Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio news. You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Karl Messer and Tim Stenebeck on Bloomberg Radio. Think about where you are in your career versus where you want to be in your career and the moves required to get there. It's the subject of a brand new book co written by three business school professors, including our next guest, Ethan Bernstein. Ethan Bernstein is Professor of
Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He joins us from Boston. The brand new book is Job Moves, Nine Steps for making Progress in your career. Ethan joins us from Boston this afternoon. Ethan, good to have you with us. How are you?
Thank you, Tim. I'm doing great. How are you?
We're doing well. Thanks. Excited to talk to you about this because it's actually based on a Harvard Business School course and research that the three of you have conducted with over one thousand professionals. Can you talk a little bit about how you made this book? I almost said how you built this book because it is something that you guys spent years building and it.
Is based on new product development. But look, this was the genesis of the book let's start with some numbers. Every year, roughly a billion people change jobs on average. People do a job move roughly every four years these days. And what we know is that hundreds of millions report
that they're disappointed with the outcome from their switch. You ask an audience the fastest they've ever gone from taking a new job to realizing it's not right for them, and usually as many as three quarters, say less than a year. And maybe they ended up in a new role they've quit quietly, and maybe they start a new job search just months after arriving a new job. Whatever the case, I personally find that frustrating people invest a lot in a job move, and so do their families
and communities. The ROI should be better, and so in two thousand and nine, now fifteen years ago, we decided to do some research on job switching to try to make it better. And our research over the past fifteen years that's followed and supported over a thousand job seekers, shows that we actually can help. It starts with a simple reframe that we stole from the world of product design and the jobs we've done.
Theory.
Just like people hire products or services to make progress in their life, we find that people try to hire their next job as much as their employer hires them to make progress in their career. And that's the premise in the framing behind the book.
Can I just say, wait, I'm not sure if I'm following you, but I've often talked when I talked with younger individuals or folks in my family who are younger, you know, and starting out their job career, and I'm kind of like, you need to interview too for the job that you want as well as companies interviewing you. This is a process, but there's two sides to it, right, Like you really need to kind of figure out where you want to go, what you're looking for, and really
kind of know what you might be stepping into. Is that fair?
Absolutely, there's a supply side and the demand side, and that's why that's why we you know, Bob is is a guru, a genius in new product innovation. He's invented more products than any human being I know, and so he brings to the table the work that he did with Klay Christensen, who is well known for it's work on innovation around jobs. He'd done this idea that when consumers buy a product they hire that product for a struggling moment in their lives that the product helps them solve.
There's a root cause that leads them to purchase not just the attributes and features of the product, but how the experience they'll have with it. And we find truly that's how people do and should think about the next step in their career when they make progress through a move, and that progress is defined by a bunch of causes, we call them pushes and pull forces that help them make that progress by hiring that next job, that next organization.
Maybe it's even a role within their organization for the job to be done in their career.
Ethan Bernstein, Professor of Business Administration. We're speaking him threat with him right now. He's at Harvard Business School. Professor, you mentioned two other names, Michael Horn and Bob Musta, who are the co authors of the book. You co wrote the book with those two other individuals. You also just mentioned Clayton Christensen, and I think anyone who's gone to business school certainly understands what a legend he is in the world of business, even of course outside of
business school as well. He passed away just about almost five years ago at this point, can you talk a little bit about his influence on the project and this whole idea of disruptive innovation.
So very personally, Clay was my dissertation advisor or one of them, and he's the person who brought us together, and so in that sense, Clay was instrumental in creating
the space for us to create this book. In fact, the reason I met Bob Mesta in two thousand and nine and saw him interview a customer who'd bought a product to understand what the job he done that customer had purchased that product to serve was because Clay, let's even say vall and told me into the session in Aldridge holl Here at the Harvard Business School to see it.
And that was that was the genesis for the idea of framing the book this way and doing the research that we did using those validated protocols that Clay and Bob created, but not on customers buying products, but rather employees choosing jobs. Michael Horn is a class of two thousand and six from here in education and upskilling guru who co authored a book with Clay. He co authored Disrupting Class and has since authored a number of books on education and upskilling, and so the three of us
each bring something different to the table. I'm the HR Talent People professor, Michael is the education and upskilling guru, and Bob is the new product development wizard.
Can I ask you something? And I feel like it's just a moment in time right now, and I've been thinking a lot about this. There's been a lot of writing about it, about the diploma divide and how that maybe explains the election outcome, and I kind of feel like it all ties in because we're going to talk a little bit later actually after you about people doing apprentice ships, which is not something that's very popular in
the US anymore, but it is overseas. But I do think about education, and I do feel like employers still want, you know, academic pedigree, you know, they look for that, and yet we have a lot of Americans that don't necessarily have college degrees, and maybe that explains to some extent the political outcome that we just got in the US presidential election. I'm just curious if you have any thoughts that kind of tie some of this together.
We're trying to help people match with organizations and with roles. That's what this book is designed to do. And in that sense, both sides, the supply side and the demand side, as we're talking about before, gets stuck in this what I will be or what someone has on their resume rather than what someone will do and how suited they
are to the experiences. So when most people think about changing jobs, they tend to focus on the features they want, things like better hours, less travel, higher pay, a worthy title, and the employer and you know, they all sound great to me, and the employees think about, okay, so what can I put in my resume to fit all of
those to make all those things level up? On the job description that says that they want entry level employee with five years of work, the work experience, it's it's all a sales job from person to person on the basis of the features and the attributes rather than the experiences and what will actually be done. And so part of what we're trying to do is make this a conversation instead about the forces. What are the things that
are pushing someone away. We have fourteen push forces that we've found over these one thousand plus individuals we've interviewed, and what are the pull forces? What are the opportunities they see that pull them towards something, and when those things align, they create enough of a pull and a push aligned to overcome the habit of the present and the anxiety of a new solution that keep people in place.
And it's not about all of those attributes. Those are nice things to have, but it's actually about the progress towards those pushes and through those pulls that someone is going to actually make. And so in that sense, it does align with the idea of diplomas and how we think about their role, because some things require it and some things don't. But we're not really talking about that because we're just thinking about the attributes rather than the experiences and the dues.
You know, there's some incredible names that have blurbed the book. Read Hastings, the co founder and executive chairman of Netflix, writes that Job Moves is packed with stuff I wish I'd understood forty years ago. Followed these nine steps full disclosure. He's also on the board of Bloomberg. I just learned. But it kind of raises a point like, this is a guy we're talking about who's, you know, co founded a company that revolutionized media. He's worth seven billion dollars
according to the Bloomberg Billionaire's Index. Yet he says he can learn from this book. Who's it for?
And We've had some very generous early readers, so I'm grateful to read and many of the others that are blurbed and have mentioned the book. The book is for primarily people who have had at least one job. It doesn't mean you can't benefit from it if you haven't, But if you've had one job, then you have a sense of what is pushing you away from that and what might be pulling you towards something else. In that sense, then it's also about people who are on some kind
of quest, somebody who wants to make progress. So one of the things we did with these sixteen pulls and fourteen pushes, we then looked at for patterns, and we found four patterns are typically on one of four quests they might be trying to get out. Those are people who are trying to reset what their job is expecting of them and how it manages them in that daily life. It might be about people trying to just take the next step. They actually like both parts of them. They
just feel like they're ready for something else. They're trying to get ahead, and the world is sort of designed for those people. That's what we call progression rather than progress. Hey one on the off Oh.
No, no, no, please finish your thought forgive me.
I say, on the off diagonals though, Some people are just trying to regain control over how they're managed, but they like what they're doing. Some people are trying to regain alignment around what they're being asked, what capabilities of being asked to use, but they love the environment around them. Each one of those quests has a different set of
advice that's good for a person. And so when I hear someone like read, who I think has probably seen at all, say that, it probably means that he's imagining that if he'd known sooner the way in which to use that common language, he could have more quickly come to the conclusion that he was on this part particular quest, and therefore this kind of step was best for him at that stage in his career.
One thing I want to ask you. There's a story that's up on the Bloomberg today about recent college graduates are feeling a cooling US labor market. The gap between the unemployment rate for recent grads and the overall rate for Americans with a college degree widened to two point eight percentage points in September. This is data from the New York Fed. It's the largest on record going back to nineteen ninety aside from a few months early on
in the pandemic. And I guess what I want to ask you these nine steps that you talk about, you know, is it only do you have the ability to follow it in a strong job market? In other words, I guess you know it's easy to kind of put your priorities and think about things when there's lots of choices, But when things are a little bit more difficult, is it tough to do that?
When the three of us got together to write a book, it's an excellent question. I'd write a book about careers. We promised ourselves we wouldn't write a book about the dream. We would write a book about trade offs, because ultimately, that's what a good career looks like. It's a bunch of trade offs that you make with priorities attached to one or the other piece of that. That's why different quests are different people at different times, and most of so filter through them over time.
Yeah, So just got twenty seconds. So I want to let you just wrap it up.
Yeah. So so really, honestly, it's about being able to tell your story for your particular moment, and then you're not competing with a thousand people for the job. You're competing with three. And that's actually better in a tight labor market. So the more work you do, the better off you'll be, even in the kind of labor market. Looks like we're heading.
Into Well, fun to check in with you, Ethan. Thank you so much. Congratulations on the book. Ethan Bernstein, Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. The book is called Job Moves, Nine Steps for making Progress in your career. Right you are listening and watching Bloomberg, we're talking apprenticeships. That's next. So in prepping for this next segment, came across in Bloomberg opinion column was late last year asking
the question can apprenticeships restore the American dream? And the column went into how apprenticeships in America were nowhere compared to every other developed country their stats around one year ago, noting that the US had half a million apprentices that's three tenths of one percent of the workforce, seventy percent of them tim in construction trades.
Okay, that contrasts with the apprenticeship giants of Central Europe. They've got ten to fifteen times more apprenticeships per capita than we do. Even the UK, Australia and Canada they're eight times bigger than we are.
We know that.
We've had guests on talk about what's going on, certainly in Europe in particular. One generation ago, though they looked a lot like the United States, with relatively small apprenticeship sectors, almost all in construction. Today it's very common for workers in those countries to launch a career in tech, our healthcare, or even financial services, all happening through an apprenticeship.
We've got with us somebody who knows quite a bit about this. Bertina Chicarelli is CEO of the nonprofit and Power. It works to move people and poverty to the middle class through tech, skills, training and job placement programs. We've gone up with her in the past. Pleased to have her back with us this afternoon. Brittina, how are you.
I'm sure, I think it's great to be back. Thank you for having me.
You know, since we last spoke to you, I've actually noticed, and maybe it's just I've been looking out for it, but I've noticed more and more people talking about these so called trades, and part of it, I think is because a lot of it has to do with there's a real lack of plumbers electricians in this country and it's driven up prices for these home services. They're also just great careers to be in. Are now we thinking
differently finally in the US about apprenticeships. Again, this is not the type of this is not the exact type of apprenticeships you focus on, But are we thinking about different differently as a society?
Absolutely, without question, and in fact we are saying enough taken apprenticeships in the traditional trades, But there's also been a great, great rise in the interest of apprenticeships for non traditional pathways like technology, which is never been deeply invested in apprenticeships until now. Right, we find that right now today that's about sixty thousand manufacturing apprenticeships. There's only about ten percent of that, a little over six thousand
today that is in tech. But tech happens to be the fastest growing sector for apprenticeships, growing at two and a half times annually per years. So I think that we've got great promise in some of these non traditional pathways to bring people into the IT sector.
Help me out how does it work, because I do feel like somebody says, well, I'm in an apprenticeship, They're like, oh, sorry, you know.
What I mean.
Like, there is certainly a stigma I think in the United States, and we've just been talking about college degrees versus not and elections and all of that, and kind of trying to understand where we are as a society, not just certain pockets, but everybody and not everybody has a college degree. So tell us about these apprenticeships, what they're like, what kind of jobs, what do people ultimately get paid?
What is it?
So you know, if you think about it, most Americans don't have afore your degree, and I think that's what traditionally why traditionally the construction trades and apprenticeships in those fields have been so popular and a past to the middle class. Arguably apprenticeships in tech are the same thing. And by the way, many of these jobs don't require a college degree. What they do require are skills, certifications, credentials.
And this is how it works. It's organizations like empower that provides that if you will free apprenticeship training that skills up populations that are often overlooked in certain segments of our labor economy, like tech. And what I mean overlooked. It's individuals who might be veterans, young adults from underserved communities, people without college degrees, but who are motivated and have all the apt and the appetite to do well in tech,
but they need the opportunity to get those skills. So that's where organizations like empower and community colleges can play a really important role. We make it easy for them
employer partners to become apprenticeship sponsors. So if you've got a skilled pipeline of talent ready to go that has those industries recognized certifications, the next step is our o employer partner to say, let's structure a six month learn to earn type of program where an individual gets those on the job skills that make them fantastic long term employees of that company and often frankly outperform those who might have polish degrees.
Brittina, I could imagine somebody listening right now saying, wait a second, this sounds a lot like an internship, but by a different name. What would you say to them.
Yeah, it's actually very different. First of all, apprenticeships, so whether they are registered by the Department of Labor or whether they're company sponsored, typically have a commitment to hire that individual full time once the apprenticeship period has ended. Right. Typically, apprenticeships are for a much longer duration. Oftentimes internships are three months between college semesters. Apprenticeships tend to be the full time six to eight months, sometimes up to a year.
So there's a real commitment and an investment that a company is making to say, now that I have this individual who's skilled up, I want to convert that person to full time. And by the way, and the tech sector, about ninety percent of apprenticeships convert to full time.
All right, So talk about those full time jobs. What are they paid. I'm curious about kind of the payoff literally.
Yeah, no, it's and it's good right through. We're talking healthy numbers. So these are jobs that again we're talking individuals without college degrees who oftentimes which often start about sixty thousand or so, and their jobs jobs in it infrastructures where we're seeing the greatest demand. So you know, we're talking for example, hardware installation, software support, hardware maintenance, computer systems and networking upgrades, big big emphasis in cybersecurity
and cloud computing and project management. Right. These are just really core skills that any company needs, whether it's a really large multinational global company like a city or an accenture, a mid sized company like a healthcare services firm, or a small business. Right, We've got a charter school network in the Bronx that is high rate. It appredces right.
Left, Hey, we only have a minute left. But I'm a little puzzled as to why the US kind of got behind with this. Why is that? Very briefly, you know.
I would say that it's just not necessarily in the DNA of understanding what it takes to earn a great income. And it's not to say that college a terrific. I'm the first advocate, and oftentimes once you get financially stable, you can go on and get that college degree. But I think we've really had a preference towards that four
year degree. And I think the reality is there are millions of people who benefit from an apprenticeship program that land them a middle class good job that can help build wealth over time.
Very cool, Yeah, very interesting. I also wonder too, if companies at this point are thinking about survivability. How many executives HR CEO that talk about partnering high schools even to make sure that they've got the future workforce.
It's really I mean, Diamond talks about this a lot.
Rethink, rethink. Britina Chicarelli, chief executive Officer at and Power, joining us once again from Brooklyn, New York. So appreciate it. You're listening and watching Bloomberg