DO WE EXPECT TOO MUCH?
One of the employment agencies, dealing especially in placing young college men, included recently in a leaflet sent forth to the business world an article indicating that perhaps hardened executives and others in the employer class expect rather too much of young fellows fresh from the higher institutions of learning. It advocates harking back on the part of such to the time when they, too, were young and inexperienced, saying:
Do we look for qualities in the youth of today which we did not pack in our own kit bag when we were his age? It has been an observation of this Department that many executives are looking for a certain poise and aggressiveness which comes only with maturity.
The average college graduate is only twenty to twenty-two years of age. However, there is scarcely a registrant whose application does not indicate summer and part-time employment throughout his college training, which shows that the average chap has done something towards helping himself through school. The largest proportion display not only a willingness but an eagerness to work, although combined with the modesty and indecision of the early twenty's.
A few years in the business world are needed before the youth gains self-assurance and confidence,—the by-product of successful accomplishment in his particular field of endeavor.
We were all somewhat green when we entered the business world, but with years of experience, the memory of these first years "on our own" dims. Let us not expect too much from the youth of today!
This may well be true. It is fashionable, especially in the columns of wise-cracking editorialists, to. assume that the college graduate is bursting with eagerness to reform both business and society—an impression to which Commencement orators and ostentatiously radical clubs in the colleges do something to give the color of plausibility—so that one might naturally expect a great deal. It seems probable, however, that this does injustice to the rank and file and perhaps promotes an unfair standard for measuring the work done by the several thousand young people who annually "accept positions" the year after graduation. Of course they lack experience. Most of them are modest and anxious to learn, if not suffering from panic due to the unfamiliarity of their new surroundings. Despite a seeming tendency of the time toward cocksureness, stressed mainly by the immodest few, it may be doubted that it is really any greater now than it was 30 or 40 years ago; for be well assured the charge is by no means novel. It was made by our fathers before us, and probably by our grandfathers.
To some extent the newest comers should know more, they having the benefit of one more generation's experience to observe—and that they actually do know more is what insures human progress, decade by decade. But it takes a bit of refining in the postgraduate schools of hard knocks, just the same, and one ought not to look for the full corn in the ear too early in the season. Give the young men time and they'll probably justify themselves fully as well as have their sires.
