While the survey & article below by Intelligent dot com is probably broader than recent maritime academy graduates & the maritime field in general, it’s still a good read to prepare ourselves to deal with new hires new to the industry.
After reading it, I first thought of my readings about Germany after the wall came down & reunification. I read industry & the government bunched individuals into teams. Many one person jobs started to have two people, 1 person from East Germany & another from West Germany for integration purposes. Surely the cultural differences between Gen Z’ers & previous generations can’t be farther apart that old East & West Germany? Perhaps companies should lean on that model to bring Gen Z’ers up to speed?
I get your point. But the point of analysis is not the numbers. It’s to look behind the numbers and find the reason for the change. So yes, 1919 is a different world than 2024, but so is 2019.
We straddle to different eras: pre-pandemic and post pandemic. Two different worlds. The Pre-Pandemic world had a workforce rich in old, experienced hands that knew how everything ran. The Post-Pandemic world has a workforce light in old, experienced hands and short in new workers, because of a choke point in demographics.
Two different worlds in just 4 years. If the college-grad-quality-survey had been asked in 2019, what would have been the results? And if they were the same, could you trust them? Because the people answering the questions in 2019 would have been an older cohort than those answering the questions in 2024. A different mindset. That doesn’t make the data points invalid.
I deleted my prior post because I got my data wrong. My argument still remains. I will re-post it here, a different way
The survey cited is fascinating, and I hope they do it every year, to get a baseline of data. It would be useful to run the survey for several years in a row, to spot the trends.
We run a food survey every year for our vessels, where we ask mariners the quality of the food. We supply a variety of Coke/Pepsi brand soft drinks. Arguably, as good as you’re going to get in terms of quality. Yet, about 10% of our mariners say every year that the quality of our soft drinks is poor. Years ago I would ask around, What’s the issue? Bad taste? Out of date stock? Too much of one flavor?
The response was the soft drinks were perfectly ok. But because of the human nature,10% of people always respond negatively to the question. That’s the baseline. Without the baseline a single point of data is a factoid: interesting, but not useful
If the negative number suddenly jumps to 20% we’ll know that the quality has actually gone down. If the negative answers go down to 0% we’ll know the workforce has had a radical change.
(In the previous post I cited figures for the recent era compared to 1919 to show how the percentage of people deemed unfit for the military were counterintuitive. But I got the numbers for the recent era wrong.)