The cultural shift: From skills to social status
In the last 60 years, we went from the Silent Generation and Boomers in skill-based roles to Gen X and Millennials getting college degrees. Which generation was better off?
We push our kids to college immediately after finishing high school and ask them to decide what they want to do for the rest of their lives. The first two years of college are just a repeat of high school. By the time they can legally drink, they have about $200,000 in student loan debt. To make that equivalent salary, employers usually require a master’s degree. More debt.
So right out of the gate, they need to get a job that’s simply going to pay their debt and living expenses.
Often, those jobs are not in their field of study but we judge them for being in customer service, retail, restaurant, sales.
As adults, we’ve developed our debt around our salaries. We may need to think differently about the jobs we apply to. If we are communications consultants but an executive assistant is doing our work now because they can use AI, then what’s the shame in being an executive assistant?
Regardless of your degree or career to date, do you like cars? Do you know that commission-based car salesmen can make six figures just by the people who walk through the door? That job doesn’t require a college degree. Sometimes, not even a high school degree. Social skills are the most important.
We can blame companies for using AI to take advantage of their employees but think about it from the business owner’s perspective. And remember that I’m a victim of a multi-billion-dollar global corporation’s “efficiency exercise” too. Read more.
For example, a communications team always needed at least two people: one to write and one to proofread. Maybe even a third person to design graphics. Maybe a fourth person to publish to a website. Even a fifth person to publish to an app. And a manager to attend the meetings, process the paperwork, and make sure it all gets done on time. That’s a six-person team.
As a communications professional, do you have the skills to deliver end-to-end and fulfill those five skill-based roles? My skills stop at website publishing, and I don’t want to be a team’s manager.
Any employee can take the meeting notes and put it into an AI bot with a prompt like, “Write a letter to send to customers with the actions they need to take to prepare for this upcoming change. Include an infographic to display the timeline.”
The problem that I take personally is that this person is usually not a communications professional. It’s an administrative assistant or a completely unrelated role. That’s an hour that could have been spent on something else, but executives aren’t cutting the “something else” when they add an AI-driven function. So, employees get frustrated and burned out. Turnover in any role is just as expensive as one communications consultant who knows how to use AI to do those five functions.
In my opinion, writing and design are skills that can’t be taught. A writer cannot always be a designer. A site administrator may not have the skills to be an app developer: those are complementary, related skills but app development is specialized and another layer of expertise and training. But we’ve trained computers to execute this work.
Things to think about:
Why are we uncomfortable to be an executive assistant? The title? The pay? The combination of the two?
Is pay a factor because you’ve built a lifestyle and debt around the salary you were making?
But more importantly: AI isn’t going to go away. So what can you do to think differently about your pay, your lifestyle, your debt? And what actions can you take?
