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Raise your hand if you graduated college.
Pretty much everyone.
If you raise your hand, I want you to take a moment.
Take a moment and reflect on the impact that that degree is hard on your life.
The network get enabled the opportunities that it's pulled into reach.
Now, I want you to imagine your 18 year old self.
Imagine I told them, you couldn't go to college.
That circumstances have changed and it wasn't an opportunity for you.
How would you feel?
What would you do?
How would you build a career or
design your resume if you couldn't start with education?
This is my first time at college.
Now, don't worry, I didn't lie on my Stanford application.
At age 18, I started working in London as an apprentice.
I learned and earned.
I trained as an accountant whilst working full time in restructuring.
Fast forward eight years and
here I am, still on stage at Stanford Graduate School of Business,
an evidence that you can go extraordinary places with an untraditional path.
I succeeded because of my own traditional path.
But it was hard.
It was hard because of prejudices and attitudes that exist in society,
prejudices and attitudes that exist in this room today.
Business leaders, parents and teachers are sending the wrong signal to young people,
the signal that the only route to success is a college degree.
Let me tell you a story.
Shortly after my promotion to manager at a top consulting firm,
I was rushing from one meeting to the next.
I ran into one of my favorite high school teachers.
We chatted and he asked me the inevitable, the dreaded question.
Where did you go to college?
I didn't, I replied, I'm an apprentice.
But before I could finish my sentence, I saw looking at disappointment in his eyes.
I've lost track of the number of times I've been told.
You need to go to college to get a good degree or you had so much potential.
Rather than celebrating the successes of people that have taken an untraditional
path, we often make them feel inadequate.
Despite my professional success, I often feel inadequate.
So you might be sat there wondering, well, why should I care?
And I say you should care for two reasons.
As future business leaders, you are going to miss out on great talent.
And as humans, you have a responsibility to the young people in your lives.
So because I'm an MBA student, I'm going to start with a business case and
then talk about the human case.
So the business case, we are in an employee market,
organizations are struggling to fill their ranks.
In 2015, 5 million US jobs went unfilled, but
8.5 million Americans were looking for jobs.
Anybody else see the mismatch?
Talented people locked out of the workplace.
Workplaces struggling to find talented people.
It is in no one's best interest to only recruit from traditional paths.
By broadening your criteria,
you're opening yourself to capable and diverse candidates.
80% of job applications in the United States ask for an associate's degree or
higher if 42% of high school sophomores graduate college.
Do you see the mismatch?
I get it, it's hard to drive change.
It is hard to open up systems that include non-traditional backgrounds.
It's hard, but it's doable.
And you can't afford not to.
By opening up your recruitment criteria, you
are giving yourself a competitive talent advantage in this tight employment market.
Why not be the first mover in this current talent war?
Now, let's talk return on investment.
I urge you to become the creators and not just the consumers of tomorrow's talent.
By that, I mean, we all have a responsibility to not just use skills,
but build skills.
There is more than just a business case for
employing people with an untraditional background.
There's a business case to build apprenticeship programs.
And this business case is built upon the value added work that you will get
from teams that work on your projects.
It's from the value adds that is given from diversify teams.
We know that there is return on investment that comes with apprenticeship models.
It has been proven, and it's been proven to come in as little as 18 months.
So although that there is costs associated with apprenticeship programs,
things like wages, training costs and
program management fees, you will see a positive return on investment.
Businesses need to push change from the top down.
As humans, we need to push change from the bottom up.
College for all is disadvantaging many young people.
It is having a detrimental effect on those that learn better by doing.
It's disadvantaging those that don't have the means or
the opportunity to attend college.
Apprenticeship programs allow people to learn and earn.
Giving opportunities to people from all walks of life.
Apprenticeship programs can be undertaken in healthcare, construction,
finance, technology, media, even law, there is more than one way to success.
There are multiple paths, but
they're currently underfunded and under recognized.
We are over indexing on one.
So my ask to you as future business leaders is, why miss out on great talent?
Why not push for change and put your money where your need is?
Why not develop programs to hire and train the future leaders of your organization?
And as humans, we need to challenge our elitist attitudes
that equate not having a degree to not being capable.
We need to recognize that apprenticeship programs and
work experience are just as valuable as college degrees.
So I'm going to leave you with three challenges.
I challenge you to change the way you think about non-traditional backgrounds.
I challenge you to change the way you talk about success.
And finally, next time a resume crosses your desk,
I challenge you not to jump straight to education but instead,
dig into experience, and benefit from a diverse, young workforce.
Thank you.
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