Marty Nemko

Marty Nemko holds a Ph.D. specializing in education evaluation from U.C. Berkeley.

How to attract and vet for the best employees

Pat was well-qualified for the job. So, without puffery, her resume, cover letter, interview and references made that clear.

Chris wasn’t qualified for the job but wanted it, so hired a professional resume writer who not only sanitized his job history as much as possible but made Chris look far more intelligent, organized and detail-oriented than is true. A job coach gave Chris model answers for likely interview questions and then, on video, pointed out when the delivery didn’t seem credible. (For free, the government also often provides resume and interview coaching, including video.) Having been fired from the previous jobs for incompetence, laziness and lack of ethics, Chris had no legitimate good references and so pressured his Uncle Al to pretend to be Chris’s former boss so that when a prospective employer called for a reference, Uncle Al would say, “Chris was a fabulous employee.”

It’s probably rare that someone uses all those deceptions, but too often the Chrises of the world get the job over Pats. When this happens, it’s devastating not just to the Pats but to society. Hiring a Chris in the private sector means the goods and services we buy and pay for are worse. When the government hires Chrises, it means that everything from education to police is compromised.

Employers could do far better when it comes to hiring. Here’s how.

Outreach

Wise employers realize that it’s safer to hire someone referred by an employee or friend because they’re unlikely to recommend someone bad. There’s greater risk in hiring an unknown.

But many employers ill-advisedly focus on unknowns by placing job ads. A report by CareerXroads, a consultancy to corporations on hiring, found that in 2013, 34.5% of hiring by the 250 large companies surveyed came from career sites and job boards. Ads often poorly describe what’s required of an employee. A wise employer, if using an ad, will list only the job’s central and difficult requirements. That results in clearer, fairer communication with job seekers. Also, an ad should post a salary range—for example, “$85,000-$100,000 depending on the candidate’s qualifications.”

Employers should think twice about requiring a degree. Yes, a degree is an objective criterion but too often a invalid one. Sometimes, the boldest thinkers and self-starters are those who decided that the years and cost of the degree would be more wisely spent outside the halls of academe. The wise employer doesn’t automatically exclude such candidates.

The application

Require all applicants to take an online test that simulates the job’s difficult, important tasks. To reduce cheating, applicants would be informed that the interview will include a parallel exam, proctored. That is typically a far more valid screening criterion than a cover letter or resume, which could have been ghost-written.

The wise employer might want to not require a resume. Even if the candidate doesn’t use a hired gun, aggregations of survey results by Statistic Brain and Grad School Hub show that a large percentage of resumes contain misleading information or outright lies. Remember, too, that excellent candidates may not be actively looking for a job. They’re well employed and don’t need to spend the time developing a resume. If they saw a job opening that was appealing and it didn’t require the hours it takes to create a resume, they might be more inclined to apply.

Ban professionally written resumes. As mentioned earlier, even if professional resume writers don’t stretch the truth, they often make candidates seem like better thinkers and writers and more organized and detail-oriented than they are. Those attributes are key to a large percentage of white-collar jobs. Resume writers claim that it’s ethical to write someone else’s resume. If so, why don’t they write, “Written by John Jones, professional resume writer”? For the benefit of the job seekers who want to do their own work, including the poor that can’t afford to hire a resume writer–as well as for employers who want the right person for the job, and for society, which benefits when the right people for the job are hired–employers would be wise to prohibit resumes crafted by professional resume writers or require that its author be acknowledged.

The interview(s)

It’s a mistake to ask questions that applicants could reasonably anticipate, such as “Tell me about yourself,” “Why the employment gaps?” “What are your greatest strengths and weaknesses” and “What project are you proudest of and least proud of and what did you learn from that?” Because such questions are so common, there’s a fair chance the interviewee is spewing a scripted answer found in an interviewing guide or provided by a job coach.

After the proctored job-simulation exam, the interview should consist mainly of actual simulations of difficult, common tasks in that job. For example, if it’s a candidate for a managerial position, you might ask the candidate to run a meeting. Or say, “Pretend I’m your supervisee and my work is of poor quality and my work ethic is bad. Role play that meeting.”

Requiring more than two, maximum three, interviews, is likely to turn off strong candidates. And it’s too demanding of candidates’ and employees’ time. The simulation-centric exam and two simulation-centric interviews with key stakeholders should be enough.

Don’t skip the background check. With the amount of deception in applications, a background check is essential. Thanks to the online availability of so much data, a professional background checking service can, at low cost, verify much of what’s stated on the application plus other key factors, for example, if s/he is on the list of registered sex offenders.

Reference checks. For fear of a lawsuit, many employers will only verify dates of employment and whether the person left voluntarily. Alas, even the latter may not be trustworthy because, to get a bad employee to leave without suing, the employer may have agreed to tell subsequent employers that the employee left voluntarily.

But it’s still worth trying to get a meaningful reference. Do it by phone rather than by email. The tone with which an employer says, “She left voluntarily” can speak volumes. Do try to get more than that. One way is to make your request in a human way, for example, “The person I hire will work closely with me. It’s really important I get someone competent, hard-working, ethical, low-maintenance and kind. Do you think I’ll be happy with this person?” Again, the reference may not say a lot but you can learn a lot from tone.

The hiring decision. It’s wise to base your decision more on intelligence and drive than on degrees and experience. A person could be great at school and lousy in the workplace. He could have 20 years of experience, but have been a low-quality employee for those 20 years. It’s much easier to teach skills than to increase someone’s intelligence and drive.

Responding to applicants.

Too often, employers don’t even give applicants the dignity of a rejection letter, leaving them hanging indefinitely. And candidates deserve a rejection letter that’s more helpful than, “We’ve had many qualified applicants.” Candidates put much time and emotional energy into applying. They deserve at least a bit of brief honest feedback.

Too often, when employers give feedback, they don’t give the real reason but something hard to argue with like, “You’re overqualified,” “We wanted someone with more direct experience” or “We chose someone with a master’s degree,” when in fact if the candidate showed better reasoning skills, drive, technical expertise or ethics, she would have been hired.

Honest feedback benefits both candidates and society. Imagine how much growth to people and society would accrue from simply giving all rejected candidates a bit of honest feedback. Yes, giving the true reason(s) you rejected them may result in some of them arguing with you, but that seems a small price to pay.

The upshot

In sum, the proposed model is simple: get your pool of applicants by referral, not ads; screen them using simulation rather than the cheat-prone resume, cover letter and interview questions; and treat all applicants with respect: not too many interviews and prompt, honest feedback to unsuccessful applicants.

That model requires less time while increasing the likelihood of a worthy person being hired. That serves not only employees and employers, but all of us.

Marty Nemko holds a Ph.D. specializing in education evaluation from U.C. Berkeley and subsequently taught there. He is the author of seven books and an award-winning career coach, writer, speaker and public radio host specializing in career/workplace issues and education reform. His writings and radio programs are archived on www.martynemko.com.

Read next: 3 Most Important Things to Know When You’re Hiring Somebody

Marty Nemko holds a Ph.D. specializing in education evaluation from U.C. Berkeley.

Our culture of praise and positivity encourages the status quo, but doesn't really do us much service

Worldwide and even in the U.S., most people live challenging lives. Many live and die poor and in pain. Perhaps that’s the reason to try to be upbeat. As singer Peggy Lee said, “If that’s all there is, let’s break out the booze.”

But a case can be made that we need more negativity.

In the workplace

Many bosses focus on the positive, both because that’s what they learned in psychology and management courses, and because when an employee gets a poor evaluation, the reaction is often not, “Thanks for the feedback. I’ll work to improve.” It’s defensiveness, and sometimes a legal grievance.

True, praise reinforces desired behaviors, but it can also encourage complacency and certainly doesn’t provide the feedback an employee needs to improve. And such criticism can be motivating: “Now it’s clear, if I don’t improve, I’ll lose my job. I better do something.” Here are some specific examples I’ve used before of criticism being motivating:

• A 250 lb. woman, Cearra Swetman, wearing a Hooter’s tee shirt, was told, “You don’t look like any Hooter’s girl I’ve ever seen.” That criticism is what finally motivated her to lose weight—128 pounds to be precise, after which she got hired as a waitress at—you guessed it–Hooters.
• A high school counselor told Phil Padrid, who had done poorly in school, that he “wasn’t college material” and should consider getting a job in the post office. He’s now a veterinarian.
• A professor told me I couldn’t write. That made me want to prove him wrong. I’ve since had seven books and almost 3,000 articles published in major publications.

Beyond these anecdotes, a University of Exeter study found that taunts from opposing fans improved players’ performance.

Job seekers

Job seekers, too, suffer from the lack of criticism. They work hard to apply for a job and usually get no response or a form-letter rejection that provides no feedback, only the useless, “We had many qualified candidates. Sorry.”

Personal life

America’s bias toward excessive positivity, of course, also takes a toll on a person’s integrity. People feel they must hold their tongue and not criticize lest they be viewed as negative, naysayers, curmudgeons.

And in dating, how often do people go on first dates and the person never calls again without explaining why. A client of mine said it frustrates her so much. She wonders if she’s doing anything wrong but she can’t improve if she doesn’t get feedback.

Across the board

Praise encourages the status quo. A bias toward searching for what’s wrong is more likely to unearth what needs improvement.

The roots of our hyperpositivity

Our bias toward positivity has its roots in the schools and colleges. Grade inflation is rampant. In Academically Adrift, by sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roska, a survey of 1,600 undergraduates nationwide found that the average GPA of students who were studying less than five hours a week was 3.22.

Our hyperpositivity is driven also by our prioritizing self-esteem, sometimes even over performance. That’s ironic in that true self-esteem comes from accomplishment.

Our excessive positivity may also have roots in Christianity, in which the highest good is not truth or accomplishment but love.

What should we do

1. Stop grade inflation. A C grade should mean “average,” not “terrible.” If a 7th-grade teacher wants to reward a student who worked hard on a term paper that showed only 4th-grade level work, give an A for effort and a F for performance.

Critics of that would argue that too many students wouldn’t get promoted or graduate. The antidote is to reinforce tracking, the placement of students in classes by ability and achievement, which became unpopular for a period in the late 1980s and 1990s. Not everyone can achieve to the same level. There needs to be different levels of high school and college diplomas. That way, students could move on to a next grade but without that promotion or diploma being meaningless, as are so many of today’s. The aforementioned survey found that 36% of college graduates showed no improvements in writing and critical thinking in four years of college.

2. Honor, don’t denigrate, well-meaning criticizers. How feeble are we that we’re swayed more by dubious flattery than by valid suggestions. We should replace denigrations of the well-intentioned critic. He’s not “negative” or “a curmudgeon.” He’s “good at finding areas for improvement and brave enough to suggest them.”

3. Make candid feedback the workplace norm. Employers should take a lesson from famed former GE CEO Jack Welch. He was called “Neutron Jack” because, as much as possible, he retained only top performers. When I interviewed him on my radio program, he defended that by explaining that no one who got let go was surprised. He installed a culture at GE that emphasizes honest feedback and that only A players get to stay. He said that the GE employees appreciate that they get to work with only high performers. “Not everyone is meant to work at GE,” he said. Accoding to Welch, when he came to GE, its refrigerators were at the bottom of the Consumer Reports ratings. When he left, they were at the top.

4. Seek out criticism. People will respect your willingness to ask for feedback, especially if you ask well. For example, you might ask your boss and coworkers something like: “I’m trying to keep growing. I’d really appreciate candid feedback on where I’m doing well and where I might improve.”

Even if well-worded, many people are reluctant to provide criticism, so you might try TalentCheckup.com. It enables you to pick three to eight people to provide feedback anonymously by email.

Negativity is key to America’s future success

Feedback is crucial for improvement–for individuals, workplaces and society. Praise is not enough. Earned praise plus well-considered, tactfully dispensed criticism may, without costing the nation a dime, be among the more potent ways to increase America’s future success.

Marty Nemko holds a Ph.D. specializing in education evaluation from U.C. Berkeley and subsequently taught there. He is the author of seven books and an award-winning career coach, writer, speaker and public radio host specializing in career/workplace issues and education reform. His writings and radio programs are archived on www.martynemko.com.

Marty Nemko holds a Ph.D. specializing in education evaluation from U.C. Berkeley.

The case for making marijuana, alcohol and tobacco illegal

America just took three steps toward nationally legal marijuana: Oregon, Alaska, and D.C. Should we be lighting up a celebratory doobie? I don’t think so.

Children

The nation is wringing its hands about its student achievement. In the latest international comparison, as I cited in a recent TIME article, the U.S. finished below average among the 34 OECD nations, despite being No. 1 in the world in per-student spending. Yet we’re legalizing pot, which may cause far greater damage than once thought:

• A 2014 Harvard/Northwestern study found “Young adults who used marijuana only recreationally showed significant abnormalities in two key brain regions that are important in emotion and motivation.”
• A 2013 study from the University of Maryland School of Medicine published in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology found that “Regular marijuana use during adolescence, but not adulthood, may permanently impair cognition and increase the risk for psychiatric diseases, such as schizophrenia.” The follow-up 2014 study found that using marijuana as a teen reduces gray matter in the parts of the brain associated with motivational, emotional and affective processing.
• A 2014 National Institute on Drug Abuse report summarized a large, long-term Duke University study: “People who began smoking marijuana heavily in their teens lost an average of 8 points in IQ between age 13 and age 38. Importantly, the lost cognitive abilities were not fully restored in those who quit smoking marijuana as adults.”

And the risks are not just to mental health but to physical:

• A 2014 study published in the Journal of the American Heart Association found that marijuana causes heart attacks and diseases in the arteries, even among the young.
• A 2014 study found that marijuana use during pregnancy can impede development of the baby’s brain.
• A 2013 review of scientific literature by Canada’s public health agency reported that “a number of in vitro studies have provided strong evidence that smoke from burning cannabis is carcinogenic.”
• All that on top of a mountain of scary data reported not by some conservative group, but by the Obama Administration.

Pot advocates try to dismiss all that by pointing out that marijuana is being legalized only for adults. But as with alcohol, wider availability filters down to kids. And with pot legal for adults, the black market will likely redirect its efforts to teens, where, as cited, the damage of marijuana use is greater and more irreversible.

There’s already evidence of that. Dr. Christian Thurstone, Colorado Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Society president and youth addiction researcher at the University of Colorado-Denver, reported that his clinic has been “inundated with young people reporting for marijuana-addiction treatment. Every day, we see the acute effects of the policy of legalization. And our kids are paying a great price.”

At Work

Then there’s our workforce. Despite the moderate unemployment rate, people are having an ever harder time finding a decent job, as I pointed out in a previous TIME article. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the labor participation rate, the percentage of adults 16 to 64 that are employed or actively looking for work, is 62.8%, within 0.1% of the lowest point since early 1978. And those who are working are, on average, making less. An analysis of government data on income and poverty released in September found that “After adjusting for inflation, U.S. median household income is still 8 percent lower than it was before the recession, 9 percent lower than at its peak in 1999.”

Legalize pot and you have a workforce that is worth not more, but less—more likely to suffer from the poor memory, reduced motivation and emotional problems cited above. Kevin Sabet, former Obama White House drug policy advisor, wrote on CNN.com about a long list of problems that have occurred since legalization in Colorado, including “Employers…reporting more workplace incidents involving marijuana use.” Pot advocates claim that legalization will create jobs. It will cost jobs.

Those are statistics. Their impact is made more real with human stories. For example, I attended a party at which one attendee had worked on the assembly line in the Ford plant in Dearborn, Michigan. He said that workers would routinely be high on marijuana and pull such pranks as deliberately dropping a bolt into a car’s axle so that, when driven, the car would rattle. Why would they do that? Because the high workers thought it would be amusing to see if they could frustrate the Quality Assurance Team, which would hear a rattle in the car and it would take them hours to figure out what caused it. Pot did.

The human costs

Apart from the toll on businesses and consumers, pot imposes enormous human costs beyond measurable disease.

As a career counselor in the San Francisco Bay Area—epicenter of “medical” marijuana use–I’ve had many clients who need to find a job but are unmotivated and have poor memory. When I ask if they smoke or have smoked a lot of pot, their answer is usually yes.

Not only are such people likely to be un- or underemployed, their families must live with the consequences of poor motivation, memory and psychological functioning, which also often translates to being more difficult to live with: unwilling to keep their home clean, poor parenting, etc.

Legal pot doesn’t yield tax dollars. It costs tax dollars.

When unable to counter the above arguments against legalization, pot activists often shift to arguing that legalization will increase tax revenues. But the aforementioned Obama Administration report states that the additional revenue would be far outweighed by the increased health care costs. For example, that report summarizes a Centers for Disease Control-funded study: “The cost to society of alcohol alone is estimated to be more than 15 times the revenue gained by their taxation.”

What sorts of costs? Apart from the increase in the cost of treating physical and mental illness cited above, there’s the increase in vehicle accidents. A study by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found that 18 percent of drivers in fatal accidents tested positive for a non-alcoholic mind-altering drug, mainly marijuana. And this study found almost twice as many drivers in fatal car accidents tested positive versus a control group. And since legalization in Washington, data adapted from the Washington State Patrol and Washington State Toxicologist summarized by Project Sam, “a nonpartisan alliance of lawmakers, scientists and other concerned citizens,” found that in 2013, the percentage of vehicle accidents in which the driver tested positive for marijuana rose 40%. Contrast that with the two years before legalization: From 2011-2012, there was only a 0.7% increase, and from 2010-2011 also a 0.7% increase.

But what about medicinal use?

To the extent that marijuana is a medicinal drug of choice, it can be treated like any other prescription medicine. If a physician wants to prescribe it, the prescription can be filled at a pharmacy. No need to make it available over-the-counter for recreational use. After all, just because morphine has medical uses doesn’t mean it should be bought like any other retail item.

Make pot, alcohol and tobacco illegal.

Freedom is not an absolute good. It is a good that should, on a case-by-case basis, be weighed against the liabilities. For example, nearly everyone accepts these restrictions of freedom because of the benefits: We force people to pay more for cars by requiring that vehicles have anti-pollution devices, seat belts and airbags. We force the public to pay more for meat by requiring safety standards. We force people to not take a newly developed medication until it undergoes extensive testing for safety and efficacy.

When weighing the benefits and liabilities of marijuana, alcohol and tobacco, it seems clear that an out-and-out ban, while politically infeasible, is what government would enact if it truly cared about its residents. Like millions of Americans, I enjoy having a drink or even sometimes three. I have smoked pot. But I would gladly give them up for the societal benefit: less disease and fewer car accidents, more fully functioning people, a more employable work force and, in turn, better products and services, plus the richer lives people would lead.

Yes, prohibition would still leave a black market, but the perfect is the enemy of the good. When alcohol was made illegal during Prohibition, alcohol use dropped by 30% to 40%. (Here is the original study.) Decreasing marijuana and alcohol use 30% to 40% would yield greater benefit than almost any policy we could enact. Yet we’re hurtling in the opposite direction. We’re on our way to soon being able to get high legally anywhere in the U.S. Excuse me, I need a drink.

Marty Nemko holds a Ph.D. specializing in education evaluation from U.C. Berkeley and subsequently taught there. He is the author of seven books and an award-winning career coach, writer, speaker and public radio host specializing in career/workplace issues and education reform. His writings and radio programs are archived on www.martynemko.com.

Marty Nemko holds a Ph.D. specializing in education evaluation from U.C. Berkeley.

A radical plan for reinventing K-12 education

In the most recent international comparison of school achievement, among the 34 OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries, the U.S. ranked 17^th in reading, 20^th in science and 27^th in math, behind such countries as Portugal, Italy and Spain. (Shanghai China ranked 1^st.) The results are virtually unchanged from previous years. And our top students are doing particularly poorly. For example, in math, only 2% of U.S. students scored a 6 (the highest), compared with 31% in Shanghai China. The U.S. is moving toward mediocrity in a world that requires anything but.

And it’s not for lack of spending. The U.S. ranks #1 in the world in per-student spending on education.

Politicians tout education as key to America’s future, including closing the achievement gap. But for education to fulfill the hope, education may need not more tweaks, but reinvention.

Dream-Team Teachers

Imagine that every child, rich and poor, from Maine to San Diego, would be taught by a dream team of the world’s most inspiring, transformational teachers and receive totally individualized instruction. It’s possible. Here’s how.

Take, for example, Algebra 1, considered (falsely, as I will argue later) a critical course. Think back to when you took it. Unless you were the exception, your teacher didn’t fascinate you nor did you learn algebra in a way that you use it in your daily life. But from among the nation’s thousands of algebra teachers, there must be a few who are magical in their ability to get kids to understand algebra, love it and make it part of their lives.

So imagine that the U.S. Department of Education invited algebra teachers worldwide to submit a video of themselves teaching, and picked three highly transformational teachers. Each would create his or her favorite 1/3 of the course with the help of a world-class gamification/simulation expert (for example, someone from Electronic Arts or LucasArts) and a techie to put it all into an interactive, individualized online course. The teacher would give mini-lectures followed by simulations, games, individualized practice and supplementary materials. That online course would be available on all types of devices and platforms, and to every teacher in the nation and beyond. Each teacher could use it as the centerpiece of class time or decide to teach the class traditionally and use the dream-team-taught lessons as homework.

If dream-team instruction proves superior, it could be expanded to all high school subjects and even piloted with lower grades, for example, third-grade science.

Dream Curriculum

Even with dream instruction, if students are taught the same things that turn off even many motivated students, we’re fighting the battle to educate with one arm tied behind our back.

It is elitist that the school curriculum, especially the new national Common Core curriculum, demands all students learn arcana they won’t even need in college, let alone in life–for example, the intricacies of Shakespeare and the trigonometric reciprocal functions. Meanwhile, the curriculum does not focus on helping students graduate with far more critical skills: tools for resolving conflict without fisticuffs, parenting skills or financial literacy such as smart ways to save and borrow and estimation skills, for example, whether a person can afford to move out of his parents’ house.

Do we actually graduate so many high school students without basic skills? Consider this. The Education Trust reported that in 2010, 23% of applicants to the Army scored below the absolute minimum (31 percentile) on a basic skills test (Armed Forces Qualification Test) be considered by the military. The questions are truly basic. Here are samples.

The pool from which that 23% of low scorers came from had already been prescreened to eliminate candidates with criminal records and the intellectually disabled, for example.

And are the Common Core standards truly that esoteric? Indeed. For example, here is the introduction to and first example of the 8th grade math standards—students are required to learn all of these:

In Grade 8, instructional time should focus on three critical areas: (1) formulating and reasoning about expressions and equations, including modeling an association in bivariate data with a linear equation, and solving linear equations and systems of linear equations; (2) grasping the concept of a function and using functions to describe quantitative relationships; (3) analyzing two- and three-dimensional space and figures using distance, angle, similarity, and congruence, and understanding and applying the Pythagorean Theorem.

1. Students use linear equations and systems of linear equations to represent, analyze, and solve a variety of problems. Students recognize equations for proportions (/ = or = mx) as special linear equations ( = mx + ), understanding that the constant of proportionality () is the slope, and the graphs are lines through the origin. They understand that the slope () of a line is a constant rate of change, so that if the input or -coordinate changes by an amount , the output or -coordinate changes by the amount m·A. Students also use a linear equation to describe the association between two quantities in bivariate data (such as arm span vs. height for students in a classroom). At this grade, fitting the model, and assessing its fit to the data are done informally. Interpreting the model in the context of the data requires students to express a relationship between the two quantities in question and to interpret components of the relationship (such as slope and -intercept) in terms of the situation.

A schools superintendent and member of a major state superintendent’s cabinet, who wishes to remain anonymous, said, “If my fellow superintendents and I were in a room and told we had to take an exam that tested whether we met the 8^th grade standards, there’d be a massive rush for the door.” Yet we require all high schools students to learn that arcana while allowing them to graduate without basics?

Students, especially slow learners, cannot learn all we’d like. Can anyone who actually cares about students assert that it’s more important that they know even those 8^th-grade standards by the time they graduate from high school than the aforementioned more life-central skills?

First things should be first. You shouldn’t teach the area of the parabola unless a student knows how to estimate the full four-year cost of college attendance. At some point, a student may get to the point where the esoterica is next in line, but most of that would occur in college or graduate school.

Not only would students learn more in a first-things-first curriculum, they’d be more motivated to learn because the material is obviously important. For students, teachers and society, such a curriculum, especially compared with the Common Core, would indeed be a Dream Curriculum.

The Dream

I view the above as comprising the key elements of a Dream School. Such a school would fulfill students’ dreams of loving school, parents’ dreams of having their children grow more than they could have imagined and society’s dream of a citizenry that’s wise, employable and contributing both to their self-sufficiency and to the larger good.

Marty Nemko is an award-winning career coach, writer, speaker and public radio host specializing in career/workplace issues and education reform. His writings and radio programs are archived on www.martynemko.com.

Marty Nemko holds a Ph.D. specializing in education evaluation from U.C. Berkeley.

A roadmap to getting things done. Now

I’ve been a career counselor for 29 years now, and from the beginning it was clear that a major reason my clients have trouble finding and keeping work is that they’re procrastinators.

When I gave a talk to a large group of unemployed people and asked them to raise their hand if they were a procrastinator, about 85% did. Soon after, I happened to give a talk to college presidents and asked them the same question. Only 10% raised their hand.

Procrastination is a career killer.

Over these 29 years, I’ve read so many books and articles on how to cure procrastination and have tried all manner of approaches with my clients. I’ve tried the symptomatic: personal organizers, prioritized to-do lists and being accountable to someone. I’ve tried the psychological: looking for an underlying cause such as fear of failure, fear of success and perfectionism. No strategy worked better than fair to middling.

But in the past year, my results have improved. Here’s my best current thinking on keeping procrastination in check.

1. Replace your First Principle. Many procrastinators operate from the First Principle, “Work as little as I can get away with.” They opt to seek pleasure even if it means they’ll be only minimally productive.

Even if that doesn’t get them fired, they fail to realize how central productivity is to the life well led. I often try to explain that to clients as follows: Imagine there are two clones of you. Clone 1 strives for as much pleasure as possible and when feeling uncomfortable—for example when working on something hard—tries to escape to something pleasurable. Clone 2 realizes that you can have a lifetime of 100% pleasure by doing nothing but watching sitcoms, eating, laughing, getting stoned and having sex 100% of the time, but quietly, because he who has done nothing for others, indeed been a parasite on others, is unlikely to feel good about how he’s living life. So Clone 2 accepts being uncomfortable in the service of being as productive as possible. If you hope to overcome procrastination, it really helps to change your First Principle from “Do the least I can get away with” to “Be as productive as possible.”

2. Find the fun way to do it. Because procrastinators seek pleasure over responsibility, whenever a client is facing a task on which he might procrastinate, I encourage her to ask herself, “What’s a fun way to do it?” If you’re choosing a career, what’s the most fun career that would be realistic for you to aim for? If you’re looking for a job, would you find it more fun to schmooze or answer ads? If you have a report to prepare, would you find it more fun to review the literature or to interview people?

3. Yes, break it into baby steps. Though this advice has become cliché, most people, especially procrastinators, are more likely to complete tasks when broken into bite-sized pieces.

4. Force yourself to do it. When that new First Principle becomes ingrained, you’ll rarely procrastinate. But until then, you must force yourself to get started. Here’s how:

A) Picture the benefits of doing the task and the liabilities of not, for example, keeping your job versus getting “laid off.”

B) Make yourself do the first one-second task, even if it’s just to turn on the computer. Then do the next one-second task. You may well find yourself building momentum. Often, the hardest part is getting started.

C) If you get stuck, struggle for only one minute. If you don’t make progress by then, you probably won’t. Instead, you’ll get frustrated and thereby be more likely to procrastinate in the future. So when you hit a roadblock you can’t solve in a minute, get help or see if you can complete the task without solving that problem.

The Pomodoro Technique

This technique may help some procrastinators. It gets its name from those tomato-shaped kitchen timers (pomodoro means tomato in Italian). You set a timer for 20 minutes—that’s called a pomodoro. You work until the bell goes off, then take a 5-minute break. Work another pomodoro and take 5 minutes off. After the third pomodoro, you get 10 minutes off. Sounds hokey, but it has worked for a number of my clients.

Or try one of the to-do-list apps, for example, Remember the Milk or Wunderlist.

A final pep talk

If you can make yourself use this article’s approach, you’ll likely soon get in the habit of trying to be as productive as possible and, in turn, be happier about yourself and the life you’re leading.

Marty Nemko is an award-winning career coach, writer, speaker and public radio host specializing in career/workplace issues and education reform. His writings and radio programs are archived on www.martynemko.com.

Marty Nemko holds a Ph.D. specializing in education evaluation from U.C. Berkeley.

Professors, the campus and even the university as an institution need to be replaced

Despite a college degree’s enormous cost, almost half of college freshmen (43%) don’t graduate even if given six years. If they graduate, a 2011 national study found, 36% of the 1,600 students tested “did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning” in four years. And in the just-published follow-up, which tracked those students since their graduation in 2009, one-quarter were living at home two years after graduation and more than half said their lives lacked direction. Twenty percent were earning less than $30,000 a year, half of those less than $20,000.

Hidebound higher education

College hasn’t changed much in centuries. For the most part, there’s still a research-oriented Ph.D. sage on the stage lecturing on the liberal arts to a student body too often ill-prepared and uninterested in that. That occurs on a plush campus with a porcine administration, which results in a four-year sticker price at a brand-name private college of more than $200,000. (And those are 2012 figures. They’re higher now. Plus, those figures exclude tens of thousands of dollars in books, travel, living expenses and miscellany.)

Time, not for reform, but for reinvention

The meteoric rise in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), which see an average enrollment of 43,000 students per course, is an early sign that the public wants change. But MOOCs aren’t the answer. Sure, they’re free and available to all, but because they’re still taught largely by those professor types to often unprepared students, the completion and learning rates are low. MOOCs have a completion rate of only 10%.

Undergraduate courses should not be taught mainly by Ph.D.s. The gap between their and their students’ intellectual capabilities and interests is too great. The instructors should be mainly bachelor’s-level graduates who themselves had to work hard to get an A. Just as you’d probably learn computer basics better if taught by someone who had to work to acquire mastery rather than by a born computer whiz, the same is true of most undergraduate courses. To be licensed to teach, prospective instructors should have to complete a pedagogy boot camp, a one-weekend to one-semester intensive, which ironically, in most colleges, is required of teaching assistants but not of professors.

Most courses would be taught via online interactive video, which would both save much money—no campus required—and allow a dream team of the world’s most transformational instructors to teach. That way, everyone—from the poorest, weakest student to the most brilliant—would have access to the best in interactive instruction. In addition, the online format allows for individualized pacing and exciting simulations impossible to provide in a nation’s worth of live classes.

Extracurriculars would occur at local gyms, swimming pools, theaters and athletic fields. Where those were insufficient, facilities on existing campuses would be used, but much of campuses could be sold off.

Importantly, courses would not be attached to any institution. Anyone could submit his or her course for approval to the U.S. Department of Education. Screening would be done only for quality and rigor, not for censorship of content. If approved, the instructor, when posting availability of the course on one of the existing MOOC sites (Coursera, edX or Udemy), could include a badge saying the course is U.S. government–approved for X units of undergraduate credit. When a student has completed the specified number and type of courses to comprise a bachelor’s degree, the student would submit proof of completion to the Department of Education, plus the results of a proctored exam that would assess if the student had acquired bachelor’s-level skills in reading, writing, critical thinking and mathematical reasoning. If so, they would be granted a U.S. bachelor’s degree.

The result would be a far better college education at far lower cost.

A high-quality pathway for academically weak students

Today, we push nearly everyone to college, even those who did poorly in high school, for whom college is unlikely to be the best way to spend their years and money. America needs a major apprenticeship initiative like those in Germany and England: a partnership between schools and employers that creates a high-quality experience for high schoolers whose track record indicates they’re more likely to succeed in a practical curriculum than by deriving geometric theorems, deciphering the intricacies of Milton or applying quantum mechanics.

In the meantime, what to do?

Higher education’s glacial pace of change, despite years of withering criticism, does not portend major improvement in the offing. So what’s the current crop of would-be college attendees to do?

Attending college should not be a fait accompli. If you did poorly in high school or are burned out on academics, you’re likely to join the almost half of college freshmen who don’t graduate even if given six years. So you might want to consider a noncollege path. For example, while not ideal, America does have a system of apprenticeships. Or try to work at the elbow of a successful, ethical business owner or nonprofit executive. Or consider the military: It offers training in a wide range of career fields. Or take just a gap semester or year to refresh and edify yourself in the real world before starting college. Try some focused traveling—for example, visit elementary schools in different areas and keep a blog. Or start a simple business. Even if it fails, you will have learned much about entrepreneurship, organization, people and life.

A College Report Card

If you are planning to attend college, you’ll make a wiser choice if you ask each prospective school’s admissions office for the following information, which collectively make up what I call the College Report Card:

• Results of the most recent student-satisfaction survey.
• The most recent report by a visiting accreditation team (for a college to retain accreditation, a team of experts periodically visits for a few days and writes a report listing the identified strengths, weaknesses and recommendations).
• The four-year graduation rate.
• The average four-year student’s growth in writing, analytic reasoning and mathematical reasoning (many institutions use a standardized exam like the Collegiate Learning Assessment).
• The percentage of students who graduate with their intended major who are professionally employed or in graduate school within six months of graduation.

It would be a consumer boon if the government mandated that all colleges post the College Report Card on their home page.

We claim that American higher education is the world’s best. Like many claims, it deserves closer examination.

Marty Nemko is an award-winning career coach, writer, speaker and public radio host specializing in career/workplace issues and education reform. His writings and radio programs are archived on www.martynemko.com.

Read next: The War on Teacher Tenure

Marty Nemko holds a Ph.D. specializing in education evaluation from U.C. Berkeley.

What to do about America's employers eliminating, automating and offshoring jobs

• College graduates doing menial work. A caller to my radio program last week graduated a year ago from the University of California, Berkeley, and the best job he’s been able to land is pizza delivery person. Alas, according to a report in The Atlantic, he’s far from alone; 53.6% of college graduates under 25 are doing work they could have done without college or are unemployed.
• Middle-age professionals are losing their job: It was offshored, automated or, if s/he was lucky, it was converted to a “consultant” position in which they’re hired only for a project and with minimal benefits after which they’re back pounding the pavement. According to an AARP report, three years after the recession, 45% of the 50- to 64-year-olds surveyed reported a decline in income.
• Itinerant professors. Colleges tout the importance of treating labor fairly, yet they don’t practice what they preach. Increasingly, they replace tenure-track faculty with people hired, without benefits, to teach just one or two courses at pittance pay. As a result, countless highly and expensively educated Ph.D.s must drive from university to university to cobble together a living smaller than they could have made without any degree, let alone a Ph.D. An Inside Higher Ed/Gallup poll found 65% of college provosts said their institution relies “significantly on non-tenure-track faculty for instruction.”

America’s employers–for-profit, non-profit, and government alike–are eliminating, automating and offshoring as many jobs as possible. And the remaining jobs are, ever more often, converted into part-time or temp work. This is the dejobbing of America

The broader picture

It’s tempting to feel things are better because the unemployment rate is down, but that masks the fact that many people have stopped looking for work. Those people aren’t counted in the unemployment rate. Nor does the unemployment rate consider people who are working but earning less income.

These statistics are more revealing: The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the labor participation rate, the percentage of adults 16 to 64 that are employed or actively looking for work, is 62.7%, the lowest since early 1978.

And those who are working are, on average, making less. An analysis of government data on income and poverty last month found that, “After adjusting for inflation, U.S. median household income is still 8 percent lower than it was before the recession, 9 percent lower than at its peak in 1999.”

The numbers hide the human toll. Work is key to people’s psychological as well as financial well-being. Without work, in addition to not being able to pay for food, shelter, transportation and health care, you can feel useless.

Solutions for the individual

Personally, I love the liberal arts. I enjoy reading novels, looking at paintings, listening to classical music and contemplating life’s Big Questions. Alas, we’re living in times in which those seem less valued than they used to be. A report this month by the National Association of Colleges and Employers reports that the four majors most in demand by employers at the bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral level are business, engineering, computer and information sciences, and sciences, with liberal arts trailing badly—just above agriculture and natural resources. Another survey in that NACE report found that employers are demanding even more problem solving expertise and quantitative analysis skills.

So I bear the bad news that, to avoid long periods of un- and underemployment, you may have to ratchet up your game. And even if you do, you may need to use more aggressive techniques to land a job than not long ago. A pretty, hired-gun-written resume, LinkedIn profile and cover letter may not cut it any more. But these things might help:

• In answering ads, include a job sample: a proposal for what you might do if hired, a white-paper on a topic of compelling interest to the boss and/or a portfolio of relevant work.
• Try to get in through the back door. The front door (answering want ads) has a long line of wannabes. So try to connect with people with the power to hire you when they’re not advertising a job. Write an email asking for advice. They may create a job or at least foot-in-the-door project for you. Ask for a job, they’ll feel pressured and just give you advice or ignore your request.
• Make an offer they can’t refuse. Offer to volunteer for a fixed amount of time. If after that, they like you, they agree to hire you. If not, they got free labor with no strings attached.
• Not for the faint-of-heart: Walk in. For example, a client wanted the security of a federal job. So at 8:00 AM, when all the federal workers were arriving, she asked a friendly looking one if she might get her through security by saying, “She’s with me.” Two said no but the third said yes. She then schmoozed her way around the building and got useful inside information, which enabled her to write a great application for a position, which she then got.

Macro solutions

• Assistance Army. Companies, nonprofits, and government should collaborate in creating an “Assistance Army.” Each sector would create societally beneficial jobs that even many low-skilled workers could do: for example, student mentor, community garden raised-bed builder, health-care system docent and mural creator to brighten gritty neighborhoods. Additionally, the three sectors would develop a campaign to encourage individuals to hire personal aides: tutors for their children, housekeeper, personal assistant and technology explainer for themselves, elder companion for their older relative, etc.

• A world-class K-16 entrepreneurship curriculum. Permanent jobs get created mainly by starting and expanding private-sector businesses. Government jobs require tax dollars, which thus reduce private-sector jobs. To increase business creation, we must go beyond the born entrepreneurs, hence the proposed entrepreneurship curriculum. That should consist heavily of students creating and running businesses, plus online simulations, in which students get instant feedback on their business decisions.

• Expanded apprenticeship programs. Despite the rampant un- and underemployment among college graduates and the relative shortage of skilled (and offshore-proof) blue-collar jobs, we’re sending young people a message that everyone should go to college, even students that struggled in high school. In fact, according to Clifford Adelman, senior statistician at the U.S. Department of Education, if you graduated in the bottom 40% of your high school class, your chance of graduating college is less than one in four, even if given 8 ½ years. And if you graduate, it’s likely to be from a third-tier college with a major that is likely to make employers yawn, thus setting you up to be one of the aforementioned 53.6% of college graduates doing work they could have done without college or who are unemployed.

Instead, we need to expand our system of apprenticeships so it’s a major initiative, like that in Germany and in England: a partnership between the schools and employers that creates a high-quality experience for high-schoolers whose track record indicates they’re more likely to succeed in a practical curriculum than by calculating calculus integrals, deciphering the intricacies of Shakespeare and interpreting stochastic processes.

A perhaps hyperbolic call to action.

Good jobs are at the heart of a satisfied citizenry and viable society. Our rapidly dejobbing America is prioritizing short-term profit over long-term survival. Many people consider climate change our most urgent threat. I believe dejobbing is an even greater one.

Marty Nemko is an award-winning career coach, writer, speaker and public radio host specializing in career/workplace issues and education reform. His writings and radio programs are archived on www.martynemko.com.

Marty Nemko holds a Ph.D. specializing in education evaluation from U.C. Berkeley.

Whether it's Ebola, Malaysia Flight 370 or the shoe bomber, our post-disaster spending efforts may not be the wisest

A guy puts a plastic explosive in his shoes and now millions of us must take off our shoes at the airport. Terrorists know that, so the chance of shoe-bombing a plane is infinitesimal. With 100% certitude, we’re wasting millions of minutes of people’s time. We don’t think probabilistically.

One person in the U.S. has died of Ebola and we’re now spending a fortune on special training for every hospital worker in the country, screening passengers additionally at major airports, and talking of a worldwide travel ban. Congress, the Executive Branch, the CDC and related federal agencies, not to mention the news media, have reallocated much of their time and effort to Ebola. What is the probability that all that will save lives? Minuscule. Think of how many more lives could be saved if we directed all that money and effort, for example, to reducing the number of bicyclist deaths because car drivers aren’t conditioned to look for them? But we don’t think probabilistically. We overreact to the disaster du jour.

We spent a fortune trying to find Malaysia Flight 370 in the middle of the Indian Ocean, which covers 28.4 million square miles, 20% of Earth’s water surface, in hopes of finding information that could prevent future crashes. What are the odds of finding it, let alone providing information that ends up saving lives? Near zero. If you wanted to improve airline safety (not particularly necessary—it’s much safer to fly than to drive a car), you’d more likely do it, infinitely less expensively, by reviewing pre-flight inspection procedures to see if they might be improved. But we don’t think probabilistically. We overreact.

Even when respected leaders err, we overreact. For example, David Petraeus, a highly decorated four-star general, went on to be Director of the CIA, where he was respected by both Republicans and Democrats. Yet, when it was uncovered that he was having an extramarital affair with his biographer, he was forced to resign.

Some governmental overreaction isn’t unwillingness to think probabilistically. It’s politics. The administration feels the need to show that government is doing something—even if the cost is absurd. Alas, somehow, the media rarely discusses the cost-benefit ratio, let alone the opportunity costs of such efforts.

We are not immune

Of course, we, in our private lives, aren’t immune to overreaction:

You get dumped by a romantic partner or three and so fear you’re doomed to a life of celibacy. Overreaction.

You’re searching for a career. Someone tells you that one is bad. You then cross it off your list, failing to recognize that a sample size of one has little validity. Overreaction.

You apply for four jobs and don’t even get an interview. You assume you’re doomed to a McJob or less. Overreaction.

In 1982, when seven people died of Tylenol that had been laced with cyanide, the value of Tylenol’s manufacturer, Johnson & Johnson’s stock price lost 17.5% of its value in the first five trading days following the Tylenol incident, but in a little more than two months, it had gained it all back.

The takeaway

It’s not easy, but we should replace visceral reactions to a single experience or three with probabilistic thinking: What is the probability of such an event occurring in the future? What’s the cost-benefit of accepting that possibility? Of trying to prevent it? What could that effort otherwise be spent on? What action would yield the most good for you, your family, workplace, the larger society? Few exhortations could do more good for humankind than: Replace overreaction with probabilistic thinking.

Marty Nemko is an award-winning career coach, writer, speaker and public radio host specializing in career/workplace issues and education reform. His writings and radio programs are archived on www.martynemko.com.