a professional job for the first time.

So let's recap. Not happening at home. Not happening at school anymore. And now kids aren't working at all. So where, then, do we get the messages around the value of work? How do we help develop these skills? Well, through pop culture and mass media. How's that working out for you? Yeah.

Have you guys seen this billboard around town? You guys seen this one? Probably not because the US stopped paying money for these kinds of things in the 1920s. The reality is that mass media and pop culture don't celebrate work. Work is not seen as something to be valued. It's not sexy. It's not fun.

And what's interesting, for those of you who watch daytime TV, which I only highlight daytime TV because it's the time when most people who aren't working watch TV, the top two types of ads nationally on local news, number one, pharmaceuticals, some sort of pill that will solve all of your problem.

But what I find interesting, the one that actually outpaces that, injury lawyers. Because what are the injury lawyers going to get you?

Audience: Money.

Josh Davies: Money for doing what?

Audience: Nothing.

Josh Davies: Nothing. Not learning a job skill. Not getting a high school equivalency. Not getting a certification. Your path to financial success is getting T-boned by a semi, right? And the strong arm got me $600,000.

Number one type of TV show on TV today? Reality TV. What skills do you need in order to be successful on a reality TV show?

Audience: Nothing.

Josh Davies: Yeah, drama. You need to be able to create drama. That's the only skill necessary. How many employers do you know that are looking for drama from an employee?

[laughter]

It's like the least valuable skill. It's below education. Trust me on that one. No employer's like, you know, we really could use some more drama here in the office. Do you get in fights easily? Are you easily offended? Awesome. We want you around, please. Thank you. No, nobody says that.

The reality is more and more work is seen as a stigma rather than something to be celebrated. In fact, I saw this the other day. I thought it was absolutely perfect. It really sums up where we are in America today about giving 100% at work, because it is true. We still give 100% at work, just not every day.

[laughter]

And this is why I asked, I was, like, can we please do Friday morning? I know I've only got 5%. I want to make sure I get all of them for that 5%. Saturday's not even on here, right?

The reality is we're in a deficit of work ethic in this country not because of some generational challenge, but because of the societal pillars that have been teaching these skills have been going away for 10, 20, 30, 40 years. And we are seeing the impacts of those. The impact of this lack of development in skills we see in a lot of different places.

This probably speaks to what most of you know instinctively, but I have data to prove it. Hold on. Some of the stuff is really earth-shattering, OK? Hold on now.

A study went in and it proved this. As educators, you may be surprised. Students who were in the top quartile of work ethic tended to graduate more frequently.

Audience: [laughs]

Josh Davies: I know that's difficult to believe. But here's the reality. For a lot of us, the challenge of this is is that, quite honestly, the same skills that make you successful academically will make you successful in the workplace. And concurrently, the ones that make you unsuccessful academically will also hinder you in the workplace. So we've got to overcome that.

Why? Because we are at a really weird place in America today. What do I mean? We've got this weird dichotomy in the labor force. Why? Because we have super low unemployment.

For those of who you don't see, we had brand new numbers just come out today nationwide. We're at 3.5% unemployment, the lowest in 50 years. Statewide here in California, including the Central Valley, we're still only at 3.7. This is generationally low.

But here's what's also interesting with that. We're seeing an inverse in the number of jobs available and the number of people looking for work. There are fewer people looking for work than there are jobs. Every single person who's unemployed right now could have a job if they wanted one.

But that's a part of the problem. Because while we have this super low unemployment, it's really driven not just by job creation, but by this, the lack of labor force participation. More and more adults are sitting on the sidelines. We are at record lows, 63.4% in the numbers that came out today, meaning that over one out of every three adults is sitting at home on the sideline not even looking for work.

Why? Because employers tell them they don't have the job skills necessary. They've given up hope because maybe they never graduated high school. Maybe they were told that it had to be college or nothing, and so they're not even trying.

Here's the reality. It doesn't matter where you enter into the workforce. More and more employers are saying this. Three quarters of them say the incoming workforce is inadequately prepared. They don't have the right skills. They don't have the work ethic. This is what they call the skills gap.

So what skills are necessary? What do we have to do to help get these adults back into the labor market? When you ask employers, is it technology skills? Is it computer skills? Is it certifications? Well, yeah, those things are important, but what's the most important thing? Basic soft skills.

More and more employers are saying this to us. If you could just give me somebody who will show up to work every day, follow basic instructions, and piss a clean drug test, I will hire every single person you send me. That's the reality of where we are.

The problem is we don't always see it this way, and a lot of our job seekers don't either. These are skills that they can develop. More and more hiring managers are saying that soft skills are not just nice to have, but need to have. In fact, 93% now say that soft skills are as important, if not equally important or more important, than technical skills when hiring.