May 4, 2024

“Anyone who tells you to follow your passion is already rich.”

The statement caught my ear on one of the Sunday news shows last weekend, prompting me to dial in on what Scott Galloway, a professor of marketing at NYU’s Stern School of Business had to say.

Rather than allowing your passion for a subject to determine your education or career path, “your job is to find your talent,” Galloway continued. “Something you can become a ninja-like master of. Mastery will give you economic security, camaraderie, relevance.”

Whatever it is that enables you to achieve those things, “you will become passionate about that thing,” he added.

It seems a fitting message this commencement season as another class of young people heads toward a workplace that increasingly demands not just basic skills but specialization and a society that seemingly requires more earning power and ability than ever.

“Your job is to find your talent and ideally in an industry that has a 90-plus percent employment rate … which by the way is about 98 percent of industries,” said Galloway, who recently published the book “The Algebra of Wealth: A Simple Formula for Financial Security.”

“A lot of young people mistake hobbies for their passion,” he continued, which is fine, but “if you don’t get strong signals that you’re in the top .1 percent, then find something else.”

But how do they find that “something else?” That’s where increasingly, I think, education must meet industry and must start sooner than anyone probably thinks is necessary.

Consider the new additional location for Boys & Girls Clubs of the Sioux Empire, which will break ground this week on a center attached to George McGovern Middle School.

This first-of-its-kind center locally will include programming in a STEAM classroom focused on science, technology, engineering, arts and music, along with a teaching kitchen.

Here’s an example of one in the Omaha area:

It’s accurate, but oversimplified, to think of this as a structured place for kids to spend time after school. In an ideal scenario, this and other programs like it, inside and outside of schools, need to become places where kids begin to discover their talents.

This week also will bring a groundbreaking for Dakota State University’s Applied Research Lab in Sioux Falls, which continually reminds me of the dire need in this country for more people with talents in the sophisticated field of cybersecurity.

And that’s just the beginning. There’s the health care field, which demands talent in everything from patient care to research. There’s manufacturing, with a need for skilled machinists and robotics expertise. There are occupations that run the gamut from accountants to attorneys, pilots to plumbers, where a whole mix of skills sets is needed to replace an aging cohort of professionals.

We must, as a business community, do our part to communicate these needs to educators and then to provide opportunities for students to hone and embrace the many talents we need to advance all kinds of industries.

And then as our students begin to graduate, whether from high school or college, we as mentors need to be having direct, maybe even difficult, conversations about how to determine the next most effective step. And I think this generation will be receptive.

The networking website Handshake, which is popular among college students, ranked the top six things Gen Z wants from their next job, which backs up this idea.

No. 1: Job stability and financial security as 80 percent of them incredibly already are thinking ahead to retirement.

No. 2: The opportunity to develop skills, with nearly two-thirds saying that developing advanced skills in their field is essential to their definition of career success.

These are not the priorities of a generation intent on finding a job they necessarily love day one, which is encouraging as we all know the real path to professional fulfillment tends to be a more circuitous one.

And there are, of course, plenty of outlets for anyone who has a passion for something. Side hustles or hobbies around food, the arts and athletics arguably have never been easier to at least float out to the marketplace. Certainly, service on nonprofit boards, volunteer work or community groups provide additional outlets and work-life balance that so many are seeking, along with greater personal reward.

This week also, appropriately, marks Teacher Appreciation Week. Talk about an area where we need talented people. And I know we already ask a lot of our educators, but anything we can do to help kids identify and cultivate their unique talents is truly the outcome we most need from our schools, at least from my perspective.

There’s clearly a place in life for their passions, but the world needs their talent more than ever.