Educational Preparation

One of the great things about business as a career pathway is that there are many different ways to get started. Your child might assume that if she wants to be in business, she must get an undergraduate degree in business, accounting, or marketing. However, as we discuss in other chapters, anyone can just as easily enter the world of business with a degree in physics or history. As your child contemplates a business career, encourage her to think about her true interests and whether those align with specific business skills or more general areas. Accounting can be surprisingly complex and intellectually challenging for someone who is analytical and enjoys working with numbers. But it's a mistake to assume that because every business needs accounting services this is a practical degree. If your child feels no underlying interest in the topic or shows no signs of enjoying math or numerical analysis, she will likely find herself wishing she had studied something else. If she is hard-working and intelligent, she could study something more interesting to her without limiting her long-term career prospects in business.

There are opportunities for teenagers to experience some aspects of business, and we would strongly encourage any who are interested in business to get some experience to validate that interest. My twelve-year-old daughter, for example, decided to create a charity fundraising baking club in her middle school. She has never expressed an explicit interest in being in business, but the baking club has provided a remarkable range of experiences that have given her a taste of a career in business. She has had to recruit other members, estimate demand depending on location and weather, verify food vending regulations, assign responsibilities, sell products, keep track of costs and earnings, estimate cash needed from the bank, and deal with other club members who frequently fail to deliver what they promise and argue over her leadership decisions.

Early Experiences

There are all kinds of clubs, activities, and experiences that can give kids an early sense of where their interests and talents in business may lie. As you help your child explore potential opportunities to experience activities or develop skills relevant to her interest in business, here are specific things you might seek:

• Selling and marketing. Some people will tell you that great products sell themselves. They might point to Steve Jobs and Apple as an example of a company that makes incredible products with exquisite attention to detail and how Apple is one of the most valuable companies in the world. But don't be fooled. Steve Jobs was a master salesman and a genius at marketing. There is an expression in business circles that sales fix everything. Anyone who can tell great stories and effectively pitch a product or service will be highly valuable in business. Can your child find activities where he needs to sell things in person or on the phone? Can he be responsible for marketing an event or fundraising? Can he work on a grant proposal for a school garden or pitch an idea from the class council to school administrators?
• Project management. Being highly organized as an individual is a big achievement. Getting a group of people organized to accomplish something together successfully is a miracle. We have encountered a few people in our careers who can pull off that miracle on a daily basis, and this skill is highly prized. Few things happen in the world of business without a team effort, and larger organizations in particular require a lot of coordination and discipline to keep things running. Can your child find activities where she needs to figure out who is best at doing specific tasks and help keep projects on track? Can she manage a club, organize an event, or coordinate a large project?
• Communication. The lifeblood of a successful business is effective communication. Even if you work in a highly technical area, you will be more valuable and more likely to advance if you can communicate ideas fluently, persuade decision makers, and distill complex information into a more digestible format. Expert accountants will be more helpful if they can explain to nonaccountants why something matters to the business. Talented operations engineers will be more likely to advance into management if they are good at presenting information to company leaders or sharing expertise at industry conferences. Can your child find activities that require him to hone his communication skills, like being on a debate team or becoming a student/faculty liaison? Can he find an opportunity to present his ideas in front of other students in a class or take responsibility for preparing a slide presentation for a group project?
• Managing money. Financial literacy is obviously useful for anyone working within a business or owning a business. Truthfully it's useful for everyone, but learning more about it can be a great way for kids to appreciate one of the most exciting aspects of business, making money, and one of the most challenging aspects, spending less than you make. You would be surprised how many entrepreneurs today don't seem to grasp this most basic rule of business. Through managing money, your child can learn that counting money properly and allocating its use carefully is important and sometimes challenging. Can your child find activities that require her to keep track of money flows, like a club with a budget or a fundraising project? Can she start a small side business selling her services or a product that other kids might want to buy? It can be tempting for adults to take over money management when kids are involved, but try to be the one who verifies things are correct rather than the one doing all the work of keeping track.
• Creativity. It may come as a pleasant surprise to your child that he can take a talent or hobby and turn it into a business. Design, art, music, writing, crafts, cooking, fashion, even an obsession with sneakers can turn into a successful business that allows someone to pursue a passion and a living at the same time. Your child may have no interest in starting a business, but the ability to create can be a magic ingredient in a business career. Some of the most successful businesses come from combinations of people who are creative and people who have operational business skills. And for those with an entrepreneurial bent, it's much easier to learn those operational business skills than to learn how to be creative. Can your child experiment with selling her creative output or services? Other kids are often an enthusiastic and forgiving first market to test skills and experience the thrill of having others pay for one's creative work. Could you help your child set up an online store or a presence in an online craft marketplace like Etsy?

A Word about Automation

There was a time when automation with computer software and robotics was mainly a threat to blue-collar occupations such as manufacturing. That time has long since passed. JPMorgan recently announced the rollout of new artificial intelligence software to interpret and review commercial loan agreements. This software can now do what loan officers and lawyers spent over 360,000 hours a year doing for JPMorgan previously.

Many of the occupations that fall squarely within the business field of study are facing significant changes through automation from software or the combination of software and cheap labor overseas. Some economists argue that this increase in productivity will allow companies to invest more, grow faster, and hire more employees or possibly create new kinds of jobs. Others have raised the alarm bells with claims that vast numbers of white-collar jobs will be automated out of existence within twenty to fifty years. Having worked as corporate executives ourselves, living the daily pressure to increase our revenues, control costs, and be innovative, if we were in a position to accomplish any of those with automation, it was our responsibility to seriously consider doing so. If your competition can move faster, provide better service, and charge less, then you will not be in business much longer. According to JPMorgan, its move to automate contract renewal was driven primarily by a need to stay ahead of aggressive competitors and innovate, not reduce costs.

So how do kids know what skills or careers may fall victim to automation, and how can they future-proof themselves? One of the biggest indicators of whether an occupation is vulnerable to automation is the presence of rules or patterns. Computers are very good at following rules—for example, accounting rules, construction regulations, or commercial contract law. If a job primarily involves being trained to understand a set of rules and then repeatedly use those rules to review, edit, or flag some issue, computers can likely take over that task. This is happening a lot with rote financial and legal tasks, but any field that incorporates rules is vulnerable to the extent that a job in that field involves a lot of rule checking and not a lot of experiential judgment—although even judgment can theoretically be automated if it involves reliable patterns. Computers are very good at finding patterns, even when human beings are not yet aware that such patterns exist. For example, computer software can now “train” itself by reading or viewing millions of images; once it learns patterns, it can apply those patterns to make highly reliable guesses. The software could look at thousands of images of breast cancer biopsies and the history of whether each was malignant or not. Once it has trained on these case histories, it may be better than a human being at reading biopsies and providing a diagnosis to a patient. It may even be better than a human doctor at guessing the type of treatment most likely to cure the cancer.

How do those who are starting out in business education and career inoculate themselves from the threat of automation? Here are several strategies:

• Learn to communicate. Sharing ideas, persuading others, distilling complex information, presenting to groups and teaching, and providing constructive feedback are all highly valuable in a business career and will set apart the “bean counters” from the people who end up being invaluable members of a team and company.
• Excel at teamwork. Communication is part of teamwork, but there are other skills of effective team members. These are soft skills like empathy, an ability to listen, an ability to make others feel heard and understood, and an openness to other points of view.
• Develop creative skills. Computers are very bad at invention. This is a decidedly human strength. Jobs that require creative thought and problem solving will be difficult to automate. Marketing is an obvious one, but even financial services careers can involve a good deal of creativity to develop ways of funding projects, new financial instruments for managing risk, or creative deal structures to fix a merger that has stalled.
• Learn to lead. Computers cannot develop an inspiring vision, spread that vision throughout a department or company, and build or mentor a team of uniquely talented individuals to achieve that vision.
• Acquire specialized knowledge that other businesspeople may not have. This could be a law degree, high-technology skills, or knowledge of other cultures and languages.

You can also encourage your child to read online about the fields that interest her and to search for articles about automation and artificial intelligence in business journals and magazines. This will give her a better sense for how certain career fields are evolving and what the cutting edge of that field looks like. It may also help her learn about other career fields she might want to explore in college. This is one of the reasons I chose to attend the university that I did. There were many other excellent STEM programs I could have studied if I decided not to pursue my original intended field. Students should apply the same thought process to a business education and look for educational opportunities that will allow them to build a more diversified skill set or explore a wider range of career options.

Entrepreneurship

We have already mentioned entrepreneurship a few times. There is a never-ending debate about whether entrepreneurship skills are something you are born with or something you can learn. We have seen so many different types of entrepreneurs that we don't think there is a single type of person who is successful at it. There are inborn traits that can help, like self-confidence, charisma, or self-discipline, but these same traits can just as easily be your undoing if you are not careful. What we have learned is that the best ingredient for success is experience. There is no better teacher and no better way to know if you really have what it takes or enjoy doing it.

At some point, your child may express a very tangible entrepreneurial goal. Maybe he wants to open a restaurant or bakery. Maybe she wants to build custom homes or open a massage therapy studio. Or maybe he wants to build the next Facebook or Uber. Is there anything you can talk about now, as your child is poised to move into early adulthood, that can help him increase the odds of success in the long run? We believe so.

As we discuss later in this book, it can be incredibly valuable and save a lot of angst and money in the long run if kids can find ways to “try on” a career before investing in a lot of preparation or taking a job in that field. This is particularly true with entrepreneurship, which can involve highly stressful financial risks and long work hours. Some degree programs do a great job of providing the kind of exposure that could be helpful to a future entrepreneur. Hospitality, hotel, and restaurant management programs, for example, often include direct experience in restaurants and hotels and provide networks of alumni to help students obtain practical internships that will be valuable in sampling certain aspects of business ownership.

A key concern with business ownership is that owners inevitably need to wear many hats. Often a passion in creating something (e.g., software products, ad designs, wedding cakes) will draw someone into business ownership, but it will be the challenges of sales, marketing, and cash management that can spit neophytes back out with bitter disappointment. For those going the entrepreneurial route, it's important to get some exposure to how these parts of a business or industry work.

Let's say your child gets a job as a prep chef in a local restaurant and has expressed a desire to be a chef someday with her own restaurant. Encourage her to ask the restaurant owner or manager questions about how they run the business. How do they market and find new customers? How long did it take for the restaurant to become profitable? How often are they having to hire new cooks and wait staff? What are their biggest challenges as a restaurant owner? Did they have to raise money from an investor to start out? Not every business owner will welcome these questions, but many will be happy to share and may even take the rare opportunity to vent their frustrations, which will be enlightening, to say the least. And even asking these questions of a manager at a big retail chain like The Gap, Home Depot, or McDonald's will teach kids something useful for understanding how a business runs.

What if your teen feels strongly that he wants to do a Silicon Valley–style technology start-up, either in college or immediately after? Maybe he is a technical whiz with some actual experience or already has an idea. As long as there are business magazines to be sold, there will be tales told of students who started a technology company in high school or college and went on to take over the world. It does happen, and if your child is lucky enough to have figured out how to do something that a lot of people want and will pay good money for, then by all means, he should go for it. Great business ideas don't come along every day.

More than likely, though, the real situation is that your child has some technology skills or related interests and wants to “do a start-up,” “have a start-up,” or “create a company.” This is not how successful companies are usually born. Great companies are usually born when someone figures out that there is a problem in the world that nobody else is solving well or that could be solved in a much better way and just happens to be in a good position to fix that. Typically that means knowing a lot about this problem, the kinds of people who have this problem, or the technologies that would solve this problem. Successful entrepreneurs want to make things that people want. They like solving problems for people, not just being an entrepreneur. For this reason, we recommend that you encourage your child to work for someone else for at least a few years before starting a business. Here are the potential benefits of this route:

• Development of stronger skills or expertise. There is only so much your child can learn about software development or any other skill through school or side projects. Working full-time for a company that must deliver products and services at a professional level can teach knowledge about a craft that is typically only transferred from person to person. Also, a company often pays for its employees to attend industry conferences or professional development courses so they can develop those skills on the company's dime instead of their own.
• Familiarity with potential customers. Working for a larger company in the industry may provide an opportunity to meet many different types of customers in that industry and develop relationships. These relationships could provide initial leads for a new business or critical references and introductions. Entrepreneurs often mistakenly believe their biggest challenge will be creating a great product or service, only to realize later that they needed to spend far more time on marketing and finding customers. Building up knowledge of where future customers network with their peers and learn about new services will give budding entrepreneurs an advantage.
• Exposure to different domains and problems. Some of the best business ideas come from unique insights that would make sense only to someone with a lot of experience in a narrow industry or occupation. It's a good idea because no one else has that perspective on how to solve it. Working for other companies can provide valuable knowledge about different industries or new technologies. Employees may even discover an opportunity within a unique segment of their company's clients.
• Savings from working when living expenses are lower. It may be possible for recent college graduates with strong technical or business skills and a well-paying job to save a significant amount of money for a few years and build a financial cushion that could enable them to take a risk on starting a business or provide critical start-up investment.
• Increased credibility with investors. Investors will tell others repeatedly that they invest in teams, not ideas, and that the execution of an idea is far more important than the idea itself. If a young entrepreneur already has a mobile app with millions of users, then their age and inexperience will not be an obstacle to raising money. For the vast majority, though, investors will be hesitant to invest in someone who has no meaningful experience in their field and lacks credibility. Working for a larger company can provide the experience to present ideas with more confidence and polish and perhaps even meet early-stage investors.
• Network of potential partners, employees, or mentors. It may come as a surprise to a new entrepreneur that recruiting other people to join their company is not as easy as posting a job ad online. Most potential employees prefer job stability and higher pay in the near term rather than uncertainty and a promise of a big payday later. It helps if those who are going to compete with established companies for employees have built a network of people within the industry who may serve as a source of leads for hiring or mentorship.
• A fallback plan. Knowing that you have experience and success working for others will give you the confidence that if your new venture fails, you can recover and find employment again. If you have worked hard to deliver value and get along with others, your former employer or related employers will very likely be glad to welcome you back. Great talent is always in short supply.

In this chapter, we have shown how diverse business careers can be and how many educational and job pathways can lead to success in business as an employee or an entrepreneur. Our own careers have taught us that while education can open doors to many business careers, what your child learns on the job, how well your child works with others, and how hard your child works will be far more important in the long run.

Sample Earnings Outlook

Following is a sample of 2015 median annual earnings for various jobs in the business field according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

• Accountant: $67,190
• Financial analyst: $80,310
• Loan officer: $63,430
• Marketing manager: $124,850
• Public relations specialist: $56,770
• Retail sales: $22,040
• Manufacturing sales: $59,080
• Information systems manager: $131,600
• Food service manager: $48,960
• Sales manager: $113,860
• Senior executive: $102,690

For wage information on other careers in the field not listed here and for more detailed local wage information or job prospects, we recommend using the online Occupational Outlook Handbook provided free by the Bureau of Labor Statistics at https://www.bls.gov/ooh/home.htm.

Keep in mind that we are showing median pay, so some people in these roles may earn substantially less and others may earn substantially more. Generally pay is higher in locations where the cost of living is higher and in fields that are growing more rapidly or require more specialization and experience. In addition to using the Occupational Outlook Handbook website, we recommend that your child conduct an Internet search using terms like “future job prospects for [career name]” to get the most current outlook on industry growth potential.