They say it takes a vil­lage to raise a child. It makes sense. After all, under usual cir­cum­stances chil­dren are not raised in iso­la­tion and the peo­ple of their com­mu­nity influ­ence them and help to mold their expe­ri­ence and future. 

Many com­mu­ni­ties, includ­ing the one I live in, work hard to improve in the rank­ings of best cities to live in. These stud­ies rank mea­sur­ables like pop­u­la­tion, cost of liv­ing index, per­cent­age of work­force in the cre­ative class, median house­hold income, salary and employ­ment growth, crime rate, air qual­ity, cul­tural ameni­ties, diver­sity, etc. If you hap­pen to be for­tu­nate enough to be able to pick wher­ever you want to live this data can come in handy.

Busi­ness Week, for the sec­ond year in a row recently pub­lished The Best Places to Raise Your Kids . It’s nice and focuses on afford­abil­ity and qual­ity of life. How­ever, I’m not able to find any data rel­e­vant to com­mu­ni­ties with proac­tive pro­grams to get kids from A to Z, from stu­dents to pro­fes­sion­als. The term K to 20 refers to kinder­garten through Master’s Degree, and any­where in between. All the for­ma­tive years and then some, and then after per­haps a one-term intern­ship - they are unleashed and just expected to be great.

With vary­ing degrees of edu­ca­tion through­out his­tory there have always been worker bees, inno­va­tors and entre­pre­neurs so you might ask why I am blog­ging about this. In HR speak I’m talk­ing about areas of oppor­tu­nity for improve­ment. Though we do OK at, “a per­son for every job and a job for every per­son,”  pro­fes­sions are so often acci­den­tal unless you are the odd child that is born with a call­ing or cor­nered into a fam­ily busi­ness. Think of how many peo­ple you know that do not work in what they went to col­lege for, were not happy in their first cho­sen pro­fes­sion or could never fig­ure out what they want to be when they grow up.

Last week I went out to a local indus­trial park with an area col­lege that has a pro­gram to tran­si­tion high school stu­dents to col­lege on job shadow day for 9th graders. Out of 140 9th graders only 20 expressed inter­est and only about 20% of the busi­nesses in the park expressed inter­est in allow­ing stu­dents to job shadow for half a day.

Where did teach­ers, guid­ance coun­selors and par­ents fail in mak­ing this a com­pul­sory rather than vol­un­tary activ­ity pro­moted with enthu­si­asm? Busi­nesses cited lack of avail­able staff, con­fi­den­tial­ity and lia­bil­ity issues as the most com­mon rea­sons they were not inter­ested in hav­ing stu­dents at their facil­i­ties for 4 hours, yet the 20% of busi­nesses that did agree found ways to make accommodations.

It’s a dys­func­tional vil­lage that doesn’t take chil­dren gen­tly by the elbow and guide them through the stages of life with a plan for suc­cess. Is your vil­lage func­tional or dys­func­tional? Please share your story.

In the mean­time, I’m gong to get the vil­lage chiefs together here to work on a plan for success.