← Becoming You with Suzy Welch
Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:00]
A
This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy. Just drop in some details about yourself and see if you're eligible to save money when you bundle your home and auto policies. The process only takes minutes and it could mean hundreds more in your pocket. Visit progressive.com after this episode to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states. We all belong outside. We're drawn to nature. Whether it's the recorded sounds of the ocean we doze off to or the succulents that adorn our homes, nature makes all of our lives, well, better. Despite all this, we often go about our busy lives removed from it, but the outdoors is closer than we realize. With Alltrails, you can discover trails nearby and explore confidently with offline maps and on trail navigation. Download the free app today and make the most of your summer with Alltrails. Yes, it's graduation season, but parents, stop. Stop, I beg you. Stop fixating on your kid getting a job. You're focusing on entirely the wrong problem. There's a more urgent problem. Let's talk about it. And more things you're about to do wrong. Because we have to, especially with the way the job market is going, which is not up, I am sorry to say. And we will talk about this stuff today on Becoming youg. Hello, my friends. This is Susie Welch, your devoted host. And today I've got some advice. I know that's a shocker for you, but listen, it is graduation season and so everyone is always giving advice, but they're giving it to new graduates, including me. I mean, I was the one up there on stage this year opining to the NYU Stern grads, 5,000 people in Madison Square Garden. Thank you. That was quite the day. But today on the pod, I want to talk to the people who really matter right now, this season, the people who paid for all of those diplomas, mom and dad, because I fear you're about to make some really big mistakes in guiding your progeny. I did it. Whoppers. I really got the job advice wrong. Really wrong. With my first kid, I got a little bit better. With my second kid, I blew it again with the third kid. And miraculously, I got it right by the fourth kid. Thank God they're all launched. And it's very nice to be the fourth kid in a family. But let me try to do some post graduation interruptus for you and see if I can steer you towards behaviors that will actually help your kids in this crazy job market and world, which I will soon describe in some detail instead of undermining them, which is what we usually do. Why? Because of love. We love them, but we undermine them. Now, if you're new here, you may be wondering why I am someone you should listen to about this and you would not be wrong to do so. So let me quickly tell you where I'm coming from. I've spent the past 30, 40 years researching and writing about business and careers and society and and the economy, all of which have changed a lot over the past few decades. I'm the co author of the books Winning and the real life MBA and the author of 1010 10, a book about decision making and also becoming the proven method for crafting the authentic life you want and need, which also happens to be the name of one of the classes I teach at NYU Stern. Basically, I live every day of my life in the world of career formation and I care a lot about this topic. I do. But here's the thing. I'm also a mom and an aunt and a friend and I'm a professor who loves her students and know them and sometimes their parents outside of class. And so I have something of a front row seat on this moment, this period in time when kids come out of college or graduate school and their parents lean in again. I mean, college has been your kid's occupation for four years and parents have had to wait outside. They've been the observers. College is like a factory. It's filled with conveyor belts, classes and roommates and internships and your kids have been on those conveyor belts. And then the conveyor belts all lead to a big field or a stage or in the case of NYU Madison Square Garden. And the product pops out in a beautiful robe and a mortarboard and everyone claps and celebrates and says congratulations and then everyone goes home and suddenly mom and dad, your kid's future feels very much like it's on you. And it kind of is. I mean, I am always so blown away when friends of mine get sad because their kid is going off to college. Oh, they're leaving home. Oh no, I'm an empty nest. They're gone. And I think they, and I say it, they are not gone. They are coming back after they graduate and they are never, ever, ever going to be gone. And the time in their lives when they are the least gone is those five to ten years after college when they need you suddenly more than ever, more than when they're Toddlers, I'm not kidding. More than when they're in middle school and being teased about their hair. More than in high school, when they're trying to get into college as part of that gigantic rejection Machinery at age 21 or 22, they are back, back. Now I realize that's not true for everybody. I mean, there is this superhuman race of college grads who go straight to jobs in big tech, the engineers, and they're the finance kids who go straight to JP Morgan or Credit Suisse and the super smart kids who go to Bain McKinsey and other consulting firms. But I want you to know something. I ran the numbers that. That's 1% maximum. Because it's about maybe, I don't know, 100,000, 200,000 kids. The vast majority of the 2 million kids who graduate from college each year, they're out there. And they're not in those big fancy jobs and they do not have the big fancy careers ahead of them. They are grappling. So let's get very real about this. The unemployment rate for recent college graduates, it just hit 5.7% in the fourth quarter of 2025. That's a three year high according to the Fed. Now, the overall US unemployment rate during that same period sat at 4.2%. So your kid, with their hardened diploma is now walking into a tougher job market than the workforce as a whole. Now hold on to that fact, because for 70 years, 7, 0 a college degree produced a lower unemployment than the general or workforce average. Covid was what broke that pattern and it has not recovered. Okay, the underemployment figure is even more sobering. The underemployment rate rose to 42.5 in Q4 of 2025, its highest level since 2020. So this is the thing. There is like the meme of the barista with the philosophy diploma. But it is not a meme that is almost half the class. Can I go on? I kind of feel like I have to. Just to set the stage here, employers project just a 1.6 increase in hiring for the class of 2026 compared to the class of 2025. And once you remember that the number of graduates is also growing, what looks like growth on paper is really just a narrower door. The hiring side is starker than that. Okay, I'm sorry. And bad news, Betty here. Job postings on handshake, that's the campus focused job platform, fell 15 to 16% year over year, August 24 to August 25. While applications per posting get this rose 26 to 30%. And what that means is that more kids are fishing in a smaller pond. Your kids might be among them. Then there's the work and field number. That's another stat that economists love to look at. I like to look at it. It tells you what happens when those lines for hiring get long. It shows that 30% of 2025 graduates secured full time jobs in their field, what they studied, down from 41% the year before. Even the kids hired are increasingly taking work adjacent to what they studied, or nothing close to it at all. All right, now let's talk about salaries. They're actually inching up. I mean, the average starting salary is around $65,000. That's a little bit better than the year before and a little bit better than the year before that. But the numbers for salaries, the economists believe have actually been lifted by the salaries being commanded by the engineers in the humanities and social sciences. If your kid happened to major in one of those things, salaries actually saw a decline of about 4%. What's kind of heartbreaking, and this is all kind of heartbreaking, is that 2026 graduates say that they anticipate a starting salary of over $100,000. And recent graduates are actually averaging, as I said, around $65,000. So what we're seeing is a $30,000 gap between what kids believe is waiting for them when they graduate and actually what's there. So kids are having a harder time getting jobs and most are earning less than they want or they expected to. And last but not least, how could we do this without talking about debt? The latest Data is for 2024, but it's between 47, 50 something percent of people are graduating with debt. And the debt numbers range from $29,000 per person to $43,000 per person, depending on which data set you're looking at. But the math doesn't math, because if you're making 65,000 and you've got 43,000, those are not great numbers. What's going on? I mean. Well, there's a lot of explanations, but you know, one big explanation. We all know it. It's AI. There was a study out of Stanford, it was analyzing payroll data from millions of US workers and it found that unemployment for 22 to 25 year olds in AI exposed jobs dropped 13% since 2022. For software developers in the same age group, the drop was 20%. Investment banks are scaling back junior analyst classes. Same for consulting. AI is eating the work that used to train juniors like you Know the making of pitch books, first draft models, research summaries. The grunt work that used to teach you the business is now being done by AI in seconds. This leads to an awful catch 22 that your grads are running into. And you know what I'm about to say. Some economists call this the. Call this experience inflation. What a euphemism. They see these jobs posted and for. They say this is an entry level job, but they're asking for three to four years of prior relevant work experience. I mean, how is that even possible? It's like the first rung on the ladder now requires you to already be standing on the ladder for three or four years. How do you become a senior if you can't find work as a junior? It can feel diabolical, it can feel daunting, and it can make you feel helpless and it can make you feel hopeless. That's the stage. The people who are in that stage, they're your kids, and they turn to you. You've helped them before. Your mom, your dad. That's your job. And my God, you want to help. You are desperate to help. What are you going to do? What? Because you have no idea what to do. How could you? This is not the economy or world that you graduated into. You're frustrated and you're worried and you're sad. I actually did a reel a little while ago about sad parents. Let's listen to it, and then let's listen to some of the responses to it. Don't freak out, but I think sad parents are everywhere. I think this is a phenomenon. I think it's huge. All right, let me explain. Sad parents are the parents of people from their 20s to their 40s whose kids went to college or graduate school and they paid for it, where they took out loans even harder. And the kids are not employed or they're super underemployed. And the parents started off frustrated at the kids. Then they started to understand that the economy was involved, and then they were just confused. It was the economy plus the way their kids were thinking about work, which is not the way they think about work. And the parents find themselves sort of five, six years into this phenomenon, which kind of started in the pandemic. And after it, they find themselves just kind of quietly losing their minds. There's a support group for them, although I'd like to see if we can get one going. And they're quietly kind of embarrassed, scared, worried that they're going to be supporting their kids for the rest of their life, which is not what they were counting on. That's it. Sad parents. You cannot believe some of the responses. They're kind of heartbreaking. We have six children. Each of them have college degrees. One of them even has an H bomb. Every single one of them, including their spouses, is struggling. For example, our son in law is a teacher, which he loves. But the pay doesn't support their lifestyle, which isn't too fancy by any means. Our brilliant oldest son finally got out of the laboratory and into a pharmaceutical sales position, which pays much better. But he finds a daily job lonely and isolating. If this was an us problem, we could probably tighten the purse strings a little bit, but it seems to be a current cultural phenomena. I felt so alone. But there is a slight comfort in knowing I'm not the only one who's going through this. My 24 year old middle son has had a double whammy. Being born two weeks before September 11th and then the last half of his senior year, Covid happened. He's severely underemployed and needs to work a full time and a part time job just to pay for some of his basic living expenses. He literally works seven days a week between both of those jobs. He can't even consider moving out. I'm always worried about him and now that he's rapidly approaching 26, he's going to age out of being able to be on my medical, dental and vision insurance. This is not a small thing. These are real emotions. So let's get to it. What's my advice for you, mom and dad, for anybody who's helping? I mean, you may, your kid may have graduated this year or your kid may have graduated in the past five or six years ago. I have four pieces of advice and that is where we're going next. Here's my first piece of advice. You have to let go of what your kids say studied and where you think you think the jobs are. I am talking about going back to ground zero with her kids. Because what you have to do is you have to figure out not what they studied or where the jobs are, you have to figure out what they're actually good at. Which college never ever does. Let me tell you a story about this because I am guilty as charged. Okay? It wasn't like in the immediate recent past, it was 2011, okay? But my son Roscoe graduated from Stanford she shiny degree from Stanford University, American Studies. Jack and I wondered what American studies was, but he assured us this was a very good thing to study. We were frantic about him getting a job, frantic and so we thought, okay, he's good at everything. He studied American studies. We asked him a few times what did he want to do with his life, and he couldn't answer us. And so we thought, let's just keep on asking him over and over again. When he didn't answer, we thought, let's just get him a job. And so we started, you know, doing what parents do. We called our friends. We. I used to look at LinkedIn and send him job postings. I would send him news articles about different jobs that might be appealing to him. Hey, did you see this article in the newspaper about this company that's growing? Did you write the CEO? And I was like breathing down his neck. He was a kid who just wasn't sure what he really wanted. And many kids who graduate are not sure what they really want. So of course, what did he do? There were recruiters on campus and consulting was kind of making a case to him. So he went for an interview at a big consulting firm and he got called back for a second interview. And it just so happened I knew somebody who worked at that consulting consulting firm. So I did what parents will do. I called the friend, and the friend called a friend within the firm and he got offered the job. So he was basically forced by us to go into consulting because it was a job. And we were focused on him getting a job. That's what college was for, him getting a job. We thought, okay, we paid for this. We did our part. He needs to get his butt into a job. So he went into this job, it was a disaster. He hated it, and they didn't like him very well and he didn't show up a lot and he kind of was sort of half assed in it and it blew up. He was fired after 12 weeks. And that day he came home from being fired, he was very sad, he was very morose. He was both defiant and ashamed at the same time. If you could try to imagine that behavior out of a 21 year old. Defiant and ashamed, yes, they can pull that off. At the same time, I got mad. This is not my finest parenting moment. Jack, my husband, cleverly left the room before the full explosion. But I kind of lost my shit on him. And I was screaming at him, you know, we've done everything. What is wrong with you? You got a great education. Why can't you get yourself a job? What's going on? And finally I did yell at him because I was at a complete loss about how to help this kid who should have been helping himself. In my opinion. I screamed at him, whose life do you want anyway? And he was absolutely certain whose life he wanted. That was the first question he could ever answer. And he answered with, I mean, I'm still kind of in shock. I mean, here was my fancy pants Stanford graduate who majored in American studies, and I asked, whose life do you want anyway? And he tells me the name of the guy who owns and runs the summer camp. He went to a summer camp. I want that life. I want to run a summer camp. And I was like, you've got to be kidding me. But it's very interesting. It was the moment where I thought, who is this kid and what does he really want in life? We had gotten on that conveyor belt with him, the conveyor belt that led to the fancy jobs. He didn't want that fancy job. And this began the period of deep, deep excavation, of searching and trying to find out who was this person really and who did he want to become. And please, please do not do what I did screaming at this kid. I mean, it was not his mistake. Every parent listening to this podcast is if their kid's looking, opening a new tab to look at the job boards on their kid's behalf, or forwarding a posting to them at midnight, or working the phones with their college roommate who's now a partner somewhere. And you are in fix it mode. I was in fix it mode. My friends, you are solving the wrong problem. The problem is not that your kid is unemployed. The problem is that your kid is unemployment aimed. And those are completely different problems with completely different solutions. And sadly, I said this advice might hurt. You have just spent, what, 300,000, 400,000 in some cases on an institution you believe was developing your child into a person with direction, with aim. And the dirty little secret is that college, especially in the last 15 years, has optimized for a different metric entirely. The placement rate. The 95% employed or in grad school number that goes on the college website. That number does not measure whether your kid is becoming themselves. It measures whether the kid took a job, any job, within six months of graduation. Those are not the same thing. They are barely related things. When a school's incentive is to push every senior onto a conveyor belt. Banking, consulting, tech, law school, med school, teach for America. The kid who emerges at the end is credentialed, but not aimed, not purposeful. You need now to aim your kid. College didn't do. Didn't. And so it's on you. Surprise. It's on you. Okay, how do you do that, of course, all roads lead back to becoming you. I mean, this is the becoming you podcast. I mean, all right, you've got to find out what your kid's values are. You've got to find out what their actual aptitudes are. There are tests for that. There's tests to find out their values. You can do it in 22 minutes, the values bridge, but you can do it other ways. You've got to find out what they're actually cognitively good at. It may not at all be what they studied. You've got to find out what their cognitive and emotional aptitudes are. This is what we do in the becoming you methodology. That's why I'm on fire about it, by the way. You've got to find out. You've got to open their aperture. They've been in college or in grad school and they've heard about banking, they've heard about consulting, they've heard about Big Tech. They've heard about Teach for America. They've heard about retail. They've heard just a few things. Do you know that there's 135 industries. Did you know that there's 12 identified megatrends? The aperture in college unbelievably gets smaller and smaller and smaller. Okay? And you've got to crank it open. You have to crank it open for yourself. This is not going to take you a long time. I mean, I teach Becoming you in three days. Some people sit down and read the book Becoming you in one sitting. And again, you don't have to use the Becoming youg methodology. I'm just telling you that you've actually got to find out who your kid is and what their purpose actually is. It may be completely unrelated to the road to college. Put them on. You gotta know that. And I know this sounds expensive, and I know it sounds time consuming. This is one of those things that you're gonna have to take the hit now or later if you don't figure out their aim, their purpose. Now you're gonna be looking for for the rest of their life as they zig and zag and zig and zag between jobs that have no meaning for them. My first piece of advice is to go back to ground zero because your kid probably did not come out of college with a clear sense of their purpose. College teaches them a lot of things. I mean, I came out of college knowing about the Edo period in Japanese art. I came out college understanding, like, Latin American history. These are fascinating things that have held me in good stead reading the newspaper. But your kid. I mean college has not really changed that much. Your kid's coming out with a degree in something they probably are not going to get a job in. But also no clear sense, I guess. Yeah. Is it fair that it falls on you? Is anything fair about parenthood? Is anything? It's still delicious. You still got to do it. It's still one of the most rewarding, if not the most rewarding thing you'll ever do in your life. And if you don't have grandchildren yet, let me tell you, it's all worth it for them. But my first piece of advice to you is to let it go and start again and find out who your kid was meant to become. That's the beginning of the journey. Not finding a job, finding out which job Nerds Today's episode is sponsored by NerdWallet's Smart Money podcast. Ever Google a money question and end up 12 tabs deep with 12 different answers? This podcast is your shortcut back to clarity. Nerd Wallet's Smart Money Podcast breaks down financial decisions With a team of trusted journalists, they explain the why behind decisions like investing, home buying and choosing credit cards. With clear research backed insights. No jargon, no misinformation. Make your next financial move with confidence. Follow NerdWallet's Smart Money podcast on your favorite podcast app. Hi, I'm Nicole Phelps, global fashion news and Features Director at Vogue and co host of the Run Through Podcast. Each week on the show, our listeners get an overview all access Pass into the world of Vogue On Tuesdays. Join me as I interview influential designers like Calvin Klein, Rachel Scott and Simone Bellotti. On Thursdays. Join Chloe Mal, head of Editorial content at Vogue US and Shoma Nadi, British Vogue's head of Editorial content, as they explore fashion through the lens of culture with guests like Doja Cat and Margot Robbie. Listen and watch the run through with Vogue wherever you get your pieces. Podcasts and Vogue's YouTube channel Study and Play come together on a Windows 11 PC and for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the unreal college deal, everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 Premium and a year of Xbox game. Pass ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more@windows.com studentoffer while supplies last ends June 30th. Terms at aka Ms. CollegePC. All right, I've got a second piece of advice. Afraid to say it? I'm about to offend a Lot of my own personal friends about this. The answer is not usually more school. At least not right away. Okay, that's what you're thinking. Oh, they don't know what to do. Let's send them to school. Kids don't know what to do. Job market is bleak. Let's get them into another factory. Mba, law school, medical school, Master's in public health. That's a big one. This is how educational institutions are actually staying afloat. It's a band aid. When your kid is floating in the kitchen at 11am with no offers and no plan. I'm sorry, but the most socially acceptable rescue available? The one that lets you tell your friends at the dinner party that everything is okay, it's grad school, isn't it? I mean it's kind of the middle class, upper middle class panic room. It buys time, it sounds prestigious, it postpones the hard conversation and it lets everyone pretend that the kid is doing something. And the dirty little secret is that a great deal of the time the kid is not doing something. The kid is hiding. And you are helping them hide. Because the alternative, which is sitting in the discomfort of not knowing who they are and not knowing why they don't have a job, is unbearable for everyone involved. But grad school, it is just another factory, only more expensive. I mean the numbers are gasp worthy. An MBA at a top school costs $250,000 all in when you include foregone earnings. Law school is $300,000. Medical school can run past $400,000. A master's in public health, public policy, international relations, those are biggies. The soft landing degrees of choice for the unaimed liberal arts Kid. Those run $80,150,000. Many cases. No clear ROI at all. None. And we talked earlier about the debt. You know, the loans that kids have. Up to 40 something thousand dollars the average undergraduate now carries. Now imagine doubling or tripling that to solve a problem that was never about credentials in the first place. It's not just a band aid. It's a band aid that costs more than the wound. I'm sorry, but let's just be real here. This is how some educational institutions are staying afloat. Grad school enrollment is is up precisely because undergraduate enrollment is collapsing. Institutions need warm bodies and they need tuition revenue. And the pitch has gotten shameless. Every adrift 22 year old is now a marketing target for somebody's master's program. Now I have to say something very very very important here. I am not anti graduate education. I'm not Anti education at all. I love education. I'm an MBA professor, after all, and I am not telling kids not to get an MBA and never to go to law school and Never pursue a PhD. All right? I am. Grad school is fantastic and can be a very powerful instrument when deployed in service of an aim. They are catastrophic when they're deployed instead of an aim. We talked, Jack and I, about sending Roscoe to go get his MBA when he was aimless. He might have gotten that, and it would have made him a more credentialed person who did not want to be a consultant, and he would have been more stuck, not less. We got unstuck with that kid when we asked him, who are you and what do you actually want? So I would say, okay, maybe grad school. But the right test for grad school is not does this delay? The problem is, does this serve a purpose that we have already identified? After some really hard conversations, I was at a party the other night. Such a good party. His friend had a birthday party, and I met a dad whose daughter majored in anthropology at a fancy paint school. He was a hedge fund manager. And he said to me, she doesn't really know what she wants to do. And then he kind of said quietly, her real dream, she told me, is to actually work in a village in Africa that's building a new water supply. And then he said, but that's not a career. She's going to go to law school. And I was like, oh, my God. I said to him, this is my field. I'm begging you to let her go to Africa to do the work she wants to do. I said to him, I think your daughter has this, her number one value, radius. Radius is the value about how much of a social impact and cultural impact you want to have. And I bet you because her dad's a hedge fund manager, that affluence making money was probably her number, her bottom value. You take this person who wants to change the world and doesn't care about making money, and you send her to law school why? And I think the answer to why was so that he could sit at that party and tell me that his daughter was going to law school, but he needed to have some conversations with that daughter about who she really was. Okay? So if you're thinking about grad school and it feels like this is just the thing, this is just the thing that's going to fix it, it is probably not just a thing. It could be, but it's probably not. Okay. More difficult advice for me Here you need to help your kid in this period of floating. They may be unemployed or they may be underemployed and you're sad. All right, you need to help your kid understand that values, the values that they have have consequences. And here's the second part. You have to own that your values have consequences too. Let me talk to you about something that happened. We have this tool, the values bridge which rank orders your values from 1 to 16 and it tells you what values you have that are included conflict and this is a tool that's been taken by it's approaching 200,000 people. It was developed by me at the Becoming youg labs with psychometricians and data scientists and so forth. Now because I teach Gen Z I generally had a feel for what Gen Z's values top values were. I know all my students values and look, it's a little bit of a rarefied place when you teach at a business school. The values are not exactly reflecting the general population but with this data set of of 150,000 200,000 people we could very very clearly see what are the top values for Gen z. The number one value for over 60% of Gen Z is a value that we call eudaimonia. That's self care, that's recreation, it's leisure, it's balance, it's self flourishing and that's the number one value for Gen Z. Not a surprise if you hang out with Gen Z people. I was not shocked by these numbers and again it's not all of them but it's more than 60%. Second top value for Gen Z is what we call voice. This is authentic self expression. It's living life out loud exactly the way you are. It's the sort of resistance to conformity. It's individualism. It's like just this is me. That's voice. Authentic self expression. That's the number two value coming in around 60%. The number three value for gen Z is. It's a beautiful thing. It's what we call non sibi the value of wanting to help other people, of wanting to spend and organize your time around helping others. I think it's a very commendable thing. These are not the values of other generations but these are very distinctly the top values of Gen Z. The one thing that kind of concerns me about that data is I wonder what the values are that hiring managers are looking for in Gen Z and I had that question why? Because I'm on corporate boards and because I'm a manager myself and because I teach Management and I care a lot about how companies do and whether they're thriving. So we decided to conduct a second study of 25,000 hiring managers. These are people in the knowledge industries, kind of tech consulting, banking industry. They had to be over 40 years old to take the survey and manage at least five people. Basically we wanted people who were hiring young people. We showed them all the values with all of the definitions and we said please identify the number one value you're looking for in the Gen Z people that you're hiring. Then we took all that data and we looked at what the top three values that came in, what they were. And the number one value was achievement, the desire to win, the motivation, the love of competition, the feeling of success, wanting to win, wanting to feel accomplished and wanting to have a lot of achievement. That's the number one value that they were seeking in people they hired. No surprise you want people to want to win on your team. Generally when you're in business and you're an employer. Number two, a value that is called work centrism, the desire to work. I mean I have very high work centrism. I'm old fashioned that way. I just love work for work's sake. I said I would work eight days if I could. I like, I don't even like weekends. Okay, I'm very stream on this. But work centrism, this just this desire to work. I have a friend, she was a middle, she was a middle school home EC teacher and she had to retire in her state, all teachers had to retire at age 60. And the next day she went out and got a job at Costco. Why? Because she loved to work. And then number three value that hiring managers are looking for is a value called scope. That's the desire for learning, action, stimulation, travel, adventure. Okay, this kind of energy, not lower scope which is psychological safety, predictability and so forth. They're looking for high scope. So here's the data over here on Gen Z, top values are eudaimonia, self care, voice, self expression and helping other people. And then you look at the values that hiring manager is looking for. Achievement, work centrism and scope. And if you take all those values and you cross reference the data, what do you find out? You find out that, that 2% of Gen Z has the values that hiring managers are looking for. I thought this was a fascinating piece of data, don't you? This 2% number. So I wrote an article about it for my friends at the Wall Street Journal. They said that is very interesting data. Suzy, let's run that piece about all that data and how you found it out. You know, when you write a piece for the Wall Street Journal as an op ed contributor, you do not make up the headlines. They get to make up the headlines and they put the headline on it. Is Gen Z unemployable? This led to several weeks of articles afterwards that said, Susie Welch says Gen Z is unemployable. I did not actually say that. I love you, Wall Street Journal. But I did raise the question, you know, if only 2% have the values that hiring managers are looking for, what does this mean about employment for Gen Z? There was like a lot of hooting and hollering over this. And on one hand, employers, a lot of CEOs wrote me, a lot of executives wrote me and said, thank you for finally saying out loud what we've been experiencing, that they don't have the values that we want to make our businesses grow. And then I heard lot of people in Gen Z who said, just get off our backs, will you? Why would we want your values? Your values got you like crummy, unbalanced lives of stress and anxiety. We don't want your lives and we don't want your values. And you know what? They both have very good arguments. I'm actually, I know it's hard to believe. I'm actually pretty agnostic on this. I think people have a right to their values. I want my values. I don't want anybody criticizing my values. Why should I criticize somebody else's values? I find values fascinating. I, I study it, I got my PhD in it. But I don't. I want people to, if they're not hurting anybody, you should just be able to live your values. And we're not talking about virtues, we're talking about values, which are choices. But here's the thing. If accidentally a Gen Z person is listening to this, I don't want you to cancel me for what I'm about to say. But values have consequences. I mean, that's what people don't want to hear. Okay? They want their values, but they don't want to face into the fact that sometimes values have consequences. And you, dear parent who is listening to this, you've been saying this to your kids. You've been saying you want work, life, balance and you want eudaimonia and you want to express your full self and you're not getting a lot of jobs. You're going to have to want achievement more. I mean, you kind of are saying this. You're going to want to work more, you're going to have to present a person that you aren't to get these jobs. And you've been telling your kids about the consequences, and they've not liked that conversation. But I think actually my very hard advice here is, is you need to have that conversation. But I don't want you accusing your kids of anything. I just want you to be talking about these things, about values. I don't want you saying you're lazy. That's what people with high achievement say to people with lower levels of achievement. And then the conversation gets very heated and you stop having it. So I want parents to continue to have that conversation, but I want them to depersonalize it in a way that's judgy. It's just sort of saying, look, you've got these values. Don't go expecting to get the jobs that are paying $100,000, and that's okay that you make. These are your values. You make your bed and you're gonna sleep in it. So that's half of what I'm saying here. I think that conversation needs to happen, and it's your job as a parent to have it. But there's a second piece of it. Your values also had consequences. So I think in having this conversation with your kids, it's okay to say the truth, which is typically something like, look, I had a very high values of achievement and work centrism. This is usually how it goes. And there were trade offs, and I did pay the price, and I did give my company my all, and I did get fired. And sometimes it can feel like a bad deal. I faced into the consequences and I lived them. And I understand why you may sometimes not want to buy into that deal as well. I mean, I think that there just needs to be a very candid, open conversation about how all values have consequences and trade offs. But you know what? The trade offs are yours to choose. Our kids should not impose the trade offs they want to make on us, and we should not impose the trade offs that we chose to make on our kids. This was a brutally hard lesson for yours truly to learn. I wanted Roscoe, that kid who said, oh, I want to be kind of a camp counselor when I graduate from Seattle. I desperately wanted him to have my values. And it took a while for me to understand. His number one value is family centrism. He wanted to be a dad. His second value was belovedness, his relationship with his wife. He had achievement down to like, seven, eight, or nine. And here I was with a achievement up at the very tippy top saying, have my values, have my values. And he was looking right at me and he couldn't say back, I don't want your values or your life. And it was only finally, when I finally came to understand him better and I saw what his values really were, that we were able to have the kind of conversation where he was able to build the career that was right for him and the life that was right for him. But we had years of knocking, locking horns as I came to terms with the fact that his values were not mine. Okay. And I have another son who when he graduated, I got it pretty right with him. I understood his interests were not corporate interests and we helped him find a career in music and then in entrepreneurship. But when he was running a company and it was a little entrepreneurial startup and he was CEO, he was dying inside. He didn't want to lead people. We were very proud. We love telling everybody he, he was a CEO. But I had learned my lesson with my older kid and I thought, you know, I, and I said to him like I don't think this is the job for you. And he said, I kind of hate it. And guess what? Right now, with his top values of voice and belovedness, he runs a business with his wife. And he is not the CEO, she is. Your kids have to understand that their values have consequences, but you have to understand that so did yours. And it's a two way street. And this is a hard conversation to have. Let me tell you one last story about this. I, I had a student who graduated and his family said, okay, come on home and run the family business. And he thought, okay, what else am I going to do? I'm going to go home and run the family business. He had none of the values to run the family business. When you're in a family business, the idea is to like grow the business so that every, all the owners, the family gets more of a bigger slices of the pie. Affluence was not a value of his and scope was not a value of his. You know, you have to have kind of high scope to run a family business. You have to know a little bit about this and a little bit about that and you got to kind of be able to handle a lot of chaos. This was a large family business business. He didn't have any values that aligned with running this large chaotic family business. And they said, oh, you got the mba. First kid who went to college in the family, first kid who went to business school, put him in CEO. And it just blew up and the family was so mad at him for his values. And we cannot be mad at each other for our values. Okay? We have to say. We have to step back and we have to say you had your values and I had mine. And all those values have consequences. And you know who lives the consequences? You do. You do. As it should be. This episode is brought to you by Prime Obsession is in session. And this summer, prime originals have everything you want. Steamy romances, irresistible love stories and the book to screen favorites you've already read twice off campus L every year after the love Hypothesis, Sterling point and more slow burns, second chances chemistry you can feel through the screen. Your next obsession is waiting. Watch only on Prime. Ready to soundtrack your summer with Red Bull Summer all day play. You choose a playlist that fits your summer vibe the best. Are you a festival fanatic, a deep end dj, a road dog, or a trail mixer? Just add a song to your chosen playlist and put your summer on track. Red Bull Summer All Day Play. Red Bull gives you wings. Visit red bull.com brightsummerahead to learn more. See you this summer, girl. Winter is so last season and now spring's got you looking at pictures of tank tops with hungry eyes. Your algorithm is feeding you. Cut. You're thirsty for the sun on your shoulders that perfect hang on the patio sundress. Those sandals you can wear all day and all night. And you've had enough of shopping from your couch. Done. Hoping it looks anything like the picture when you tear open that envelope. It's time for a little in person spring treat. It's time for a trip to Ross. Work your magic. All right, so look, all of this, all of this leads me to my last point, my last piece of advice. Advice. In this fraught time, you mom and dad parent, you cannot become the boogeyman in all of this. You have to become their ally. In the hard work I've described in my first piece of advice in this podcast, the re aiming the purposifying of your kid. Your kid cannot rage at the job market. It's not going to talk back. The job market is too big and too abstract. Doesn't care about them. They cannot rage at AI. How can they? They cannot rage at McKinsey for not calling them back. So what happens? They rage at the only available safe, loving target in the room. They rage at you. And because you love them and because you feel guilty that they're suffering and because some part of you wonders whether you should have made them major in something more practical. Okay? You take it. You absorb it. You become the proxy enemy. And the longer you absorb, the more the relationship calcifies into something that neither of you wanted. Your kid loses respect for you. You lose authority with your kid. And the very alliance that should pull your kid out of the spiral becomes the casualty of the spiral. Now, in this moment, most of us default to one of two postures, rescuer or critic. The rescuer is the parent who tries to fix everything, calls their friends, sends three job postings a day, edits the COVID letter. And the critic is the parent who, exhausted by the rescuer role, eventually snaps and starts asking pointy questions about what the kid is doing all day. And both postures are losing postures. The rescuer, like you, infantilize your kid and the critic ostracizes your kid. I want you to be the ally. That's my fourth piece of advice. The ally. It's hard. The ally walks alongside. Not in front of the kid, not behind the kid, not above and not below. Alongside. You're doing the work with them. You didn't think you were going to be, but you are. You are the co investigator on the question of who they are becoming. That changes everything about the texture of the relationship. Now, this alliance, I have to be clear, is not. It's not a vibe. I'm not saying be their ally. It's a project. It's a job. I am not asking you to be empathetic and feel for them. I'm asking you to do something very concrete with your kid, which is sit at the kitchen table on a Saturday morning and take all the assessments and talk about the results. Find out what their values are. Do the actual work of figuring out who they are and where they're going. All right? It may not be what you expected, and it may not be what you wanted. That is the thing that you can do. That is the antidote to the helplessness. That is the antidote to the sadness. That's actionable help. And by the way, it helps you, too. All right? The boogeyman dynamic can run in the other direction sometimes, you know, you actually become the boogeyman to yourself. Your inner critic. You know, it narrates every interaction you have with the kid as evidence of your own failure as a mother or father. I should have pushed harder on the major. I should have made him do that internship. I should have. I should have, I should have, should have. And that voice is just as destructive as the kid's projected anger. And it's running on the same engine. The search for someone to blame for a situation that is structural, not personal. Being your kid's ally, you know, also means you have to be your own ally. You're not the reason the job market is what it is, and you're not the reason your kid is struggling. You are the person standing next to them while they figure it out. And that is not a small role. That is the role. That's the work. That's the love. That's the whole thing. Do you remember at the beginning of the podcast, I said, I got it right with the second kid. I got it right with my second kid. My daughter Sophia. She was a person who had a lot of purpose, okay? Coming out of college, she knew what she wanted. She wanted to be in entertainment. She wanted very specifically to be in the casting field. Being a casting director, she was so clearly presented. I mean, to have a kid who, like, knew exactly what their purpose was at that age was kind of a big gift to us, okay? So she knew. And our eureka was like, okay, look, we can't hold her back. I mean, we talked to her about trying other fields because we understood how hard it was to succeed in the entertainment field. But one day, I remember thinking to myself, okay, somebody's gonna succeed at being a casting director. Why not? Why not her? So I actually went out with her to Hollywood with her dog, Wolf, meanest Chihuahua that ever lived. Anyway, we went out with Wolf, and she. She looked and looked for jobs, and she broken into reality tea, and she got a job in casting, and she built a pretty good resume of going from job to job, mainly in reality casting. And eventually she broke into scripted casting, and she had kind of a great career going. And then life went on, and my husband, her stepfather, got sick. She came home to New York to abide me, to keep me company, as he was in hospice. It was a beautiful thing that she did. And he died in March 2020. And then Covid hit, and so she stayed in New York with me, and Hollywood pretty much shut down during COVID And then Covid ended, and she decided to stay in New York and take a corporate job. I could see her flailing. She was not living her purpose anymore. And she went in every single day to her corporate job in communications. And she did the work, but she was slowly withering inside. And I thought, this is again the moment. The moment when you have to lean in. And I sat with her, and we did her values. We looked at them, and we saw how clearly she was not living them. My God, she was nowhere near her interests. And I had to help her remember who she was and say to her, you're not becoming you. You're not becoming you. And I could have kept my hands off. I could have let her bump along. But you can't say my job's over. I mean, like I said at the beginning, they're never gone. They're. And she didn't. In a way, she was too kind of devastated and weakened by not living her purpose to actually sort of shake it off. And I became her ally. I think she would say that, too. I had to walk up alongside her. I had to take that role on, of helping her get back on the road to becoming herself. I mean, that's the work, that's the love. That's the whole thing. This is the season where your kid's graduating or they've just. They've graduated a few years ago and you think I should be saying goodbye. I should be sending them on their way. But the world is not enabling that as much as it used to. Get over it. This is your job again. This is your role. This is the love to be their ally and their companion now more than ever, to help them become who they were meant be to be. And that is my advice to you about this time after graduation, this very tender, fragile, important time. You thought your kid was going to be launched, but they're back home and they are needing you more than ever. And that's okay. That's the love. That's the whole thing. Thanks so much for being here. I hope this helped. This is becoming you. I'm Susie Welch. I'll see you next time. Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money. Whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings, there's a money side to every story. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now@bloomberg.com.