We Need To Do More To Help People Get The Job They’re Suited For

In order for our economy to function at its highest potential, everybody needs to do the job they’re most suited to. In order for our world to move closer towards Utopia, we need our economy to operate at its highest potential, but our education system and standard business model does more to stop people from getting the right job than it does to help them.

It’s not standard practice for schools to administer professional personality and aptitude tests to children once let alone doing longitudinal studies on the student body. Children are just judged by whether or not they’re good at math, science, history, and arts. Then they’re given a piece of paper that says they’re either dumb, average, or smart… then they get thrown to the wolves.

Kids who are either rich or happen to be smart in the right ways get to go to a university where they’re pushed to the breaking point intellectually and financially. Half the classes they’ll take will be completely random, and their professors will take great liberties with what/how they teach. Students will learn how to cite essays and regurgitate technical terms. The students who do the best will be the ones who stop asking questions and give their superiors what they want.

Once they graduate they’ll get a piece of paper that says they’re a higher form of life than people who only have a high school diploma. With that ticket through the glass ceiling, they’ll enter management jobs where they’ll be tasked with whipping poor, uneducated people to work harder and make their employer richer.

The poor, uncredentialed workers who are turning the cogs of the economy will have to take whatever job they can, and it won’t be doing something they enjoy. They’ll have to give maximum effort for minimum wage, and every time they quit their job to go find a better one they start back at the bottom of the pecking order, and their resume will look more and more unprofessional.

Our economy isn’t designed to put people in the right jobs. It’s designed to make the rich richer and to keep the poor, poor. We have the tools and reasons to make sure people get into the right jobs. We just need to prioritize people over profits.

Here are a few steps we could take to help people get into the right jobs:

1: Free education

The glass ceiling of higher education is probably the greatest obstacle to a smooth-functioning economy. We have the technology to provide free online education to the entire world for a fraction of the cost of our current, predatory higher education system. We just don’t have the funding to fulfill the potential of online education. You can help fund it though, and every little bit helps.

2: Longitudinal personality/aptitude testing

We can’t help people get where they are if we don’t know what they’re capable of. We’d know if we asked everyone, and if we kept testing them we could track where they’re going and then point them in that direction. If they take a job that doesn’t fit their personality profile we could warn them that they might be happier somewhere else.

3: Civilian AFPC

The United States Air Force has an office called the AFPC (Air Force Personnel Center). Every airman that joins the Air Force gets a file there. It includes all their military training records, job performance reviews and records of awards and reprimands. It’s a cradle to grave tracking system that helps the military keep track of its members and get them to where they need to be. The civilian sector doesn’t have an equivalent office, but if it did it could help people get to where they need to be.

4: Central job board

There are millions of job boards in America alone. This literally makes it impossible to search all the job openings in the country. If there were one central job board the entire economy would be open to everyone.

5: Apprenticeships/mentorships

The glass ceiling of higher education splits the workforce into castes separated by levels of management. The standard way to make more money is to move up in management. This forces the best and brightest workers to stop working and start micromanaging slaves. This is inefficient and unfair on a thousand levels. People wouldn’t need expensive credentials to get good jobs if employers hired workers under an apprenticeship program similar to how the military takes people off the street and grooms them through short educational courses and on the job training. If the best and brightest workers could keep getting pay raises without having to change jobs they could keep doing what they want and what they’re best at.

6: On-site housing

People leave jobs they love and take ones they hate because they need as much money as possible to survive since they have to pay as much as possible for everything they buy. The biggest expense in life is rent/mortgages. If workers didn’t have to worry about paying to keep a roof over their head they would be free to work for lower paying (but more fulfilling) jobs. If every business were required to offer free on-site housing for its workers then everyone would be free from the yoke of the landlord. This would free employees to choose the career that suits them.

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