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The Contractors Are Coming

Jim Correll, director Fab Lab ICC at Independence Community College, Independence Kansas 

Recently I saw a Tulsa news story about an upcoming shortage of construction workers.  Companies there have all kinds of construction jobs to be filled and not enough job applicants to fill them.  There was an interview with a teacher at one of the local technical colleges. He said something to the effect of “Young people today don’t want to work hard and they don’t want to work with their hands.  All they want to do is work with computers and play video games.”  Nothing could be further from the truth and had I one of the bricks shown in the news story; I would have thrown it at the TV. 

We see, every day at Fab Lab ICC, that young people DO want to make things with their hands and they will work hard if they are doing something they find fulfilling.   

Here’s the disconnectThe construction companies want to keep doing business as they have in the past so they tell the technical schools “Turn out more construction workers, we need them.”  The schools then develop programs to churn out construction workers, but the young people don’t enroll. 

The problem is not that young people don’t want to work hard.  BTW, there have been plenty of people in every generation who have not wanted to work hard.  The reason, for all generations is this; people want fulfilling work.  At the end of the day they want to feel like they’ve accomplished something good.  In the past, people were willing to accept jobs they hated.  Today’s youth are putting up their hands and saying “Whoa, I’m not buying this obsolete economic model where I am expected to go to work for others and keep working at a job I hate because I have too much debt for a house that’s too big and too many new cars.”  (OK, they don’t really say it like that but that’s what they mean.) 

Instead of urging young students to enter the aforementioned teacher’s program to “learn to be a carpenter so you can go work for someone else your whole life” we should be teaching them how to be entrepreneurial in the way they choose to solve problems for others.  Once presented the choice, some will become employees and many will become independent business owners.  Many will even enter the carpentry programs of the world to learn how to make things.  No one works harder than an entrepreneur working to control his/her own destiny. 

Those construction companies in Tulsa with all the open “jobs” will end up hiring independent contractors to get the work done.  We should be teaching students that they should strive to solve the problems of others as their life’s work whether working for others or having their own businesses.  Our education system should be showing them how to choose their best path. 

Jim Correll is the director of Fab Lab ICC at the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship on the campus of Independence Community College. He can be reached at (620) 252-5349 or by email at jcorrell@indycc.edu. 


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