Sunshine Coast’s New Workforce: How to Adapt for Gen Z in your Business with Tara Jacobsen

Full Transcript

Note: the following transcript was generated by AI and therefore may contain some errors and omissions.

The tech is changing so fast. Education isn’t fit for purpose because it’s just not giving those skills, real time skills that young people need when they go into the workplace. And workplaces aren’t set up to be able to be the training facility that they need to, to be able to give those skills for kids. And this is where I think this disconnect is happening between what industry needs and education provides. Before we get started, the team here at the Coast and Commerce podcast want to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land where this podcast is created, Kabi Kabi and Jinibara people.

We honor their rich culture of storytelling as we share the inspiring stories of business leaders across the Sunshine Coast. We pay our respects to their elders past, present and emerging. Let’s get on with the show.

G’day and welcome back to the Coast and Commerce podcast. I’m Ben Amos from Innovate Media and this is the show where we bring inspiring and interesting individuals who are doing cool stuff in business on the Sunshine Coast to you to hopefully help you in whatever you do in business on the coast. And one of those inspiring and cool people is Tara Jacobson from Growie Education. Tara, welcome to the show. Thank you. Very excited to be here. Been watching it and quite keen to be a part of the show. Thank you very much for inviting me. Well, you’ve been mentioned to me.

by a couple of different people, previous guests of the show included. And as I kind of got to know more about what you’re doing in the world of education and entrepreneurship and business, both on the coast and further afield, I thought this is gonna be a good episode. So here we are. forward to getting stuck in. For those that haven’t come across you before, can you tell us a little bit about your story? So who is Tara Jacobson and what got you into what you do today?

I guess like every startup founder, I’m kind of just go with what makes what’s interesting to be honest with you. I really kind of fell into education. I was really always quite interested in starting my own businesses and not really sure what that looked like and did a business degree and ended up in innovative education, I guess. So kind of innovative education environments when they were doing something new. I always use the term we were breaking the system inside the system.

even worked for universities for a while doing the same thing. I was brought in to basically create something that had never existed before. So I kind of, I guess, became an innovator in education 30 years ago and at different times have had my own businesses, had an RTO, worked in universities, so worked across all sectors of education.

and looking at where the system needs to change and where maybe more formal structures of education haven’t got the flexibility to do that. And so then I create either go and do that with a partner or do that in my own business. So five years ago, Grow Education started to do exactly that, particularly around regional small business scale startup, which is where it had come off a project that I’d done with University of Southern Queensland, where…

they’re after the droughts that occur in regional Queensland and they were looking at ways to support farmers to create off farm income and Advanced Queensland actually funded a project back then and they said, well, how are we going to be able to help create that when people are destocking their farms, how are we going to be able to create these alternative sources of income? And they said, well, women, know, they’re sort of at home, they’ve got this kind of latency skills. Let’s look at ways that we can support farming women to create alternative sources of income.

So I ended up running a program that had about 4,000 women, regional Queensland women go through that, starting their own businesses, all online at that point, so pre-COVID. I was a beta tester for Zoom at that point. And so off the back of that, we sort of built a business for The Growie sort of product was all around creating small business scale programs and education programs for regional businesses actually. And then COVID hit.

and all our projects got cancelled. So we had to kind of reinvent ourselves as an education business. And at that time, I am a mum of two of my own biological kids and two step kids, we’re a blended family. And I was really looking at this whole issue that happened around grade 10, 11 and 12 around that…

and I’d been in corporate work before and that we weren’t setting these kids up for the work that was coming their way. And at that point, this was pre-AI as well and those sorts of things. And I was sort of really frustrated by the way what the education system could provide to my kids. so, and my daughter’s, she was a robotics champion, STEM specialist, all this sort of stuff. But we were looking at the subjects for grade 11 and 12 going, there’s nothing there that’s going to prepare her for the work that she wants to do and that she’s passionate about.

So I just kind of dreamed up a new product or a new solution which was essentially supporting kids to create their own startup venture while they’re at school. And you can’t teach entrepreneurship in a weekend or a short term program, traditionally what had been offered at school, like a weekend or one day. You can’t teach people, or kids particularly, in that time frame. So I looked at how we could put a 12 to 18 month solution into the school system that was acceptable in a school system.

And so at that point we put a diploma in and we created a, I guess a startup incubator in schools, but the kids, it was acceptable for the kids to do that while they’re a school if they were getting a qualification at the same time. And so I designed it for my daughter actually, because out of sheer frustration for the fact that nothing else existed. And so Growies sort of then just morphed into this whole other new thing in the last three years because of that. And now we’re sort of moving more into…

Microskilling, stackable, transferable, microcredentials that are industry endorsed and evidence based and much more tangible and nimble for what young people need and more importantly what industry needs when they come into the place of work. Yeah, very cool. Thanks for sharing that story. And for me as a former high school teacher and educator and then turned entrepreneur and now small business owner, like a lot of that aligns with me as well.

I’m really fascinated to kind of unpack some of those issues. And I think a good place to start is from your perspective, Tara, like you kind of touched on it there, but what do you feel is broken potentially in the current way that the secondary schooling or the schooling system is operating? Yeah, look, I’m a passionate purveyor of education. I’ve got multiple degrees. I’m actually doing my PhD at the moment. So I love the system.

I don’t think it’s necessarily broken, although I have used that term in the past. I think I’m probably more saying it just no longer is fit for purpose. And I work across all three sectors. As I said, I have my own RTO teaching in university and now in high schools as well. And I think it’s just not fit for purpose for what we need in terms of the future of work. And we can talk about the more advancing industries like advancing manufacturing. We could say advancing as opposed to advanced because with

with open source AI, it’s just totally changed. still advancing. Even in my business, we know we’re constantly, I when I had my RTO, I had a RTO in Port Hedland, which I was the first of its kind ever have a private RTO in a place like that. And we had this massive server, we had everything loaded on that. Then we moved to cloud-based SaaS. And I think now we as organizations gonna see an even bigger shift of this.

having to be nimble to pick up different platforms and AI tools that are fit for purpose for us at the time. And as a team, we have to change very quickly to be able to use that. And so we’ll be advancing for a lot longer, quite some time, I think, in terms of for businesses. So from an advancing manufacturing, as an example, the tech is changing so fast. Education isn’t fit for purpose because it’s just not giving those skills.

real time skills that young people need when they go into the workplace and workplaces aren’t set up to be able to be the training facility that they need to to be able to give those skills for kids. And this is where I think this disconnect is happening between what industry needs and education provides. Yeah, absolutely. And the audience of the Coast and Commerce podcast are those businesses who are out there, you know, operating in today’s world, not in yesterday’s world. And although some people might need to kind of get a bit more up to speed in their business as well.

And, you I guess there’s also people listening who are parents as well and going through having children going through their own education journey. But I’d really like to speak to those business owners and, you know, just kind of address the ideas here of, you know, how do you see the education system potentially making it more difficult for people moving into the workforce today? Like you’ve kind of touched on that it’s advancing, it’s changing, but the students coming out of the standard education system.

Are you seeing that they’re like because of the education system, they’re not fit for purpose as well? Yeah, and it’s, mean, a perfect example of the fact is, you know, it’s been an interesting experience, this whole thing about AI. I’ve been always an early adopter of anything technology. And, you know, we’re seeing industries, so we run a program on the coast at the moment called Talent Accelerate. It’s funded by the federal government. It’s a research pilot and we specifically wanted it to come to the Sunshine Coast and Bundaberg, actually.

Because there are so many of these really advanced businesses on the Sunshine Coast that are struggling with this growth and not understand… …and they want to kind of get talent from here, create a talent pipeline for themselves. Not these kids not leave but actually stay here and actually work. So I think the kind of small chunkable really relevant learning… …is actually where things are really missing. As I said, businesses don’t have the capacity to do that level of teaching.

But more importantly, they have got no way of evidencing that. So it’s not transferable. Boeing, for example, a lot of the big end of town are starting to create their own internal education solutions because the education providers can’t do it. Big management consulting companies are doing it, EY, KPMG, all of them. But when you think about those middle tier businesses in Australia, but even on the Sunshine Coast, we’ve got quite a lot of the growth businesses here. They don’t have that internal capacity to actually…

provide an evidence of that learning to a young person so that they are transferable. And so this is what this program was about, was creating, taking an ecosystem here on the coast, like advancing manufacturing and manufacturing in general, and actually helping them help us design those kind of micro learning skills that they want for their advancing sort of manufacturing industry.

that are recognisable across the coast, across all of the businesses on that coast and they’re recognised. I think that’s a really big thing is we have to rethink the way we’re skilling kids. Universities take four years to rewrite a university degree. The social media marketing degree, for example, there was people in those jobs and it was about five years later the degree actually got created. Vets the same, two or three years. So I think this is the challenge, is education can’t be nimble enough to provide that.

But also when you look at it from a school’s perspective, I think this is a crack of an example, they’re blocked from using AI. So kids can’t learn prompt engineering and AI at school. All our programs, the kids are actually taught how to use it. And the thing about AI and prompt engineering is it’s not something that you can do as a formal degree, besides the fact that it doesn’t exist. It actually requires you to immerse yourself into it. You have to practice it over a long period of time. You have to learn how to be a good question asker. You have to be curious. To be a good prompt engineer, that’s what you have to do.

And we’re doing the kids a disservice in our education environment at the moment by not allowing them to practice that. I teach at QUT and they’ve been working on thinking about ways that they can do that in their teaching, which I think is really forward thinking for that institution, for example, but there’s not many others that are doing that. Yeah. So without addressing on this podcast anyway, the bigger issue of education reform and what can be done in that space, I’d like to kind of ask you, what can businesses do to

I guess better adapt or restructure or reconsider, rethink the way that we’re approaching business today with all of this in mind. Yeah. And I think that’s kind of a million dollar question. think if I could answer that, there would be, you know, we’d be able to plan our business growth strategies really You haven’t got just one clear this, is it? No, well, I actually kind of do, but I mean, I don’t know that’s the actual answer. As things change and we learn new things that could be new. We’re very fortunate in this Talent Accelerate program to…

to be funded by the government to figure that out actually. And I see this as a two-sided kind of problem. As we know, we’re not skilling the kids properly, but we’re also not preparing the businesses to take these young people in. And the reason why we applied for this funding was because we could see this. We could see businesses were struggling with the fact that they were avoiding and bypassing university graduates because they weren’t coming to them with the skills that they needed.

So they were going straight to the schools, but then they didn’t know what to do with them when they actually recruited them to the business. So I think, firstly, businesses think they have to do things the same way they’ve always done them, from a recruitment and an onboarding perspective. They ask the same questions in the interviews. They have the same job descriptions that they’ve always had. All of those things need to change. We need to flip that on its head and reshake that. We need to kind of do more skills-based recruiting.

because the kids aren’t going to have the technical skills that they would normally have when they come from university. They’re not being trained to do that in high school. So we have a fabulous partner here on the Sunshine Coast, in this program, her name’s Erin Barnes from A Human Edge. She’s an organisational kind of behaviour consultant and she’s working with the 17 businesses we’ve got here on the coast to basically go through a whole job redesign process. So taking all their current org charts and their jobs and literally breaking them up.

and doing a job simplification process and, you know, taking them through a process to kind of go, all right, if you had an unskilled person straight from school who has no technical skills or what we would call red skills, which normally you go to university to get, how could we teach them blue skills? So, you know, creative thinking, critical thinking right from the get-go when they come into our organisation, as well as teaching them those red skills as we go.

And that requires a redesign of the way the job is structured. It requires a redesign in terms of what performance looks like. It requires internal mentoring and a change in leadership and cultural competency. Gen Zers will make very different decisions about employability than what we’ve done as Gen Xers, for example. So, yeah, so all of the above, to be honest with you.

And this is the point of our pilot is figuring that out so that we can create some tools that businesses will be able to take and be able to apply internally in their businesses. Yeah, it’s interesting. It makes me think about, you know, you know, traditional business, but also, you know, having grown up, you know, as a, I guess, as a Gen X, cusp millennial person, that idea of university as being like, you know, the culmination of your education. And obviously there’s further…

pathways to go as well. in order to get a job, in order to advance in your career, you need that kind of education level, right? And I think as an employer as well, like I’m guilty as well of looking for, when I’m looking for a skilled team member, I’m looking at what is their tertiary qualification. But what I’ve really struggled with in this business with a focus on video marketing and digital marketing and social media, which is fast paced and fast moving, is finding even a relevant

tertiary education that is what I need from a team member. So then as an employer, then I’m kind of not really looking at the CV for, you know, tertiary education, but then I’m stuck and I’m like, well, what am I looking for? How can I actually ensure that the person I’m getting, unless I get them in for like a trial period for three months and really figure it out. So then I think when you reflect that back on the actual job seeker as well, I know that.

they’re just less interested in going to university. They want to get out and get into the real world. So you’ve got this kind of problem here of, you know, employers looking for something that they can’t find and job seekers, you know, going down pathways that they want to go down and it’s not meeting in the middle, right? And you described that as like the red skills and blue skills, which I love that. And, they’re not kind of merging together. No, and traditionally in, sort of have an org design background as well. And traditionally we were

we’d be brought into larger corporates to train for purple people. call it purple people. Red and blue combined. Red and blue combined, absolutely. And so this is actually one of Growie’s missions is to create as many purple people as we can under the age of 25, essentially. And this is this sort of flip on its head that things like AI has created in businesses is, and I can give you a great example of a business here on the coast that’s kind of going through this, and there’s a number of them in our program.

But traditionally you would take a university graduate who had those skills, an engineer, a teacher, a lawyer, they’ve got a marketing degree or whatever. I’ve got a lot of them in my businesses that have come straight out of university that got those skills, but actually they don’t know how to do what we need them to do, which is that kind of critical thinking, design thinking, being nimble, being flexible, being able to try to move from one sort of tech platform to another because one doesn’t work or figuring out how to combine the two or.

be good at using AI to kind of help create a solution faster. They’re all what we would call blue skills, you know, being able to collaborate, being able to build social capital and build networks. They are blue skills. And traditionally, a university graduate would come out of uni with the red skills and then they would go into business because you knew they had XYZ technical skills and they would learn those blue skills through experience within your organisation. And eventually, you’d get a purple person who you would put into leadership.

That’s traditionally how our world has happened because when we were, I for me, I’m a little bit older than you, but for me university was free while I was going through high school. So my parents went, you’re going to uni because it’s going to be free. Of course, God, there it wasn’t. anyway, and I think that this is where we’ve got to flip things on its head now is that we need to start figuring out how we can create a purple person right from the time they come from school. So we’re teaching them red and blue skills straight away.

And those red skills are even the skills that the businesses are still learning themselves. Like one of our partners in the program, Dom from Makerspace, he teaches CNC machining. mean, just even the technical skill of CNC machining has changed massively. And it requires a way different way of thinking rather than just knowing how to operate the machine. So I think, you and so having to be able to teach on the go those red and blue skills and develop that purple person.

A business needs a process for that, it needs a structure for that. And you’re right, the kids also need to be able to have say, well, this is what I want, these are the skills I need, this is what I can bring, this is how I think. We’re already seeing now the kids, the AI skills that they’re learning, they’re going to go into these businesses. So the kids are being pre-skilled in this program and the businesses are being pre-skilled. And then they go in for an eight week work integrated learning placement. And the kids are going into those businesses with essentially what we would call agency. They’re going in almost as a…

you know, a purple person in training before we put them there because they can now teach you how to use AI more effectively because they understand the tools and they’re way more nimble than their leaders will be potentially. Yeah, it’s interesting. I’ve always defaulted to the understanding or the belief that those red skills are easily taught. You can easily teach red skills, but those blue skills are potentially harder to teach. A former business coach of mine

used to refer to the idea of hiring seven footers in your business. don’t know if you’re familiar with that term, but it’s the idea in a sporting analogy or a basketball team that the seven footer players, the tall guys, are always going to do better. You can teach them how to play basketball, but they’ve got a natural advantage, right, because of their inbuilt nature of their height. And when it comes to employment, then it’s like there are certain skills, certain assets in an employee that, not that you can’t teach them, but it’s harder to cheat.

teach them, you know. But you can definitely teach them the skills of what you want them to do. So is that true though, that idea? you… mean, I’m assuming that I know the answer here but that you can’t teach those blue skills, that you can’t really change how someone reacts or behaves in situations and those soft skills. Yeah.

And I mean, I don’t even like the terms off skills anymore. I think that word needs to not exist. I was teaching emotional intelligence in the eighties when the framework came out and it wasn’t till, it’s like it’s a new thing now even, you know, like I was at a, on a speaking on a panel the other day and a senior corporate employer sat there and said, he said, if I could teach, said to him, what’s the one skill you would actually like to teach and wondering whether it was a red or a blue. And he said, emotional intelligence. I’m like, we still talking about that? Like, shouldn’t that just be, it’s just part of being human. And I think this is the thing is,

I think actually, yes, you can teach it, but you have to create a space and an environment for them to be able to practice it. And then also have language. And again, I’m speaking it from the perspective of a young person, because that’s who we work with, 15 to 25-year-olds mostly. They need to be able to say to you, when you say, actually really need someone who is nimble and a critical thinker because we are a fast-paced environment, which is what you just said about your business.

And you need to have a young person come to you and say, well, actually, this is how I can demonstrate to that to you. I demonstrate critical thinking because I’ve done this, this and this in a previous role or in my personal life, I do this or so even for them to actually be able to put language to explaining those skills. And I think that’s why they’ve been traditionally called blue, sorry, soft skills is because it’s hard to put language to them. Right. And hard to prove. Hard to prove, hard to codify. Yeah. And that’s what we’re doing in our skills badges is we codify that.

And I think, you know, back to that, you know, employment conversation I talked about before of looking at a CV and looking for those hard read skills, you know, the tertiary qualification, it’s easier to codify that and to say, yes, you’ve got that skill. and back to my idea of, know, what do I do as an employee employer? Do I just, you know, start someone on a job and, you know, try them out and see how they go and hope that they’ve got the skills that I want them to as far as the blue skills. And that’s hard, right?

So, you know, how can you or how are you working to better codify, I guess, or better, you know, measure the ability of someone in those blue skills so that you can, you know, use that through the recruitment process? Yeah. So from there’s two ways to look at it. And I think you have to it’s not either side of one coin. think you’ve got to be looking at this as both sides. Like purple people are both sides of the same coin.

right? And so it’s the same sort of thing. We need to be looking at this from an education solution and from a business solution and looking at how we can pair that together, which is what this pilot is about. Traditionally, it’s been done as either or not together. The only other previous example of this is universities do work into greater learning for nursing and things like that. But even working with the university partners we work with now, it’s still focused on the student experience, not the business experience. And you’re absolutely right. The businesses needed to be taken on a journey as well to be able to do that and go.

I can’t make a decision from an employee based on what’s on their resume. That means you can tick a few things, but it’s actually got to come from that skills-based hiring. So we codify those skills by using a human thinking framework. So there’s two that we use. There’s a global one called the Durability Skills Framework. And then there’s Australian version, which actually QTAC uses and some of the larger management consultations and car firms in Australia use called the Human Capability Framework.

Absolutely look it up for your listeners. I think it’s worth looking at. And the beautiful thing about that is it actually levels it up. So this is basically your blue skills in a codifiable map. So it will say critical thinking is defined at a level one as a kid straight out of school as this. This is what it looks like when they do it. At a level seven, when they might be in a leadership role, this is what it looks like when they do it. And so that’s what we’ve built our education and our sort of our micro-credentialing based on that framework.

But we’ve then taken those frameworks to the businesses and said, all right, now you’re going to use this language to kind of codify your job or your roles. think giving get rid of the word job is probably the step one and look at the word of the roles and the skills that you want. so rather than trying to put them in a box where this is what their job is, it’s actually what’s their role and the skills that they bring to the business that you actually want them to deliver on. And so then we apply that framework to the kind of work that has to be done in their businesses.

and do basically a role redesign that allows them the space to learn the blue skills, to practice the blue skills, to also learn the red skills. So a great example on the Sunshine Coast here is rate of target tree, a massive growth business here on the coast. I think something, I could get these figures wrong and I apologise to them if I have, but it’s around 60 to 70 % of their employment is engineers. They weren’t getting the skills they needed to do that. And so now they need design skills. They need people that are…

critical thinking, creative thinking, not to say engineers aren’t, but traditionally they’re not taught how to do that. And so they’re shifting their workforce. So they’re actually bringing in kids straight from school who are just great designers and who have been creative at school. so we’re looking for kids that can demonstrate that and then can codify that and actually tell them what level they are in their creativity skills. So they’re redesigning jobs for kids that are coming in just like that. Yeah, I think that’s super valuable for…

for even the small business, you know, who isn’t doing a lot of employment on the coast, you know, just to look at your job descriptions and look at the roles in your organisation. When you are looking to, you know, track new talent into your business of how can you change the language that you’re using so that you’re attracting the right people based on those blue skills, which is so much more critical, yeah? And so those frameworks that you talked about there, you know, is that something that…

if people look that up, they can just basically take it and use it in the next time they’re recruiting. Yeah, and there’s a whole lot of tools that do sit around with it. It’s all open source information. And you’re absolutely right. I mean, the other thing is, is even some of the businesses that we’re working with here on the coast who are so enthusiastic about bringing young people in, they want that.

They still come from an old paradigm. I need a job description that is the same way it’s always been and explain the same thing. I ask exactly the same interview questions I’ve always asked. You’re never going to learn about that. You like what you’re saying when you bring a person in. You’re never going to learn about a young person or any person, even someone from university that has a qualification. So straight out of university, they don’t have any blue skills. They still might understand marketing theory. And I’ve just employed someone or I employed someone that was similar. She understood marketing theory, but she couldn’t apply it because she hadn’t actually ever done it.

And so we had to teach her those skills, but what I wanted to know was, was she even teachable? And so we had to change our interview questions and even our interview approach and how we did it in a way to try and get a sense of whether she had that capacity to learn. And you’re right, we went through a period of time that we just employed on casual or on internship to start with, just because that gave us a chance to test that person as to whether they are teachable and they can learn. So.

Can you share just really quickly without going too much into the weeds here, what are some ways that you can actually change the interview or the recruitment process so that you can test for those or identify those blue skills? Yeah. I know we generally do like around Robin. I mean, there’s lots of things. It’s different for every organisation, but we do around Robin. So we have everybody in the team, you know, we have a different structure of how they might actually interview them.

We don’t do a one hour interview. It might be just a 10 minute kind of huddle, invite them to a 10 minute huddle and have a conversation. Cause you’re looking for values alignment actually. One of the first things is you want to know if that kid or that young person aligns to your values and also your way of working. And this is the other challenge is young people can’t articulate the skills they’ve got. So we have to get better at being able to ask those questions. asking them questions in a way that helps them.

talk about the things that they’re passionate about, that they’re interested in. We’ve got a young person in our program who can’t read or write, but he’s incredibly talented when it comes to creating things. So he takes scrap metal and converts them into beautiful sculptures. And he uses technology to help him with his understanding of written and spoken language.

So traditionally he would be someone that would be challenging to place in with the business, but we’ve found the right business for him because they’re looking for someone who’s really creative and we’ve taught him how to articulate what his skills actually are. you’ve got to assume that a young person doesn’t know how to do that. Obviously a program like ours teaches them how to talk about that. So as an employer, you have to get better at being able to ask good questions. And I think this is where a power of any leader is, is being a good question asker.

be able to scaffold questions that you can actually draw out what those skills are, what their passions are, how are they teachable. We’ve also done short term trials, bring people in on internship, I think that makes sense, but you need to be able to allocate someone who works with them for that period. Give them kind of mini projects that might challenge or stretch their way of thinking and see how they perform on that. But you also long term need to kind of look at how can you redesign your whole job process or your whole role process to do that.

Traditionally, we’ve been successful in just bringing them in on a casual role and giving them a mini project and seeing how they go. As a smaller business, that kind of works quite well. I feel that one of the key things as a takeaway for the listeners or viewers of the show is just to not think about recruitment and structure in your business like you always have. think sometimes it’s easy to be complacent in a business, particularly if you’ve been operating for years.

that this, well, this is the way we’ve always done it. Right. But we know the world’s changed. We know that, you know, particularly young people and, you know, Generation Z, for example, that, you know, do show up in the world differently to Gen X’s millennials. You know, they’ve got a different cultural foundation from their birth. And their values are different too. Right. I think an interesting point just back to what you’re saying is, you know, not in the weeds, but one simple solution that a business could do is to create a,

you know, a sort of a summary of the skills that they want in the business, which is kind of what we’re doing in this parlour as well. But have a way that when you, anybody you’re recruiting, asking them whether it’s a, not a behavioural profile, but they fill out a little survey or a form where the young person has to articulate the skills and passions that they’ve got. Just starting there and actually having that conversation. So you’re actually flipping recruitment on its head. Whereas normally in an interview, you’re asking about the red skills. You might talk about values alignment, but.

actually, and then you kind of learn about their blue skills once they get in and you sort of experience them. Well, why don’t you start with that in the interview? Talk to them about how would you demonstrate emotional intelligence? Give me an example of when you’ve done that. Don’t do an interview, you know? Take them on a walking meeting, bring them into the businesses to just hang out with you for half a day. There’s actually a really good startup founder and I can’t remember what his name is, but essentially he said any new staff member should just hang out with you as the founder for three months. Pay them to do that. Follow you around for three months because I listen to everything you say.

you know, they kind of embody what the business is all about and they’re going to be able to all of a sudden be a mini you. And I’ve tried that within my business a few times and it’s been way faster in terms of performance for that new person than not doing it. Yeah, that’s great. So when we’re talking about Generation Z, I’m not sure where the exact year’s cutoff is, know, Generation Z are those people who are school leavers now and you know, all those younger people in the workforce.

What are you seeing? Because you work with a lot of that age demographic. So what are you seeing as the way, like what did they want from employment? What do they want from the workforce that maybe they’re not getting in a lot of cases? Yeah, that’s actually a cracker of a question. And you touched on this before, they’re choosing not to go to university for a start.

For a number of reasons, you know, by the end of a three year degree, I’m not going actually have the skills that I want. I mean, I think it’s only the current stats are only one in seven university graduates are actually getting a job, let alone within the career that they’ve qualified in. Different for those things, those kind of blue-skinned teacher, lawyer. I mean, you said you were a teacher as well and now look what you’re doing, something completely different. I mean, it was a place to start, but I think lots of young people are looking at that and they’re racking up a ridiculous HECS Debt that’s going to take them forever to pay off.

So that is definitely a theme across the board that we’re seeing with all the young people leaving school unless they’ve been very clear about needing this job and they need that degree to do that. I think I’m seeing a huge amount of anxiety, so a decision kind of indecision. My stepdaughter got an ATAR of 90.7 and she’s not enrolled into university. She has no intentions of going. She may choose to change her mind down the track. Her ATAR is irrelevant in two years.

She won’t even use the IT to get into university. They’re looking at the world of work and seeing it changing so fast that they don’t know, and I’ve got business owners are saying the same thing, they don’t know how to kind of skill themselves now to be ready for that world of work. So a lot of them are just not making a decision. And, you know, my stepson was a perfect example of that two years of playing with Lego and gaming, working at a retail store, super smart.

So I think, you know, and that comes down to their parents, it comes down to the environment they’re in in terms of how they’re encouraged to make that decision. They want flexibility. The gig work is definitely going to be a big thing. They want to be able to kind of try different projects, whether that’s internally in an organisation or have lots of different places that they can work. They want to explore. That might change as they get older. They love technology.

They absolutely, the young people we work with, absolutely embrace the technology and learning about technology and being able to have the opportunity to play with it. So learning an environment that gives them that, I think, is really good. And they’re very curious, actually. And I think we also undermine just how much they know. We had a session the other day teaching young people about AI and prompt engineering. was a millennial that was teaching them and he was very cool.

but we had a 15 year old and a 19 year old there totally challenging him on his prompt structure for prompt engineering and saying, well, that prompt’s not gonna work because it’s gonna give the wrong response. And I would never have expected these young people to be able to do that, to challenge somebody. And so I think about employers need to think about cultural competency. How can the leadership, how can they develop their leadership to be able to support young people to come in and actually.

have that space to be more creative, to challenge the way you do things, because they will look at things completely different to the way we did. And I think we need to be able to learn as business owners how to crack that space to just pick that goal from the young people that come into businesses. Yeah. Thank you for that. It’s super valuable for anyone who is employing or looking to retain, you know, that younger generation in their business as well, which, you know, increasingly more businesses will be as we move forward.

generations not going anywhere. No, I mean, as leaders and employers and business owners, we could be managing three or four generations in one go, which is the first of its kind for most employers that’s come before. So I think that in itself is a challenge. 100%. So just as we wrap up here, Tara, can you give us a bit of a sense of some of the things that you’re doing locally here? So you’ve touched a little bit on some of the programs that you’re running.

And I know you’re doing some stuff with say Manufacturing Excellence Forum, know, who we’ve had previously on the Coast and Commerce podcast here. Can you tell us a little bit about on the Sunshine Coast, what are some of the things that, you know, growing education is up to and what’s that going to do for the Sunshine Coast? well, growing education and myself are passionate about the Sunshine Coast. I mean, I’ve got 90 % of my staff here on the Sunshine Coast. I live on the Sunshine Coast. I went to school here on the Sunshine Coast and came back.

We also do Study Sunshine Coast, which is funded half by the Sunshine Coast Council and half by Study Queensland, which is state government. And that project is designed to support firstly international students that come here and give them wellbeing and support and employability skills. So that’s a really big piece of work that we’re doing in terms of helping international students kind of get employment and bring some of their experiences to businesses here on the coast.

But we also look after domestic students as well. we look at really a big part of that project is around talent retention and talent pathways. So we’re working with the Regional Jobs Council and other sort of organisations to try and look at ways to do that here on the Sunshine Coast. So to keep the kids here and create pathways for jobs for them to grow. We do a lot of employability skills in that program. So we do free AI for LinkedIn.

barista skills, all of that’s free and it’s all funded by the council and Study Queensland. So that’s a project that we do here. The other one is the Talent Accelerate program, which is in partnerships with MEF, the Manufacturing Excellence Forum and Food Ag Network actually, because a lot of their members have also come into the program. And that is kind of a nine month pilot, as I said, funded by the federal government to try and figure out how we can create an alternative solution.

for pre-skilling our young people and also pre-skilling businesses and then managing work integrated learning solutions for unskilled workers. mean, traditionally all that has been done through universities, so technically skilled workers. know, pathways for learning and creating people within your organisation. So this is a pilot and going really well. We’re about to head into our eight week work integrated learning placement and we’ve already…

presented to the government and they’re really excited about potentially looking at other ways we can continue this, not just on the coast but even nationally. The reason why we chose the coast to do it here is because we’re growing so fast as a region and talent is a massive issue for us, know, and as we know, accommodation and things like that. So we’ve got the kids here, they’ve got a place to live. Why not find ways to actually give them pathways to work?

where they actually can gain some skills and we can keep them here on the coast rather than them leaving. Or if they leave, they know that there’s an economy for them to come back to, to continue to grow their skills. So there’s a perfect example of that in Brisbane. I don’t know if you’ve come across Psi Quantum. There were some boys out of Brisbane University, went overseas, went over to NASA and developed this new solution in quantum computing. And they…

It’s basically groundbreaking, but they started to negotiate with Queensland government and they’re now building that at the airport in Brisbane because they wanted to bring it home. And I would love to say that through these programs, we’ve got kids that even if they do leave and they go and discover something groundbreaking and new, they bring it back to the Sunshine Coast because it’s important to bring it back here and make it as a centre for employment. So. Yeah, that’s very cool. A great vision and great work that you’re already doing here on the coast. For any business owners on the Sunshine Coast who are

who are listening and are interested in connecting further, doing more of what you’re doing or getting involved in some ways. Is there somewhere you want to send them or where’s the best place for them to go to find out more? Yeah, just come to our website. Everything’s on there. Obviously you can look up Study Sunshine Coast if you’re interested in recruiting international workers or things like that, or even employability skills for some of your staff. Obviously predominantly that’s for students.

But then the Talent Accelerate program, if it’s all on our website, so growegroer.com.au, if you just come on there. Or probably the easiest place is find me on LinkedIn. I love connecting with people on LinkedIn. I think some of the best conversations start there. I’m a social capitalist, so for me it’s about networks and connections and building our amazing ecosystem here on the Sunshine Coast and building a depth to the economy in our ecosystem. I think we’re still very young economy here and so…

Our passion is very much about creating that talent so we can actually get some depth in our economy here. Very cool. I love it. So connect with Tara on LinkedIn. Start the conversation. You never know where that will go. Hopefully it’ll be beneficial all around. So Tara, this has been a super interesting conversation for me personally and professionally. So thanks for coming on and sharing your passion for changing the way that we show up both in business and in education across the Sunshine Coast and further afield.

And for you guys watching, make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t miss another episode of the Coast and Comos podcast. And Tara, thanks for joining me on the show. Thanks, Ben. It’s great to be here. All right. Take care, guys. See you in the next episode.