Michael Horn on Navigating the Evolving World of Work

Work Forces

Michael Horn, co-author of "Job Moves: Nine Steps for Making Progress in Your Career," joins us to discuss the changing landscape of job searching and career development. He introduces the "jobs to be done" theory, emphasizing the importance of understanding individual motivations and seeking progress in work and life. The conversation explores the distinction between career progression and career progress, highlighting the need for personalized approaches. Horn offers practical advice for job seekers, employers, and educators including reflective career planning for individuals and strategies for attracting and retaining talent, such as conducting "entry interviews" and creating more effective job descriptions. This episode provides valuable insights and actionable steps for job seekers and employers as they navigate the evolving world of work.

Transcript

Julian Alssid: Welcome to Work Forces. I'm Julian.

Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin, and we speak with the innovators who shape the future of work and learning.

Julian: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained.

Kaitlin: Work Forces is supported by Lumina Foundation. Lumina is an independent, private foundation in Indianapolis that is committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. Let's dive in. Welcome back to the show. Today, we're diving deep into a topic that's been on our minds lately, how the changing world of work is impacting job seekers, and what it means for those of us who support them.

Julian: You know Kaitlin, it used to be that career paths were pretty straightforward. You'd go to school, get a job in a specific field, and kind of climb the ladder, but now things are so much more dynamic, and job seekers really need to be the drivers of their own careers. Absolutely.

Kaitlin: Absolutely Julian, and that's where our guest today comes in. Michael Horn, along with co-authors Ethan Bernstein from the Harvard Business School and innovator and entrepreneur Bob Moesta has been researching and testing a new approach to job searching, one that recognizes the need for flexibility, adaptability and a deep understanding of personal motivations. They've captured their learnings in the forthcoming book, job moves nine steps for making progress in your career, which is being released in November of 2024.

Julian: I'm really excited to hear about this new approach. I think it's going to be incredibly valuable for our listeners, those leaders in education, workforce development and and business who are guiding the next generation of workers.

Kaitlin: So let's get right to it. Please join us in welcoming Michael Horn to Work Forces.

Michael: Thanks so much. It's great to be with you guys.

Julian: Great to be with you as well, Michael. And before we dive into the conversation, we want to share some more about your background. So in addition to your forthcoming book, Job Moves, In addition to forthcoming Job Moves, Michael is the author of several books including From Reopen to Reinvent: (Re)creating School for Every Child; the award-winning Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns; Blended: Using Disruptive Innovation to Improve Schools; Choosing College; and Goodnight Box, a children’s story. He is the co-founder of and a distinguished fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, a non-profit think tank, and teaches at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Michael co hosts the top education podcasts Future U and Class Disrupted and is a regular contributor to Forbes.com and writes the Substack newsletter, The Future of Education. Michael also serves as an executive editor at Education Next, and his work has been featured in outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Harvard Business Review, and NBC. Michael serves on boards and advisory boards of a range of education organizations, including Imagine Worldwide, Minerva University, and Guild Education. He was selected as a 2014 Eisenhower Fellow to study innovation in education in Vietnam and Korea, and Tech&Learning magazine named him to its list of the 100 most important people in the creation and advancement of the use of technology in education. Michael holds a BA in history from Yale University and an MBA from the Harvard Business School.

Michael: Yeah, I'm thrilled to be here, too. Don't hold the bio against me, I guess, but it's been, it's been a fun ride getting do a lot of things with a lot of you know. You both know a lot of these organizations. There's some great companies out there, great nonprofits doing some really cool work. So it's been fun to be affiliated and connected with them in different ways.

Kaitlin: Absolutely. Well. And we really appreciate you taking the time to join us today, Michael, and as we get started, though we just gave your bio, we would love to have you tell us more about your background and in your own words and your most recent work.

Michael: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I got my start in this world of education and helping people improve their opportunity to live a purposeful life at the foremost of their potential. By accident, I was a student at the Harvard Business School, took Clay Christensen's class on disruptive innovation changed the way I saw the world. And he, one day, literally said, want to write a book with me about public education. And I signed up for it, and it changed my life. We started the Clayton Christensen Institute. And, you know, initially was a K-12 focus, over time, became a higher education focus, because I realized a lot of the problems in K-12 education were pretty hard to solve because they were dependent on higher education, and higher education had a lot of challenges, as you both know from the work that you've done in that arena. And then you look up again and you realize, well, higher education is struggling because the workforce has some challenges, right, and it's dependent on there. So you start working there, and I think that describes a lot of my journey. If I'm being serious about my purpose, which is helping all individuals build their passion and live lives of purpose, then working right across that spectrum is important. And Ethan and Bob, they both were mentored by Clay Christensen as well. Bob Moesta founded the jobs to be done theory with clay. They worked on that in the mid 1990s and Ethan, he's a professor now at the Harvard Business School, but he was a student of Clay's at the Harvard Business School, and Clay was one of his dissertation advisors, actually. So the three of us sort of were united by that, and then started having conversations among the three of us, which led us to this book, all in very different paths to it, but, but it's been, it's been a really cool collaboration.

Julian: I didn't realize that you would all that you all have that connection with clay. That's, that's really cool. So, so what are the problems that you're solving for in Job Moves which, which is, is geared to job seekers.

Michael: You know, the big thing, I would say, is that we observed, and not just in the data, right? You see the millions of people quitting during the Great Resignation, and then roughly at least 50% of them said, Actually, we regret that job switch that we just made, we're not landing in places. We see a billion people worldwide every year switching jobs. Hundreds of millions of them are disappointed. We know from Gallup and Pew and others that two thirds of employees are disengaged at work. Up to 60% of them are quiet quitting. And the reality is we looked at it, and frankly, we looked at it in our own lives, working with individuals, just all the advice to help people make progress in their career just wasn't working. And so the big thing we said is, how do we help people make progress? Because they are telling us that they are trying to use their careers and jobs and as they move through the labor market at increasing rates. Now every four years on average, and Gen Z seems to move even faster than that. They're using this to make progress in their careers and lives. But just the evidence is pretty clear, most of them are not succeeding, and so how do we help them make meaningful progress so they can, you know, have the outcomes that they want in their lives, with their families, in their communities, and on the job.

Kaitlin: I loved that that notion in your book, Michael, about people seek progress in their lives and their work is part of it, right? I think that that notion just rings so true as we're as we're getting into this conversation you mentioned earlier on, the jobs to be done framework, in line of thinking, can you explain that a little bit to our audience around what is what? What is the jobs to be done theory?

Michael: The jobs to be done theory originated, as I said, in the 1990s when Bob actually brought to clay a puzzle, which was, we have more data in the world. And even today, we have even more than that about, you know, which demographic is likely to buy a certain product or service, but it doesn't seem to be helping anyone. And their conclusion, as they looked at it was, it was all correlational noise, right? It doesn't actually explain the causal reason why someone says, today's the day I'm going to switch behavior, or I'm going to make a purchase, or I'm going to buy this service. And you know, as you all know from your work at Southern New Hampshire, today is the day I'm going to say, Okay, I'm going to stop doing what I was doing. Or I'm going to, you know, continue to work and enroll at Southern New Hampshire University. Like those are big switches. And what we realized is, it's rarely the product or service itself that they're desiring. It's more that they're trying to make progress in a struggling circumstance in their lives, and they hire something to help them make progress, right? So it sounds simple in some ways, but it's basically like people don't want quarter inch drills. They want the whole, the outcome, in a certain situation where that would be useful to them, whether it's hanging a painting in an art gallery or, in my case, you know, punching a hole through the wall to pull some Ethernet cable through that you know no one's ever going to stare at. And if you understand the circumstance and what progress looks like, then you can much more effectively design things that help them accomplish what we call those jobs to be done in their lives. So it's very demand side focus, as we say, it really wants to understand what does progress mean for that individual, and how can we better design experiences to help them unlock that progress.

Julian: Picking up on that notion of progress then, in the book, you highlight career progression versus career progress. And so can we? Can we dig in a bit deeper there?

Michael: Most people say, well, career progression, I get it. We're moving up the corporate ladder, the career ladder. You start as entry level, you move to mid level, you start to have a team reporting to you, director, right? You sort of we have these frameworks in our mind. But the reality is that as people's lives, as evidenced by the jobs that they do or don't take often and almost never, mirrors these days that career progression right? And it's because we make decisions out of an effort to make progress in our lives for all sorts of reasons, right? You know, sometimes, you know, when I stepped down as the executive director at the Clayton Christensen Institute, it was because I think we've talked about this Julian, you know, I had twins who are one year, and I was like, you know, I want to have a more flexible life. I don't want to have a team reporting to me. I want to be there more on more present. I'm going to step aside from this job on the paper like that didn't make any sense from a career progression point of view, but from a progress in my life perspective, understanding all the forces acting on me, it made perfect sense. And so that's really what we're trying to unpack here is that for some people, yes, they are on the career progression career ladder, and it is synonymous with what progress means to them. But for most of us, and I would say well over 75% of us, our sense of progress is not the same as progression, and progress is really what we call a demand side phenomenon as viewed from the individual employee, whereas progression is viewed from the perspective of org charts and companies and things of that nature.

Kaitlin: Yeah, I love that notion of tying back to the job seeker and the individual and their life circumstances, and allowing the room for, as your book outlines, for people to really sit back and say, Wait a minute. So what happened in my last job? Move right? And that reflective component, I think that's a really interesting piece of this book, is like pushing people to really say, well, what, what did I do last time? And why? I'm interested to hear a little bit more about what made you start at that point.

Michae: Well so I'll tell you, and I'll give you the actual full origin story, which was in 2009, Clay Christensen said to Ethan Bernstein, you need to come to my class today. There's this guy named Bob who's going to do this thing that you need to come see. So Ethan shows up, not having any idea what he was in for, and he watches Bob do an interview about when someone purchased some random product or service. I don't, I don't know what it was. And basically the interview is about something you've already switched on. And the reason for that is we say, as you know, in the book, we say bitchin ain't switchin. And we complain all the time, but like, we actually want to know when someone makes the big choice to change behavior, to change what you're doing. What were the forces that were acting on them that caused them to make that switch? And so essentially, the interview, it uses criminal forensics techniques, and we basically use it to create a mini documentary of the last time someone switched behaviors in whatever area we're interested in studying. So Ethan watches Bob do this, and he goes, oh my God. I just earlier this morning, was counseling someone who was asking for job advice, career advice in my office, and I had that person in there for like an hour and a half, and I realized when I watched Bob do the interview that my advice was completely worthless because it was completely decoupled from their situation, their struggles, their sense of progress. If I had just interviewed them like Bob, just interviewed someone there, I would have learned so much and could have given so much better advice. And so honestly, that was the origin of the collaboration between Ethan and Bob, and Ethan created an entire class around it, and so as a result of that, we've been able to, as you know, study literally over 1,000 individuals changing jobs to build this data set around why did and it starts with, why did you last change? Really, to unearth those forces, and once you understand how they work in your life, then you can start to pull them forward and recognize the patterns going forward about what might be causing you to seek something new right now.

Julian: So just to kind of now, put a little spin on this, given Michael, given that our audience is composed of many of the people who are educating and hiring individuals, what are some of the key concepts that are relevant to them? I mean, I was, you know, we really was struck by the whole concept, for example, that you lay out of like employees hiring their employers. What does that mean for those of us who are hiring and training and educating?

Michael: Exactly? And I'm sorry I buried the lead when you asked about the jobs to be done there as well. Because Originally we wanted to call this book, Hire Your Next Job, because the big switch here, right is that we as individuals have agency in our lives, and you actually hire your next job. And the publisher said we hate that title, because no one thinks about the job market that way, and we're like, oh, but you do? You do hire your next job, and this is the big switch we want them to make. And so the big argument in the book, right? For individuals, and I'll get to the employer side in a moment, but for individuals, is if you understand that you actually hire your next job, meaning you choose, do I want to work here for the money that they're going to pay me for the title that they're going to give me for the responsibilities, et cetera, et cetera, right? That's a choice you make. And so yes, employers are hiring you, but you are also hiring your employer and the job you take. And there is a two way street there that we too often don't recognize, and when you do, it empowers you. Now for employers, the implication there is, hey, actually, even though people haven't thought about it this way, if you look at behavior over the last couple decades, it is increasingly clear that more and more people feel empowered to hire their next job because they're leaving, they're quitting, they're changing careers, right? We employers talk about this all the time. We would invest more in our workforce, except they're only here two years, and then they jump to something different, or what if they go to a competitor? Et cetera, et cetera. And so our big argument to employers is we actually have the root causes in our data set of over 1,000 job switchers of what causes them to say, today's the day I'm going to change my job. We know why employees quit in sharper detail, I would argue, than we've ever seen before. And so if you can understand the progress that individuals are making when they decide to hire your job, how do you create a workplace that people want to rehire each and every single day, as measured in their engagement, their productivity, right, their excitement for being in the job. And so out of that, and I will be super honest here, we have three conclusions of what we think this means for employers, of how they can do it differently. And we've really tested the heck out of this in the individual side. We have not tested the heck out of this on the employer side. And so, like, what I hope is employers read it and be like, Those are three good ideas to start, and here's two more. Or here's how I would perfect this, or here's how I would shape it. Because I think there's a world of things. Is my guess that employers would do differently with a real understanding of why people are hiring their companies in the first place, why they are firing them ultimately, and how do we become places that they want to rehire each and every single day?

Julian: I think I may be seeing your next book.

Michael: Or maybe we'll all collaborate together.

Julian: Sure!

Kaitlin: So yeah, I mean thinking we’d love to hear you talk a little bit more about what those recommend, what those preliminary recommendations are, Michael, recognizing that, as you said, maybe they not as well tested, but especially as we're thinking about talent development and retention, and what does it look like to as you said, have employees rehire their jobs every day, and have their jobs kind of shift and mold with them in their lives as they progress. What? What are what you know? What are your preliminary ideas? What are some moves that employers can start to make to respond to that reality?

Michael: The first one I would say is, you know, we know what exit interviews are when people it's their last day on the job, but if there's someone you really wanted to retain, an exit interview is way too late. Number one, you can't do anything with the data. Number two, the data is probably false, because no one really wants to be in an exit interview. They just want to get the heck out. So what we say is interview them on the way in about why they hired you. So the interview that I just described, we are trying to teach people and give them a free assessment to jobmoves.com that you can use with all of your employees, that they can actually use to say, Okay, now I understand these are the forces, the pushes and pulls that caused you to say, I want to work here. So that's number one. Let's understand why they're here, and once we do then, if you think about it, every single performance review, every single time we're meeting with management, they can say, hey, I remember that one of the reasons you left your last job and came to work here was because you felt like you were being micromanaged, right, really stifled by your boss. You know, are we falling into that same pattern here? How do we make sure we avoid that? I remember that you really wanted to stretch into these capabilities, you know, develop your management responsibilities or something like that. You know. How are we doing giving you those opportunities? I was mentoring someone the other day, and he said he hired his current employer, because he wanted to do product development that was customer facing, really get out with customers. And two and a half years in, he was only doing product development on internal systems. He was going nuts. Well, if you knew. That on the front end, you know, you wouldn't have lined him up right and made that mistake. So he's looking to leave. So that's number one. Number two. Job descriptions, as you know, have become hopelessly confusing and burdened and meaningless, I would argue, because essentially, the way we create them today is we take the job description of the last time we hired, and then we add all the skills and experiences and things that our competitors have, and then we get around in tables and think about all the other things we could use to filter people out, and we write those in as well. And so you get, like, laundry lists of meaningless job descriptions that by the time you finish it, you have no idea what this person actually does on a day to day basis, or what the real skills at the heart of the job are. To some extent, we're copying, and this is Ethan, because he comes from the HR world and his research at HBS, but you know, he's saying, like, look, these job descriptions, they're probably not going anywhere, because they're essentially legal documents to allow us to hire and fire employees and justify it legally. But if that's the case, let's create shadow job descriptions at the very least, and rather than, like, listing, you know, eight years of experience for an entry level job, good luck with that one or, you know, the bachelor's degree requirement or critical thinking communication, which are like great buzzwords, but I have no idea what they mean in practice in this job. Let's instead just write down what's the day to day and week to week, you know, experiences like in this role, and can I find people who have done the sorts of things that I, you know, want them to do in this job so we can do a better job of finding fit on both sides of the equation, so no one's misled when they when they show up on day one, and it's completely different from what they expected. And then the last thing is number three. When we sort of say the first two things, a lot of chief learning officers, chief human resource officers, they'll say, Well, we know all these things, but stupid managers, they won't do it. And it's because, I think it's asking a lot of managers to sort of remember, oh, the reason someone you know came into this role was they were trying to escape these things and move toward this. And now I have to incorporate it in my meetings and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, like, it's a lot. And so our push is, let's work smarter, not harder, by embedding these things into our actual HR systems. So let's embed the reasons that they left their last job, for example, in the performance management systems. Let's actually understand right on the HR review cycles. Let's have this be part of the form, so that we can say, How are we doing against your goals and your reasons that you hired the company initially, things like that, to really make it systematic, as opposed to ad hoc, hopefully will help us better align, you know, what progress means for an individual with what progress means for a company, because, you know, you got to hit your KPIs too, so that we're all swimming in the same direction. And by the way, if at some point it diverges, we can have a really transparent, upfront conversation about it, as opposed to something that's acrimonious. Because the one thing I know is true is no one will be in a role forever. That's just, that's not the way the world works. That's not the way humans work, and we will never be in a role forever. So let's just acknowledge that up front, stop making it something taboo, and have much more transparent, open conversations with each other.

Julian: So Michael, going back for a moment to the to the individuals who are seeking employer here their next job, many of our listeners are particularly focused on low income, first generation, you know, college students, people who may be new to this culture, if it's we're talking about the US and just just wondering, you know, and process that you describe in Job Works is very reflective. I mean, it's takes a lot of sort of soul searching, and it's very holistic, and, you know, and what about folks who are maybe hard pressed, you know, and racing from activity to activity, just trying to get through the day or paycheck to paycheck? Does it apply? Have you looked at these folks? Have you thought about how this might work?

Michael: I'm so glad you asked the question. So a lot of the research was actually on frontline employees and people in blue collar jobs. So we know that the process works with them. That said, You're right, the biggest thing that they face is time poverty. How do you carve out the time? I will be super honest, in my view, it's more about finding the right next step for someone, as opposed to you have to do all nine steps. And so what I mean by that is, I think there's a bit of a choose your own adventure when I when I'm counseling someone, and I'm probably on the phone, you know, once a week with someone who's looking for career advice, I try to listen to where they are, understand what their questions are, and then I try to give them the one. One Step or maybe two, that I think will really unlock progress at this point. And so I think that's number one is, if you're, you know, working with someone who's low income or has multiple jobs and is just, you know, trying to make ends meet, what's the leverage point you can, you know, you can use at the right time to help them unlock progress and get a deeper sense of what they're trying to achieve. And that's the last chapter of the book. Is like, pay it forward for mentors, right? And so I hope that's helpful. Is like, and I don't know if it's shared with all my co authors, but my own belief is, like, you don't have to do all nine. It's like, find the right one for you at the time. Some people, I think, are so consumed by just sort of, they're on the hamster wheel, right of job to job, and sort of thinking, Oh, it's about boosting pay and so forth. And what you realize, if you step back from it is, if you're not energized in your job, you're not going to do a great job, which means you're never going to get that promotion to get more money. To me, in that situation, like the most impactful thing you can do from our process is look back at your past roles and just figure out, like, what what drives your energy and what drains it, so you can get a clearer sense of like, oh, I should avoid, you know, even though it's like, you know, pays $1 an hour more, I realized from my past moves that like, I'm gonna stop showing up to work, or I'm gonna quit after two months, because it doesn't align with what gives me energy. So that can be, like, a huge boost, right? Because now I get, as you know, again, job seeker of limited time. This actually doesn't take a lot of time. It's like, over the course of two weeks. Anytime you think about, oh man, another meeting with blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I remember that sucked in my last job to write it down. And by the end, you have, like, a collection of, like, very small insights that add up to something really big. And you can say, oh, wow, I really hate it when I have to be in ad hoc meetings without knowing in advance that it's going to show you know, again, I'm making it up. But you know, some people who are in shift work, for example, some of them maybe don't mind getting called to the manager, you know, on an ad hoc meeting with no notice, right? Because you get to pow wow with friends. Others, it's like the worst thing in the world, because I had lined up childcare in the following way, and it was dependent on me being home at such and such time, and now you just blew up my entire schedule. What the heck do I do? And so I, you know, that's something I think that can really give you a lot of insight into what does and doesn't work for you, to make sure I'm not going to take a job that that, that, you know, makes me do that thing. And yes, there's going to be other trade offs I do make, but like, I'm going to optimize around these one, two or three things that really are important to me.

Kaitlin:It's really helpful to hear how you think about, you know, which kind of which one, which steps do you need most imminently, and being able to build from those steps, you know, proactively, without necessarily needing to follow all nine. So following up on that idea, and you're already giving us so many kind of practical steps through what you've outlined, but I would like to give you the chance, given that our podcast name is Work Forces, I'd like to give the chance to we're going to specifically ask this question about being forces in this effort and around how can education and business leaders develop better strategies for supporting employee growth and development, and you've already said so much. But if there's anything else you'd like to add, I wanted to throw that question out to you.

Michael: I appreciate it. Well, I'll say on the educator side, I think number one, I actually think you can embed the nine steps into your programs. It'd be an amazing way not just to revamp Career Services. Frankly, but also a really clever way. I think you know talking to the people who did this when Southern New Hampshire University, like a project based College for America, right curriculum? How do you make sure that we're prototyping work before you actually take the job? Because that's also one of the big things of the book is like, how do you learn before switching rather than after you've switched? Because by the time you've switched too late, you know you're in a bad situation. If I can learn before switching. And so I think coupling some of the insights with the book with real work based learning for educators could be incredibly powerful, and I hope to see that for employers again. I mean, I think we have the three steps, but I think probably the bigger thing is, you know, as a manager, as a mentor, as someone seeking to guide those on your team, how do you have that? Right? You know, I see the struggle you're having. Let's have the right conversation at the right time. Rather than trying to overload your working memory with like the, well, you have to do an interview about the last time you switched jobs. Otherwise, we can't have the conversation about the no, right? Like that may be what's required, but it often won't be. So it's like, oh, you know, the big thing is, you don't know, you know Julian, how to pitch your career story in 30 seconds. Let's teach you how to tell your career story. That's the value add you need right now, really, using the process as a way to shape your conversations. Because, again, personal experience, but also, you know, a lot of people talk about this, most of us give really lousy job advice for the most part when we're asked. And we hope this gives you a template for how to do it better.

Julian: Yeah, it's so great to hear you lay that out. And it's funny, because so much of what you know, this podcast and Kaitlin's and my work is about, is making switches. And so, I mean, even as you were talking, yeah, jobs, but this is a conversation that switches the way we think about learning. That switches the way we think about how we spend our free time. I mean, it's just, it's a we've got to get to a better place.

Michael: Actually, can I bend your ear both on that for one second? Because it's, it's sort of my view that we are talking a lot, as you know, about skills based hiring, both in work and higher ed. But I think what we mean by that all of us have very different conceptions of it right now. And my own view through writing this book is like, if we think it's going to be some sort of technocratic exercise where, like, I have an assessment that defines critical thinking and like, and somehow I fit these. It's not going to happen, because employers have no idea what the skills are called at the heart of their successful employees, nor should they, and we don't know how to do those stuff. But what we do know how to do is like, oh, you know, in this job, this is somewhat, this is a task, or this is an experience, something you know, someone does many times. Okay, so in the education, how do I build opportunities for someone to be able to do that over the course of their educational career? And then, you know from that, oh, I see I actually have to build your skill or knowledge in this thing, so I'm going to have some direct instruction, you know, around this thing, to build you up to doing this project or work based thing. And I think if we we can migrate if it's almost experience based hiring as opposed to skills based, again, it's, I mean, it's, I'm sort of bashful, because you guys kind of built this, but like, I think we can unlock a lot of this realignment that we want to see, and between work and higher education in ways that I think right now are a bit of a mystery to folks, and we're all trying to build taxonomies and languages, and I just don't think it's going to work.

Julian: Yeah, and I think, and that's why Job moves is so of such great interest to us, and so exciting, because you're beginning to break it down, like, how do you practically take these steps? And I love that. It's a bit of a pick what works for you, whether your co authors agree or not. It seems very practical. I mean, for me, it's almost like an update of what I did when I read, What Color Is Your Parachute I, you know, I way too add to understand the whole thing, but I zeroed in on what is that I love to do, that I do best, and that's kind of guided my career. And every decision I've made, very simple but very profound,

Michael: 100%. And I think I mean, our hope is this is honestly the 21st century refresh of What Color Is Your Parachute is sort of the thing that I've had in my mind. It's much shorter than what color is your parachute and to your point, it's okay if you don't get every nine, all nine steps right, like, it's okay if the petal flower and what color is your shoot parachute exercise doesn't work for you. It's like getting the right leverage at the right time for you.

Kaitlin: Yeah absolutely. And I would circle back on your other point around, you know, I think this concept of experiential or scenario based hiring, I mean, I think it rings so true, especially in light of the fact that so many job,. I mean, any job is inherently multidisciplinary, multi skilled, right? You can't say, Okay, well, if you have skills in this one area, then yes, you'll be successful. It's if you take on this situation, right? What skills are you pulling on in order to be successful? And so that really, that that rings true to me, as especially as we see, you know, the emergence of different types of technology that can support some of our work. And what are the skills that are becoming more and more essential as as you know, AI and other tech forms kind of take shape and have increasing influence.

Michael: 1000%. And really quickly off that, like, if the rate of change of what work is accelerates, our only way to keep up to it is not to codify it in some overly technocratic way, but to give people actual experiences using the AI and things like that to keep up with it. And I think then the answer to folks who say, Well, you know, people from privileged or upper income backgrounds, they're going to have more chances to get those experiences true, which is why I think education has such an important role to play here, because you can actually embed this into your program so the low income students are not left behind in this era.

Kaitlin: Absolutely. So Michael, as we wind down this conversation today. I mean, I feel like we could, we could continue to speak about this for much more time, but given that we're winding down, how can our listeners learn more and continue to follow your work?

Michael: Yeah, absolutely. Well, if you want to check out more about the book, it’s at jobmoves.com. It's got a free chapter there, the intro, as well as the assessment I talked about and some other tools and ways to purchase the book. And then if you want to follow me, I'm on all the social networks. At MichaelBHorn, whether that's X or LinkedIn or even Instagram, I'm not on Tik Tok. But then you can always follow me at Michael B Horn on sub stack at the future of education or my website, michaelbehorn.com

Julian: Thank you so much, Michael for taking this time. It's always so great to talk with you, and it's kind of an update and a very important one, I think, and can't wait for this to get out there to the world.

Michael: Appreciate you both. Thank you.

Kaitlin: Thank you. That's all we have for you today. Thank you for listening to Work Forces. We hope that you take away nuggets that you can use in your own work. Thank you to our sponsor, Lumina Foundation. We are also grateful to our wonderful producer, Dustin Ramsdell. You can listen to future episodes at workforces, dot info or on Apple, Amazon and Spotify. Please Subscribe, Like and share the podcast with your colleagues and friends.