SHRM Survey Findings
With companies increasing their focus on the “human side of competitiveness,” greater attention is
being given to employee selection than ever before.
According to a recent survey Roy Maurer sites in his blog, seventy percent of college students and
recent graduates said they would prefer a stable job without a high level of emotional investment or
passion over a position with lots of passion but no job security.
Additionally, a recent SHRM survey concluded that organizations believe 2015 college graduates lack
knowledge/basic and applied skills:
43% Professionalism/work ethic
29% Writing in English
29% Relationship building/soft skills
28% Business acumen
26% Written communications
26% Critical thinking/problem-solving
Questions:
What implications might the survey findings have for organizational competitiveness?
How do you compare to the statistics reported in the surveys?
What are you doing to prepare yourself for the future?
The Shaming of Izzy Laxamana
Slate Magazine, June 12 2015
A Tacoma girl defied her father. He cut off her hair. She killed herself. The story would sound medieval if the details weren’t so modern.
By Amanda Hess
Illustration by Robert Neubecker
Last month, 13-year-old Izabel Laxamana put on a sports bra and some leggings, took a picture, and sent it to a boy at school. Soon, administrators at Tacoma, Washington’s Giaudrone Middle School, where Izzy was poised to finish her seventh-grade year, heard about the picture. Izzy’s parents were called. As Tacoma police would later report to the News Tribune, the Laxamanas expressed concern that their daughter had been sending selfies of any kind. They had warned her against using social media. If she disobeyed, they had told her, they’d cut off her hair.
Amanda Hess
Amanda Hess is a Slate staff writer.
Last month, 13-year-old Izabel Laxamana put on a sports bra and some leggings, took a picture, and sent it to a boy at school. Soon, administrators at Tacoma, Washington’s Giaudrone Middle School, where Izzy was poised to finish her seventh-grade year, heard about the picture. Izzy’s parents were called. As Tacoma police would later report to the News Tribune, the Laxamanas expressed concern that their daughter had been sending selfies of any kind. They had warned her against using social media. If she disobeyed, they had told her, they’d cut off her hair.
·
Back at home, Izzy’s father, Jeff, made good on the threat. On May 27, he cut her hair to her shoulders, leaving just one long strand untouched. Then, he started filming. His camera panned from Izzy’s downcast face to the heap of glossy black strands at her feet. “The consequences of getting messed up. Man, you lost all that beautiful hair,” her father said. “Was it worth it?”
“No,” Izzy replied softly.
The next morning at school, staff members helped weave Izzy’s hair into a French braid in an attempt to hide the damage. But a new humiliating s.
SHRM Survey Findings With companies increasing their focus.docx
1. SHRM Survey Findings
With companies increasing their focus on the “human side of
competitiveness,” greater attention is
being given to employee selection than ever before.
According to a recent survey Roy Maurer sites in his blog,
seventy percent of college students and
recent graduates said they would prefer a stable job without a
high level of emotional investment or
passion over a position with lots of passion but no job security.
Additionally, a recent SHRM survey concluded that
organizations believe 2015 college graduates lack
knowledge/basic and applied skills:
s
-solving
2. Questions:
organizational competitiveness?
he surveys?
The Shaming of Izzy Laxamana
Slate Magazine, June 12 2015
A Tacoma girl defied her father. He cut off her hair. She killed
herself. The story would sound medieval if the details weren’t
so modern.
By Amanda Hess
Illustration by Robert Neubecker
Last month, 13-year-old Izabel Laxamana put on a sports bra
and some leggings, took a picture, and sent it to a boy at school.
Soon, administrators at Tacoma, Washington’s Giaudrone
Middle School, where Izzy was poised to finish her seventh-
grade year, heard about the picture. Izzy’s parents were called.
As Tacoma police would later report to the News Tribune, the
Laxamanas expressed concern that their daughter had been
sending selfies of any kind. They had warned her against using
social media. If she disobeyed, they had told her, they’d cut off
her hair.
Amanda Hess
Amanda Hess is a Slate staff writer.
Last month, 13-year-old Izabel Laxamana put on a sports bra
and some leggings, took a picture, and sent it to a boy at school.
Soon, administrators at Tacoma, Washington’s Giaudrone
Middle School, where Izzy was poised to finish her seventh-
grade year, heard about the picture. Izzy’s parents were called.
3. As Tacoma police would later report to the News Tribune, the
Laxamanas expressed concern that their daughter had been
sending selfies of any kind. They had warned her against using
social media. If she disobeyed, they had told her, they’d cut off
her hair.
·
Back at home, Izzy’s father, Jeff, made good on the threat. On
May 27, he cut her hair to her shoulders, leaving just one long
strand untouched. Then, he started filming. His camera panned
from Izzy’s downcast face to the heap of glossy black strands at
her feet. “The consequences of getting messed up. Man, you lost
all that beautiful hair,” her father said. “Was it worth it?”
“No,” Izzy replied softly.
The next morning at school, staff members helped weave Izzy’s
hair into a French braid in an attempt to hide the damage. But a
new humiliating social media artifact—her father’s video—was
now being passed from phone to phone. School administrators
heard about that, too. This time, they called child protective
services. School counselors were dispatched to aid Izzy. The
next day, just before school let out, Izzy wrote eight notes on
her iPod to family and friends, passed the device to a friend,
headed to a bridge over the highway that separated the school
from the mall, and jumped. She died in the hospital the next
day.
The story would sound medieval if the details weren’t so
modern. A young girl is caught flirting. Her father hacks off her
hair. The community watches. Consumed by shame, she takes
her own life. In Roberta Milliken’s history of hair, Ambiguous
Locks, she writes about the third-century Christian martyr
Christina of Bolsena, whose father chopped her hair off when
she denounced his pagan religion. By the Middle Ages, the
ritual had been codified into law, and “when a woman
misbehaved sexually, her basic sexual attribute was taken away
from her” in “often very public spectacles”: In the early 13th
century, for instance, Germans punished women who became
pregnant out of wedlock with the “hide and hair” regimen:
4. State-sanctioned torturers stripped the woman’s shirt off,
whipped her naked back with sticks, and cut her hair.
Now, 800 years later, similar displays of ritualistic public
shaming are back with a vengeance. The factors that lead a girl
to suicide are too complex to untangle, but her parents’
behavior is too remarkable to ignore. Over the past several
years, countless other grown adults have pulled similar stunts,
albeit with less tragic consequences. There was the mother who
forced her 11-year-old daughter to stand at a busy intersection
and hold a sign reading, “I was disrespecting my parents by
twerking at my school dance.” And the one who caught her 13-
year-old daughter posing as a 19-year-old online and forced her
to face a camera and admit she still watches the Disney
Channel. When one father discovered that his daughters had
posted a twerking video to Facebook, he put up his own video
of himself whipping them with a cable cord as they curled their
bodies in on themselves and screamed. Another father forced his
son to twirl for the camera in his favorite skinny jeans,
announced that “it look like you stole a midget’s pants,” posted
the video on YouTube, set the shaming to music, and snagged a
guest appearance on Dr. Phil.
What’s going on? It wasn’t too long ago that criminologists
speculated that public shaming risked becoming extinct in the
modern age. Michel Foucault’s Discipline & Punish charted the
“disappearance of torture as a public spectacle” by the early
19th century, as the English pillory was dismantled, the
American chain gangs were disbanded, French public executions
were closed to spectators, and offenders were removed from the
public square and installed behind prison walls. A similar
privatization of discipline occurred: By the early 20th century,
schools had retired the rod and the dunce cap for a trip to the
guidance counselor’s office. Shaming became a largely family
affair: In the home, parents still held tight control of their
children, and they exacted punishments behind closed doors.
Many videos in the parental shaming genre revoke the
misbehaving child’s Internet privileges, the modern equivalent
5. of locking the maiden in a tower.
Now, parents are modeling their most humiliating techniques
out in the open. To understand why this kind of ritualistic
public shaming is back, consider why it left in the first place: In
1996, University of Chicago law professor Dan M. Kahan noted
that public shaming had declined with “the loosening of the
tight communal bonds that characterized colonial life.” In
premodern “shame cultures,” villagers would see the same
people in school, church, work, on the street, and in the home.
Everyone knew everything about everyone. Back then,
“Communal attachments were so central to individual identity
that loss of face could be literally self-destructive.” But
modernization has fragmented our lives and reputations into far-
flung social and professional circles and turned our neighbors
into strangers. As “American communities grew and became
more impersonal,” Kahan wrote, “the disgrace of corporal
punishment receded.” The sight of some random father
disciplining his daughter in public for God-knows-what is more
likely to bring shame upon him than upon the kid.
But Facebook has made the world small again. Online, your
shame can move instantly from your father’s cellphone to every
important person from every stage and aspect of your life. And
if you try to move on, your offense can be dialed up on Google
and replayed for future acquaintances to see. In a prescient 1993
essay in the British Journal of Criminology, the Australian
criminologist John Braithwaite reasoned that modern shame
could be even more traumatizing than the medieval form
because it represents a sudden and jarring collapse of the walls
we’ve constructed around the separate parts of our lives. In
cases where news of the offense does travel widely—like, say,
if it’s posted online—“the worst side of the offender’s business
or professional self is exposed to people to whom he normally
presents his churchgoing self, his golf-playing self, his fatherly
self,” he writes. Or to translate that into a 13-year-old’s
experience: The Internet has enabled the schoolyard bully to
crash a family dinner, the parental tyrant to stalk his child
6. through the school halls, and the school administrator to punish
a girl for the things she does when she leaves the campus. No
wonder one Wisconsin judge, who offers offenders the
opportunity to stand on the street corner wearing humiliating
signs (like “I stole from the dead”) in exchange for shorter jail
sentences, has found that most people who cycle through his
courtroom would rather get locked up than be shamed. A bout of
petty thievery or a victimless DUI might not bear a mention in
the newspaper, but wearing a sandwich board confessing to the
crime can now make national news, dragging down a person’s
online reputation forever.
Worse yet, social media has found a way to integrate total
strangers in the shaming process. Digital villagers are no longer
relegated to the sidelines; online, everybody gets a gavel. Kahan
writes that “degradation ceremonies” used to be “imposed by an
agent invested with the moral authority of the community.” But
now the dynamics of social media have incentivized individuals
to care even more about how many people like them, whether
they know them or not. Often, the verdict as to whether a person
actually deserves to be publicly shamed occurs after the act of
shaming has already been completed. The father cuts the hair
and films the aftermath, and then strangers click over to the
online video and vote it up or down. (The video of Izzy has now
been assessed more than 4 million times.) And unlike in the
intimate village, where Braithwaite writes that villagers
possessed an understanding of “the complex totality of their
neighbours,” making them “less susceptible to the stereotypical
outcasting of deviants,” the only thing that some Internet
gawkers know about you now is this one jerky thing you did.
Many videos in the parental shaming genre revoke the
misbehaving child’s Internet privileges, the modern equivalent
of locking the maiden in a tower. When the kid gets booted
offline, all that remains of her online reputation is the artifact
of her shame: The video of the dad unloading his .45 caliber
handgun into his daughter’s laptop, or the footage of the father
who found sexual material on his daughter’s phone and smashed
7. it to pieces with a baseball bat.
Foucault argued that one reason public shaming fell out of favor
was because, as citizens turned against violent and biased
modes of punishment, shaming an offender in public required
exposing his state-sanctioned persecutor to public ridicule, too.
Online parental shaming has now taken a similar turn. The
fathers who dispensed justice with a cable cord and a handgun
both got visits from the cops. Commenters have called for
Izzy’s father to be denounced, imprisoned, even killed. “He is
effectively a murderer,” one Swedish commenter wrote. “Now it
is his turn to be shamed.”
But one irony of shaming’s modern return is that, as the power
to shame extends across the globe, those closest to the victims,
offenders, and torturers lose their own power to influence the
community norms. Izabel’s actual friends are not lashing out at
her dad or creating awareness campaigns about online bullying.
Their friend is gone. What else matters? They have been busy
lighting candles at her favorite schoolyard tree and threading
flowers at the overpass’s chain-link fence and tweeting about
how they’re too tired to go on a field trip but also how summer
is coming soon and how maxi skirts never seem to fit right.
Some have edited their Twitter and Instagram bios to
memorialize their “Princess Izzy” alongside an umbrella emoji
meant to represent the Pacific Northwest. They have waved
away the strangers, including me, who have descended on their
social media accounts, trawling for a peek at the dead girl’s
life. When Izzy’s story made it all the way to Seventeen, a
friend tweeted an embarrassed face emoji; another responded
with a scared face one. “Y'all don't know what happened,” one
friend tweeted out to the faceless mob. “The only one who
knows exactly why is herself.”
April 16, 2015
14. http://www.shrm.org/
1 | P a g e
Students, New Grads Prefer Job Security over Passion
By Roy Maurer
5/26/2015
Seventy percent of college students and recent graduates said
they would prefer a stable job without
a high level of emotional investment or passion over a position
with lots of passion but no job
security, according to a recent survey.
Workforce consulting firm Adecco conducted the 2015 College
Student Survey of 1,001 Millennial
and Generation Z students and graduates ages 18-24 as part of
its Way to Work program, which
helps prepare young adults for internships and job
opportunities. There were 444 respondents from
Generation Z (born after 1995) and 557 from the Millennial
generation (born between 1980-95).
The survey found that even though the majority (79 percent) of
students are optimistic they will find a
15. job in five months or less, and 42 percent believe they will find
a job in less than three months,
finding a job is still the top concern for both generational
cohorts and nearly one-third (32 percent) of
all respondents combined. The next most pressing concerns for
the groups were the cost of
education (16 percent) and their personal financial health (13
percent).
More members of Generation Z (21 percent) ranked the cost of
education as their greatest concern
compared to just 13 percent of Millennials.
The survey found that most students’ greatest aspiration in the
next 10 years is to be financially
stable (31 percent), followed by working in their dream job (28
percent). Broken down by generation,
a greater share of Millennials (34 percent) aspire to financial
stability than Generation Z (29 percent).
Likewise, more members of the younger cohort (32 percent)
aspire to landing their dream job
compared with 24 percent of Millennials.
Other findings include:
• Career growth (36 percent) ranked as the most important
aspect for a first professional job,
16. followed by fulfilling work (19 percent) and stability (19
percent).
• A job’s “opportunity for growth” is most important to 41
percent of recent graduates, compared to
30 percent of college students.
• Overall, respondents ranked the importance of soft skills
higher than hard skills in the interview
process (57 percent compared to 43 percent). Interestingly, male
respondents ranked the skill
sets equally (50 percent each) while females ranked soft skills
(63 percent) as more important in
the interview process than hard skills (37 percent).
2 | P a g e
• About one-third (36 percent) of current college seniors feel
their school has failed at teaching
them applicable business skills. More Generation Z respondents
(38 percent) said they believe
their school is doing a good job at preparing them for a career
compared to 28 percent of
Millennials.
17. • Overall, online job boards (31 percent) and university career
centers (29 percent) are the tools
students and recent college grads use the most when searching
for a job. Professional
associations (5 percent), social media (5 percent) and staffing
agencies (3 percent) were cited
less frequently. Millennials were more likely to use online job
boards (34 percent) as compared
to Generation Z (27 percent). The younger cohort cited using
their personal connections and
those of their parents (28 percent) in finding their first post-
college job more than their slightly
older counterparts (20 percent).
Roy Maurer is an online editor/manager for SHRM.