ZachEvans

Believer. Husband. Dad. Coach. Healthcare Thought-Leader. All-Around Good Guy.

Miscellany

A Degree in Philosophy Doesn’t Guarantee Me A Job?

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I’ve written before about the crisis of student loans that is facing a large number of young people today. A recent study by the Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University further drives home one of my biggest points:

…we argue that college remains the best alternative for young workers with one caveat: Not all majors are created equal. Some majors offer substantially better employment prospects than others.

While I completely agree with the sentiment, why would it come as a surprise that unemployment rates vary greatly among recent college graduates and that there is a correlation between what degree the student has and that rate?

Update: 5 College Degrees that Aren’t Worth Cost

Goodbye to The Office (Again)

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A while ago I wrote about my experience as a remote worker for the better part of five years. Overall, it was a positive experience that allowed me to spend extra time with my boys and avoid the mess of a daily commute.

Now there are new studies pointing to how flexible work environments are leading to healthier employees.

…a rigorous study out of Stanford recently supported claims that remote work increases productivity. Now another study led by University of Minnesota sociology professor Phyllis Moen is doing the same for results-only work environments (known as ROWE) with a careful examination of Best Buy’s experiment in flexibility.

Earlier studies also found that employees with flexible work environments and schedules were found to be more productive as well. I experienced this result personally but at a personal sacrifice: I was working 70-80 per week. Every week. Even when I wasn’t in my home office I was still working. Even when I was supposed to be on vacation. That’s one of the things that flexibility brought me.

Granted, part of this is due to the fact that I have workaholic tendencies and part of this is that I truly love what I do. Part of this, however, is because I was never able to get away from the office. The office was always right downstairs. The first thing I did every morning? Go in to my office. The last thing I did every day? Go in to my office. It was simply hard for me not to.

I did have added flexibility to go to the doctor and exercise but it was most definitely a double-edged sword. I also had a fully-stocked pantry with snacks for my boys that didn’t cost me $1.00 at the vending machine. There are days when I miss working from home but there are certainly benefits of being back in an office. We may all work remotely one day in the future but let’s at least approach that possibility with our eyes wide open.

Being the Newbie

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I have given several lectures at Lipscomb regarding professional networking. Back in the late 1990s I became a huge advocate of networking after I saw the benefits when it helped me land a full-time internship while I was staring a rapidly-approaching wedding date in the face.

I did not know many people in Nashville but I had a college professor that took an interest in me (thanks Randy) and made the first few introductions for me. With this being pre-LinkedIn I kept track of my phone calls and meetings on a set of note cards that eventually became a rudimentary online tracking tool that I programmed myself. One meeting led to another and I soon found myself in a salaried position with LBMC Technologies.

How was able to swing so many meetings with some very high-powered individuals in the Nashville business community? It was simple: I acknowledge that I was just a dumb college kid that did not know much and that needed to borrow some wisdom from individuals that were much wiser than me. I was not being flip about this, I was serious and it opened up a lot of doors for me.

You absolutely cannot lean on that logic for long but it is true that people do not take advantage of being the newbie on the team enough. It is OK to admit that you do not know everything and that you may need some help for a bit. You need to transition to a productive employee quickly but there is a honeymoon period…and you should not be afraid to take advantage of it!

Image source: Atwater Village Newbie

Another Wall is Coming Down

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A decade ago I working as the Director of E-Commerce for a footwear manufacturer in Franklin. We were a 100-plus year old company that sold primarily to retailers or direct in to industries where safety footwear was required. I was hired to start up a direct-to-consumer business for this $150 million company.

At that point in time, footwear web sites were some of the few places online that were offering free shipping (and most–including us–offered free returns as well). This practice was a nod to the fact that shoes and boots from different labels fit differently and we wanted to encourage shoppers to try on our products.

Remember, at that point in time online retailers were using excessive shipping charges to pad their margin numbers so that they could advertise lower prices than their bricks-and-mortar brethren were offering offline. Over time, however, this practice began to change to the point where, today, almost half of all online orders now include free shipping.

For many consumers, shipping chargers were a barrier that kept them from purchasing online unless the price differentials were large enough to make up the cost. As this wall continues crumble, it’s no wonder that online retailers such as Amazon continue to consume more of our spending.

One of the drivers behind this is Amazon Prime where users pay a flat annual fee to access free two-day shipping and discounted overnight shipping. As a Prime customer, I can tell you that my shopping habits have been changed by the fact that shipping costs are no longer a consideration.

How about you?

UPDATE: The walls continue to crumble. “Amazon’s Endless.com Debuts Free International Shipping To 50+ Countries“.

$1 trillion? Really!?!

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It’s being reported that, in 2010, student loans outpaced credit card debt for the first time in history. The total amount of student load debt currently outstanding: Almost $1 trillion (that’s $1,000,000,000,000 for those of you counting at home).

One major reason for the growth: People have been heading back to school in large numbers due to job loss and the thought that additional education will make them more marketable once the economy starts to turn around. Given that many of these new students are out of work, it’s not surprising that they’re financing their degrees with debt.

In the interest of full disclosure, both Mandy and I financed our undergraduate degrees at Lipscomb with student loan debt (about $30,000 between the two of us) and we took out even more loans when she went back to graduate school at Belmont. Fortunately, my employer paid for my MBA at MTSU so we ended up needing to pay back about $60,000 plus interest. Our last student loan was paid off in early 2010 (Thanks Dave).

Seth Godin wrote an interesting blog post recently asking if students are actually buying an education or a brand with all of that money. In it he states:

Does a $40,000 a year education that comes with an elite degree deliver ten times the education of a cheaper but no less rigorous self-generated approach assembled from less famous institutions and free or inexpensive resources?

If not, then the money is actually being spent on the value of the degree, on the doors it will open and the jobs it will snag. If this marketing strategy works big, it pays for itself in no time.

This is a perfect example of why I chose MTSU over Vanderbilt for my MBA degree. I really wanted to go to Vanderbilt and could have, but for me and my career, it just wasn’t worth the money. Vanderbilt’s MBA program is world-class but what you’re really paying all of that money for (and giving up two year’s worth of salary in their full-time program for) is the Vanderbilt name and the alumni network you can now tap in to.

From an education perspective, however, you take away benefits pretty much equaling the effort that you put in to the program. For me, that meant working my tail off for two-and-a-half years while still working a full-time job, traveling quite a bit, and starting a family. (One of my favorite graduate school stories has me having to pay a fee for an overweight bag on a flight to Las Vegas for a trade show because I had too many textbooks tucked in among my dress shirts and slacks.)

I’m confident enough in my work ethic, knowledge, and experience that I know I’d hold my own alongside any of my Owen-degreed counterparts that the additional cost just wasn’t worth it (although I would still love a PhD from Vanderbilt).

Education is a silver bullet for a lot of issues, but I agree with Mr. Godin that the benefits may not offset the costs. If college is about educating people for their future, maybe we need to start with educating people that spending $100,000 on a philosophy degree from an Ivy League school may not be a good investment.

Productive Mornings for the Night Owl

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I admit it: I’m a bit of a night owl. The habit (because it IS a habit) started in college. When I was at Lipscomb we had a pretty strict curfew (12:00 AM during the week, 1:00 AM on the weekends). For me, this meant that the bulk of my study time didn’t start until after midnight because I wanted to spend all of my free time with friends or my girl-friend (and future wife).

This meant that, regularly, I wouldn’t get in to bed until 2:00 AM or later, which made early morning classes quite a chore for me. Enter my wife, Mandy, who I mentioned above.

Mandy is a morning person. It’s not that she doesn’t need much sleep (she does) but that she doesn’t like sleeping in because it takes away productive hours from the day. This isn’t much of an issue any more because we have three small boys at home who wake up between 6:30 and 7:30 AM pretty much regardless of what time they go to bed the night before.

I’ve been able to pick up some good habits from my wife (although not nearly as many as she would like me to, I’m sure) and the need to get up and get going is one of them. The problem is that I just don’t have much energy in the morning and it still takes me quite a long while to get going (or, as Mandy puts it, I like to piddle in the morning).

Two recent articles, one on the effects of morning workouts and one on personal effectiveness, are re-motivating me to take another look at my early morning habits and see if I can wring just a bit more out of life by taking advantage of all of the hours God has blessed me with.

Well, that and the fact that I’ve signed up (again!) to run a half-marathon in April and will need the early morning hours for the workouts necessary to get ready.

What about you? Are you a morning person or a night owl?

Proud to Call Nashville Home

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Even though I’m not a native Nashvillian I was still incredibly proud to see the city I now call home called out as a viable alternative to Silicon Valley for start-up companies looking for a good place to get their business models off the ground.

Internationally known as the home of country music and the Opryland Hotel, outsiders are often surprised to learn of our vast healthcare industry (full disclosure: I currently work for HCA, one of the largest healthcare companies in the country and based in Nashville) among other strong industries including insurance, finance and publishing.

For entrepreneurs, there’s also strong VC and private equity firms including one of Tennessee’s first incubators–JumpStart Foundry–and several of the recently-funded TNInvestco firms.

Also, don’t forget we’re called the Athens of the South for our many colleges and universities (my own alma mater was called out in one of the articles: Lipscomb University where I’m also an adjunct professor) and boast a highly-educated workforce.

So, here’s a hat-tip to my new hometown (actually, I live in the suburb of Franklin but who’s counting?). I’m proud to call you home and hope I can make you proud of me in turn.

New Year’s Resolutions

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Yes, it’s that time of year again. What are your goals for 2011? Hit the gym a bit more often (some estimates have 50 percent of new gym memberships being purchased in January)? Eat better? Sleep more? Work less? Regardless of the goal, it’s simply good to have goals at a very basic level.

(Editorial aside: Can you believe that 37 percent of respondents in one survey listed as one of their New Year’s resolutions to be more prompt in responding to business emails and calls? I’m hoping that they’re talking about normal business hours because the last thing we need in today’s hyper-connected world is the felt need to be even more connected. This is a lesson I’m still trying to learn but the fact remains that we all need some disconnected time with family and friends each and every day.)

Goals help us stay focused (at least through February, right?). They prove that we at least have a desire to improve ourselves, even if we fail more often than we succeed. The attempt is really what matters, however, because eventually things do work and you do move forward.

I think that each person should have a resolution that fits into each of the following categories:

Faith

I like having a plan (I make New Year’s resolutions, after all) and the plan provided as part of The One Year Bible fits my schedule nicely. Combining a daily reading from the Old and New Testament along with Psalm and Proverbs is a great way to spend time each day in God’s word. You may not gain any Earth-shattering insights in to complex theological issues (or, you might), but bathing your mind in His wisdom daily is always a great idea.

Family

On November 1, 2010 I started a new job with HCA that included–for the first time in five years–a daily commute to an office. While I absolutely love the camaraderie that can develop in an office setting, working from home has a lot of advantages. One of the first that comes to mind was that the time I now spend in the car was, most days, spent with my family.

When I worked from home my typical weekday schedule went something like this:

  • 7:30 AM to 5:00 PM – Work in my office (I worked through lunch most days)
  • 5:00 PM to 7:30 PM – Spend time with my family (eating dinner, wrestling with my boys, etc.)
  • 7:30 PM to 10:00 PM – Spend time with Mandy while multitasking (meaning, I was in the living room working on my laptop)

Now, however, I leave my house about 6:45 AM and get home about 6:00 PM due to a commute (about 15 miles one-way) so I’ve lost about an hour a day of family time. While this may not seem like a lot of time, it is to me and I am resolving to make it up somewhere else during the week.

Finances

In early 2010 Mandy and I committed to attending Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University being offered at Harpeth Hills where we go to church. While I was a bit skeptical when I walked in to that first session (we didn’t have any credit card debt so how could he help us?), I walked out hardly being able to wait to plan with Mandy for what we were going to do during the remainder of the year.

What we did was nothing short of amazing and God-led. In about 10 months we paid off approximately $30,000 in debt that included student loans, a car loan, and a home equity loan. We were able to take the final payment to the bank on December 31st and entered 2011 debt free except for our primary mortgage.

So what’s my resolution for 2011? To be honest, I’m not completely sure yet. My guess is that we’ll agree on making extra payments on the mortgage, or investing my income from being an adjunct at Lipscomb in home improvements, or putting all of that money in a savings account for when we need to buy her a new car. Whatever the goals ends up being, I certainly know we’re better off in January 2011 than we were in January 2010.

Fitness

Back in 2009 I ran my first half marathon and immediately afterwards I said I would never do it again. Why did I change my mind in 2011? Because I am looking forward to having the 2011 Country Music Marathon & Half Marathon motivate my exercise regime (at least for the first few months of the year). Plus, exercise of almost any kind simply does a body good.

Alongside of running in my second half marathon, I’m also resolving to record what I eat on a daily basis in an online food journal (I use the one offered by the Livestrong web site and its corresponding iPhone app). I’ve been blessed not to have much of a weight issue but most of us could stand to lose a few pounds and I’m not exception.

Career

As part of my new opportunity with HCA I am being asked to study for and obtain the Project Management Professional certification offered by the Project Management Institute. While I don’t plan on being a project manager for the rest of my career, professional certifications make a lot of sense in today’s hyper-competitive job market.

I’m also planning on studying for an obtaining the Certified Professional in Healthcare Information and Management Systems offered by the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society if I can get my manager to agree to pay for my annual membership dues.

So, what are your New Year’s resolutions (or do you even make them)? Do you think I’m crazy to try for so much?