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It’s kind of interesting to be asked to do this because when I started in this industry,
I was the young person and we all were so that’s kind of a break on this.
Uh oh, we don’t have the new slides.
Do you have a different than the one that was in my pocket?
The way I was going to start this was, Heather asked me to add a slide that showed a trend that
was quite troubling for all us as we came up in industry and that was
in the '90s and the beginning part of this decade,
we laid off a huge number of people in this industry
and the result was that we had a curve that went like this
so we had a double hump and in the middle was a gap.
And that gap, of course, has aged over time and those people are the people who are now
running things and in many instances are the CEOs and leaders.
Unfortunately, I may not have saved it so never mind, well just forget that.
So, anyway, in that gap what we have found over the last five years
in doing a number of interviews about the new generation of CEOs
is that they may not be the people that had the daring and the bravado.
They are people who have been trained to satisfy Wall Street and
that is not 100 percent, but it is a very troubling trend.
So what are we doing right now? It looks, if you looked at numbers
that we’re getting ready to do the same thing again.
In 2008 there were 659,000 people employed in this industry.
Today there are 624,000.
That is a fairly dramatic drop between 2008 and 2010
and we don’t know what that number will be at the end of 2011,
but it’s not going to go up and that is the truth.
In Europe, there has been a 2 percent increase, not on the space side,
but the defense side has driven that and that is
because people who used to be employed by the Ministries of Defense have been shifted in the industry
and as cost and economic pressures go in, that will also effect that number.
So we got a little bit of a strange economy going on right now,
but the bad part of it is that we are actually recreating that gap of leadership so that if you all,
the young people that are here today leave, that is their making of the void.
The message is then is, when Heather was your all’s age,
that gap was there and she was forced to faster and with more talent than here predecessors.
The same holds true for young people today so that’s kind of the core message.
Those people that are in the work today, that are young professionals face a greater challenge
than ever before because you’re going to have to step up with a broader set of skills faster because of that gap.
Just so you know, the Aviation Workforce study has been conducted for 16 years.
We started off just identifying career opportunities because we noticed as new technologies were emerging,
they were taking the best and the brightest and we has an industry or has an enterprise we were no longer getting them.
We also wanted to put a face to who A&D professionals are because it became increasingly clear as I just very indelicately said the other day,
I can remember having this conversation in 1999 and the group of engineering technology leaders at the front of the room wondering,
“Why can’t we get the young people to come in our in our industry?”
And I’m looking at them and they all have bad comb overs and I’m thinking,
"I can tell you why, wait we got to put a better face on this." And so that was part of it too.
The other thing is, what we have been doing about laying people off and letting core competencies go
is going to affect our long-term capability and I think that is a very scary thing.
In 2004, we launched a partnership with Aerospace Industries Association, AIAA, National Defense Industries Association,
and NASA to do a more complete study that would be the authoritative source of credible information
because there was so much disinformation out there. Norm Augustine went before the President’s panel
and said were going to have retirements at 37 percent by 2006.
That did not happen and it was not true.
He had been given information that was based on what someone said, someone said
- and I asked him, trace that back and he said I have no idea.
It wasn’t based on data, it was based on folklore.
So we had to come up with some really good, credible data.
Right now, here is the chart I was trying to talk about.
This is where we are right now and if you look at it the gap I was talking about,
this is this double hump and we’ve corrected it to some degree.
This is where we hired the most, here and here over the last decade.
This is the decline I talked about in terms of employment.
Now, this week for our study, what we’re trying to do, what NASA challenged us to do
and AIA was to find out what is driving decisions about how people are choosing careers and employers
and we are doing this in a four wave process.
The first is once every five years we do a Reader/User Study which is similar to climate survey or engagement survey
that you would do within your own organization, what makes people satisfied about their work,
what makes people dissatisfied about their work.
The last time we did this it was very interesting. We found that 90 percent of the employees believe that they are in their top rung of their
organization. That says something about our supervision,
we’re not letting people know so we will be doing that again in May.
The corporate study looks at demographics data relative to technological challenge in terms of investment in R&D,
investment in tools to assist with design and development, professional development, as you know,
adds a cause for being that he believes people need restorative time to contemplate their naval and come up with the next great thing.
That’s part of this, how much is being allowed for them?
What we’ve learned thus far is about this gap in leadership, that the retirements were overstated;
the lack of available workforce was overstated dramatically.
We left kids on campus.
When employers go out and say they won’t hire anyone with less than a 3.7 grade point average
and they are in the fields that you are all are in, that narrows the field dramatically
so we left over 30 percent of the kids on campus last year with no jobs, saying that we didn’t have enough.
The issue is a mix of skills and competency.
The pay we are offering people, you all as a government entity are well aware of this,
but in industry it is the same thing, finance and consulting –
and we have been rotating an article among the young professionals that one of our advisory board sent us
and it’s “Friends Don’t Let Friends Do Finance.” It is funny, but it is the truth.
We are losing very highly educated people to careers that are not going to create products
and make stuff for the future.
Attrition is higher than desired amount young professionals.
I will tell you the other place that we are noticing an alarming voluntary attrition rate is among highly talented and skilled artisans and craftsman
on the hourly workforce
and if we don’t get someone to start paying attention to that and vocational education in this country,
we got another problem.
The emerging stem fields are pulling away from A&D, particularly biotech and I would say on the
women in particular are being attracted in to new fields where they perceive that there will not be a pre-judgment about gender.
Young people in the past did not get the idea what they did on Facebook
and published about themselves would affect their security clearance and that has become a big issue as well.
There are all kinds of tools that are being put together to take into middle schools and high schools to tell them,
you’re not going to become the Navy Seal if you do this stuff
and three tickets for speeding are as bad as one drug charge because it shows a persistence of bad judgment, that kind of thing.
We also found no clear messages to who aerospace is,
if the pay is equal, the technological challenge is the most important factor driving career choices.
Internal career development replacing external, people love these type of events,
but they also want to get together outside with their peers so the community sense of this enterprise is very important.
Diversity, I grew up in valuing diversity and we went to training in the '80s and learned all about it.
Now it is about respect of the individual and that is where really most young people believe they want to be.
Major differences based on the size of company with regard to retirement, average age, and job satisfaction.
Smaller companies are more flexible and are offering more of the types of workplaces that
people are interested in being, but they can’t offset the money. Boeing and Lockhead have the money.
AeroVironment gives you 20 percent time off to go play. Where are you going to go?
If you’ve got a huge loan, it may be to Boeing.
The Young Professionals Study has a 10 percent random sample from 13 companies, including NASA.
We will track them over their career duration as long as they all respond
and see how their attitudes about work and what influences their decisions changes.
We’re trying to make sure that we continuously assess expectation versus the reality and we
also need to continually assess how they seek information,
how young people seek information and drive toward that because it changes dramatically.
In the first week of the student survey, which is running right now,
we have found a trend that they are using their phones to respond to a survey that I couldn’t even see on my phone
so there is an issue there.
The student survey has a 10 percent random sample from seven universities, MIT is included.
We’re assessing how they make decisions regarding the university, major, and first employer,
where they are getting information and how.
The current employees among young professionals, these are the factors that seem most important.
They highly value how their companies lead,
what they’re doing and how they lead and I heard a lot of that at the breakfast table this morning,
I think that is interesting, and how they handle downsizing.
Be insensitive, be dispassionate and we’ll pay a price for it over the long term.
Current employers feel overwhelmed with activity versus value. I heard this yesterday about email, but they do feel valued.
That is good. Current employees believe there is more money to be made elsewhere.
We probably all know that and current employees are concerned about the lack of strategy be it defense, national security, or space.
There doesn’t seem to be direction in any of those categories
and that this has gone on, not just one administration, but several.
There is bigger chasm between the 20 and 30 somethings and between the 20s and 50s.
I found that to be interesting and Garth Henning, who is one of the NASA advisory board members, said he just doesn't get these
twenty-year-olds. He is 37. Young professionals are planning to stay, they want to be here.
They’re student loans do have them trapped and we are totally insensitive to that as an enterprise.
They chose their careers and majors based on a single person or major event,
Columbia and Challenger, and the bridge in Minneapolis were the most often mentioned.
They are highly influenced by personal relationships and sense of community.
Many of the people in my age group, we thought we were INTJs and therefore we were happier being off by ourselves.
That’s just not the case with most folks anymore and is that because they grew up tapping into a phone and lacked personal relationship,
who knows, but that is the reality.
The pay the last five years has been all over the place.
We’ve gone up, we’ve gone down, we’ve got new grads making more than people who have been on the job for two or three years
and that is not a good situation to have either.
The stability, in terms of location, we did two focus groups.
92 percent cited the need to repay student loans as the reason for not wanting to move.
However, most of them do want to get out of their parents’ house or having a roommate and those are things that most of us did not have to do.
18 percent do want to start a family and so that, again, is part of the dichotomy.
What makes them leave, it’s always their direct supervisor. (I have two minutes left.)
78 percent need more flexibility and we under estimate, we think job rotation every six months is kind of what they talk about when they need
variety, it is actually, what we found was they want, they being people in this room, you,
want variety in what they’re doing day to day and hour to hour.
They don’t want to sit and do the same thing for eight hours and they need to feel their ideas are valued.
Our focus work is now that they hear the message of security, not using email.
They are using their phones instead of their email. They want layers of information, I think we heard that yesterday.
They don’t understand the lack of message around A&D is about or what NASA is about.
They don’t get it. One young woman told a group of CEOs, you all are whining, whining, whining.
We do amazing things, which I thought was very brave of her, but I couldn’t have done it and,
again, the important thing is that most young professionals do plan to stay in this industry.
They’re not planning on leaving if we can keep them here.
While public service is a factor, it is not the to the degree we have been told in the past.
The finance and consulting industries are on campus wining and dining the students by the time they are at the end of their freshmen year.
We certainly aren’t. We certainly aren’t giving them tickets to plays and championship ball games so those are the things we are up against.
And this was heartening to me, over 20 percent indicated that they are interested in careers in academia,
which as you know that’s part of the limiting factor for us.
We are in the corporate study right now, the university student study is running now,
the YP survey will run the first two weeks of May, the Reader/User Study runs the month of May,
we’ll do the analysis in June and July and we’ll publish the results on August 22,
National Aerospace Week is in September use the data prolifically.
The white paper will be distributed. Ed will have a link to it somewhere in NASA. Use it, use it, use it. That's all I have.