Podcast

The speaker, Talia Nunziato, believes that schools should provide more career-based curriculum to better prepare students for their future professions. She argues that taking prerequisite courses unrelated to her major is a waste of time and that students should be exposed to future career paths earlier in their schooling. Additionally, she discusses how jobs have become more degree-based rather than skill-based, leading to an overpopulated workforce of individuals with degrees but lacking necessary skills. Talia shares a personal anecdote about her uncle, who became successful without completing high school, emphasizing the importance of experience in the workforce. Overall, the episode highlights the need for a shift towards more career-oriented education and the impact it can have on students' success. Hello, my name is Talia Nunziato. You're listening to Life After School, Success or Failure, where we discuss who will truly prepare students for success later in life. According to Should High Schools Pursue Career-Oriented Classes, the Bobcat Prowl, children that have career-based education have more confidence later in life when pursuing a career. This creates less fear for when they get a job and puts them on a better track for success. As a nursing major, I think personally that school before college and schools in general should provide more career-based curriculum. I personally am taking courses that have nothing to do with my major in my first two years of college besides one nursing class each semester, which I feel is not enough to prepare me to be successful in my field when I'm older. I'm taking courses such as puppetry and just courses that have nothing to do with what I want to pursue later in life. This is wasting valuable time that I could be using to become more confident in what I'm going to be doing later on in life, which has to do with my career of being a nurse. As a future nurse, I will have patients' lives in my hands and I need to make sure that I am confident with my abilities to take care of them. Unfortunately, I only have two years of practice doing what I'm going to be doing before I have face-to-face interactions with real patients of my own. And I feel that this is not enough time to put me in a field, especially one as intense as nursing, and rely on me to be confident in my abilities while working alone. The time that I am using to be taking these prerequisite courses that have nothing to do with my major is wasting time that I could be using spending practicing what I'm going to be doing later in life. That will make me and others more confident in my abilities to take care of them. Both statistics and my personal beliefs show that students that are given curriculum based on their future profession are more confident when they get into that line of work. This has shown to also carry over into their everyday life. If they are more confident with what they're doing every day at their job, they will become more confident in what they're doing outside of their job as well. Some people may argue that students need to have these prerequisite courses in case they want to switch their major as they get to college. On the other hand, I believe personally that students should be exposed to these future career paths earlier in their schooling so that when they get to college and later years of schooling, they are not indecisive about what they want to pursue. In my next topic, we will discuss how it would benefit students to have this exposure earlier on in their schooling careers. Coming into college, I had one main question and that was, why am I required to take all these courses when they have nothing to do with what I actually want to do in life? When I proposed this question to my advisor, she stated that a lot of people do not know fully what they want to do when they get to college and they sign up for a major they won't actually end up liking. These prerequisite courses allow for the student to transfer over into another program very easily, as most students have the same prerequisites that they need to acquire before they can actually start going into the curriculum of their major. This got me to thinking about how high school is structured as well and how we are required to take a certain amount of years of each course before we can move on to college. As someone that was unsure of what they wanted to pursue until their later years of senior year of high school, I know first hand that it is very daunting to have to make that decision without having any experience in any field besides the core classes that you have to take in high school. Christine Valenziato, a high school teacher, stated that kids are going into college unprepared and unaware of what they want to pursue later in life. This is causing great confusion and stress for them once they reach these later years of their schooling. She believes that if schools were to provide a baseline for many different jobs and opportunities during high school, such as shop classes or nursing classes, they would probably be more confident when going to college of knowing what they want to pursue. Unfortunately, many jobs have become more degree based rather than skill based and will only hire if you have a later degree than a high school diploma, which leads me into my third and final topic. According to BCG Global, jobs have become more degree based rather than being skill based as they were in previous years. In order to attain a sustainable job, you are mainly required to have a college degree, but what happens when someone is very skilled at their job but are not cut out for college? This has caused the workforce to become very overpopulated with people that have these degrees but are not as skilled in their jobs. In previous years, not having a college degree was not as big of a deal as it is now. You were still able to get a job and often times they would be more successful with having more experience rather than a college degree, but nowadays without that degree, it would be very hard for you to get a decent job and would be very hard for you to be looked at as respectable while in that workforce. Someone may argue that people need knowledge and this knowledge to be a more well-rounded worker, but I would like to say that knowledge outside of the field that you are working in is seemingly pointless and wasting your time. Experience and knowledge are both important, but school nowadays has become far more knowledge based rather than skill based. School requires you to memorize material that you will most likely never need to use later on in life unless it has something that is directly impacting your field of work later on after you graduate. Memorizing and learning stuff that is outside of your work field is pointless and is just taking up the time that could be used gaining experience and confidence in what you are going to be doing and pursuing later on in life when you are outside of school. I would now like to add a personal anecdote. Growing up, I always had one uncle that I always looked up to. He was extremely rich and I thought he was extremely knowledgeable. That being said, I never really dove deeper into his personal life. I just knew that one day I wanted to be as rich as my uncle was. As I got older, I began to ask him what he had done to lead him to such success. I asked him if he was as hard of a worker as me and he said yes. He then began to laugh and I was confused so I asked him why he was laughing. He told me that he never finished high school and that his father would take him out of class to go work for his business and gain experience working in an actual working environment. He told me that this is what has led him to be so successful. Having this previous experience before getting out of high school has led him to develop the skills that many other students didn't have. This created an advantage for him when he began to run a business of his own. He then began to open up his own business and had the knowledge that his father had taught him to be successful. He told me that if it were not for his father prioritizing his experience rather than his schooling, he would not have become successful in his later years. He said he owes it all to his father. My uncle is a real life example that all of this unnecessary learning and memorization that we do in school is not necessary in order to be successful later on in life. He was more successful in his job due to the fact that my uncle's success was due to the fact that his father prioritized experience. That being said, I believe that careers should become more experience based rather than education based if they want their workers to be more skilled. Now for a brief overview of what we have talked about in this episode of life after school success or failure. In this episode, we have discussed how schooling should be more based on your future career rather than taking pointless classes that will waste our time. We discussed how students should be exposed to future career paths early on in their schooling so they are not confused on what they want to pursue once they reach their college years. Lastly, we discussed how jobs have become more education based rather than skill based and how that has affected the skills of the workers in that profession. Up next, listen to Drew's next episode about how your college of choice affects your future success. Thank you.