What Makes People Successful? (The Unfair Advantage)

The Ramsey Cash giveaway is back. You could win one of our $500 weekly prizes or the $3,000 grand prize to enter. All you gotta do is go to RamseySolutions.com, slash giveaway, and make sure you come back and enter daily for more chances to win. No purchase necessary, but you must be 18 or older to win. So do you have an unfair advantage when it comes to your success? Answer yes. I'll explain, and then a conversation about technology and its future, and it looks good, Brian Collins joins me next. Helping you win in your work so that you're winning in your life, I'm Ken, this is the Ken Coleman show. I think we all have a unique role to fill. That means we are needed, and that means we must do it. And you can't have that belief set without realizing that that role must come with some inherent advantages. Now there's a book that's been out a while, it's a business book, a wildly popular book called The Unfair Advantage, and several people have told me about it. Hey, Ken, have you read this book? Have you read this book? People do this all the time, and I love to read. And so when people say, Ken, have you read this book, and I haven't read the book? I say, no, tell me about it, and some people told me about it, and so I picked it up. And so I wanted to dive into the concept. Now again, as soon as I saw the title, I immediately think, well, The Unfair Advantage, sure. That is my story, and that is my design. Now that's what I think, when I give talks on this, I'll be giving this talk in front of several thousand people in Chicago at our smart conference in September. And as I coach people, and I've coached now nearly thousand people on the air and live at events, I could boil everything down that I teach to your story and your design. And so what do I mean by story? Well, I've got a story, you've got a story. And the story is made up of our environment, that's the home that we grew up in. Some of you say, Ken, I didn't grow up in a steady home. I was in foster care, that's your environment. Your environment could have been chaotic. Your environment could have been stable as just two simple examples. But the environment in which you were raised or grew up in has a tremendous impact on us. It shapes our worldview, it shapes the way we see the world. Now, the experience part is what life has thrown your way. The winds, the losses, the hurts, the loves. You throw it all in and I look at a person's environment and a person's experience and I can tell you immediately. If they begin to share, I can immediately see how it is shaped that person in two ways. Their environment shapes the way they view the world and their experiences shape their heart. The things that move their heart, good, bad, ugly. That's just a fact. Now, so when I saw the title of the book, I said, well, yeah, so that's the story part. Is your advantage is you use your story to your advantage and then you use your design. Now, if you've been listening or watching me for an amount of time, you know that I have a methodology that can tell someone and I believe your purpose in life is to use what you do best, that's your talent to do work that you really enjoy. I call that passion to produce results that matter deeply to you. I call that mission, a sense of mission. So that's my methodology. Now, that's based on design and story. Talent is designed. The God of the universe gave you talent that you can sharpen with education and experience and to skills. That's your design. But if you look at passion, the work I enjoy, it is related to design because we enjoy doing things we're good at, but it's also related to my story. And that's where the mission piece comes in. What results motivate me? Why am I motivated by the results? Your story, your design, it's pretty simple. So I thought, well, let me check the book out. So this is interesting. So do you have an advantage? I absolutely believe that you have an advantage and I have an advantage. The way to maximize the advantage is first awareness and second action. I've got to be aware of my advantage and then I've got to take action, leverage the advantage. So this is how the writers of this book define the unfair advantage. It's a condition, asset or circumstance that puts you in a favorable position. A condition, an asset, a circumstance that puts you in a favorable position. So the question that you should be posing is, what's good in my life? In other words, what do I got going for me? What are some positive things that I've gotten in my life? There are five areas that the authors of the book share as to look for the answer to that question. What's good? What do I got good going on? What's going for me? Money, intelligence, location, education, or experience, and status. Those are the five areas. So money, okay? Don't let a lack of money immediately limit you. I think the greatest innovations of all time. You think of the great inventors? The great innovations come when there aren't much resources. You don't have much to work with, but grit and ingenuity and people figure it out. So my lack of money shouldn't discourage me. It ought to make me more determined. I have to figure out a way to do this thing that I wanna do. And I don't have a bunch of money to fund it. I'm gonna have to bootstrap it. Oh, that's good. That's good. You're gonna be more innovative because you have to be. A lack of resources means a wealth of innovation if you state determined. Intelligence, obviously, it's just, it's just, you're gifted. You got some gifts in this area. Hey, I know how to do this. Naturally, and I can bone up on that. Location, hey, I'm around these people. Let me tell you something for me in my early 30s, the opportunity to get into broadcasting was absolutely foundational to the fact that I was in a city and I had made good connections. I was around people that I could get into the industry. I still have to pay my dues. I did a little itty bitty stuff. High school football play by the internet. Did a high school football show at 11 o'clock at night on a conversation down in noon in Georgia. I did a broadcasting class with a bunch of 20-year-olds. I introduced Mimes and balloon artists. I did it all, all the little things. I started doing radio on Saturdays at 2 o'clock in the afternoon where I paid the station for the time. Education and experience. What have I learned? Through a book, a class, or real life experience and status. Hey, I know these people. I got these connections. So when you look at your advantage, you must first start with my story, my design. I walked you through that. How about your personality? It's it's been shaped. This is how I'm uniquely wired. How about your mindset? Do you have a fixed mindset? Or you think, man, there's only so much I can do. Or do you have a positive mindset that says, hey, I can actually improve. All of these things together, personality, mindset, talent, passion, mission, my story. When you put all this together, you begin to see clear patterns and clear signs. You see the patterns in your life and the patterns in your life reveal signs. See, self-awareness is the aim here. You wanna know what your unique advantage is? If you become radically self-aware, you are ahead of most people in this world who walk around like zombies as they don't truly know who they are. Self-awareness is a superpower. I'm here to help you get it. Steve Myers Tech jobs are the new trades. You can get into a technology job get into a technology job without ever walking onto a college campus and the ladder for growth is unlimited. I've been preaching this message for years partnered with Bethel Tech, one of the great technology boot camps in all of the country. Our listeners are going to them and winning big. So I had Ryan Collins stop by recently. He was in town and I wanted to talk to him about the trades education tech new collar skills. Here is my conversation with Ryan Collins. Check it out. All right, Ryan, let's talk about trades and education. Yeah. And in that conversation, I want to dive into what I believe is true. That technology jobs, they're the new trades. Yep. Would you agree? Is that factually can we say that? And what I mean by that to our listener to the viewer is technology jobs don't require a four year degree? Absolutely. Yeah, you know, it's interesting about 10 years ago, Jenny Rometti, she's the now she's the former CEO of IBM. She coined this phrase that's that's impacted me. It's so good for the season that we're in. It's called new collar skills. So we're moving into a season in the workforce where it's not defined by blue collar or white collar, but new collar skills that are immediately applicable skills that companies are falling over themselves to find quality talent. And overwhelmingly, those new collar skills would point to anything intact. So software development, cybersecurity, data science and data analytics. We've got blockchain now. So these companies are not requiring you to have a four year or even a two year degree. They can't wait that long. There's such a gap in talent that they're saying if you have the skills, however you got them, if you can prove to us that you're proficient in these areas, we'll hire you. Yeah. And we're going to hire you for a good pay. I mean, the starting pay can be anywhere from 80,000 to 150,000. Right. And that's just getting in. Yeah. So do you have a snapshot right now on what the gap is in technology jobs? Because I know the greater numbers, you got about nine and a half million jobs available in this country. Maybe six and a half, seven million unemployed. These are, you know, technically saying I actually want to work. Yeah. I reported on my show recently that we have a dearth of 600,000 manufacturing jobs. That's unbelievable. Yeah. By the way, many of those jobs could be tech jobs. There's some overlap there. So what, what, what, what, give us a snapshot of what you're seeing right now is it relates to the amount of tech jobs that are available and, and what that looks like. Yeah. Well, it's continuing to grow. And as we have new technologies, it will continue to grow. So there was a recent report that said that by the year 2030, so we're, what, we're almost to 2024. That's right. So not in the not too distant future that 85% of the jobs that will exist have not even been created yet. And overwhelmingly, that will be in tech. And so the numbers that would have been put out over the last couple of years is that in the next few years, there'll be a million job shortfall in tech talent. Wow. And there's only one qualified candidate for every three open business. Okay. Let's stop there. Yeah. What does that mean? It's best as you can in a crystal ball. What happens to the economy? Yeah. What happens to the nature of getting people in the tech space when there's a million jobs unfilled? Yeah. Well, that's a really big question. I would say that one employers can't wait for you to learn for four years. They need you now. And so if we continue to go down that paradigm, there's going to be a shortfall. And it's going to hinder the innovation that we need in terms to move our economy forward. So then what will businesses do? They see that coming. They're going to make a change. Yeah. Well, there's a couple of things. And so this is a very hot topic right now. It is one you'll continue to outsource. You know, and there's some pros and cons to that. But then sourcing being international. Yeah, overseas. Okay. But then too, this is where if we can't find the human talent, they'll figure out ways to augment that with artificial talent, artificial intelligence. So this is where the conversation about our is AI going to replace our jobs. I really don't think that that's going to happen. I think that AI will actually create more jobs. I think so too, because it's going to require this human talent to make the AI work. You and I've had a long form discussion about this. You can actually will link to that conversation because Ryan gave us some great insight on that. So we'll provide a link because I want to stay on this topic. So what I'm hearing then is that companies are going to have to innovate how they hire exactly. They're going to have to go, all right, I'm going to train them on the job yet. Or I'm going to work with companies like Bethel Tech. Yes. And I'm going to say, I got a partner with them. And you said to me recently that companies are more and more open to the tech trade schools like Bethel Tech. Yeah. Why is that? Why are they so much open to this? Well, because they're not getting ready to work graduates from the university system like they want. Okay. So there was a survey. I think it was Gallup is probably 10 years ago. And the Gallup surveyed 100 executives at major companies to ask them, how confident are you that you're getting ready to work graduates from the university system? And 11% of them said that they feel confident they're getting ready to work graduates. Now the same survey then flipped it and asked 100 university presidents, how confident are you that you're producing ready ready to work graduates? 98% of those university presidents said that they're confident they're producing ready to work graduates. So there's this massive chasm in expectation and perception on what are ready to work graduate is. So what used to be the standard of getting a bachelor's degree as that credential is no longer is not no longer holding up. So companies are saying, you know what? I don't care where you got your skill. I just need to I need to know that you have the skill. Right. And so whether that's from a boot camp like Bethel Tech, or it's from a community college or a university, or if it's just real world experience that you've aggregated over your career, I just want to see that you can do the job. And if I can get you in to do the job, then I can train you up to continue to learn in the areas that are important to our company. And what type of, I mean, we're looking at really attractive starting salaries. Yeah, we just look at the data from what you are doing at Bethel Tech, where you're training people. Yeah, but let's look across the board when when when companies are going, okay, we need some talent. What are we talking about? What's a general range of of a starting salary with what we would call basic skills that you just talked about? Yeah, it keeps going up. So, you know, we launched Bethel Tech over five years ago and the average starting pay for a junior developer was 65,000. I think it's gone up to about $75,000 now. Starting pay. That's incredible. One to two years, it's not uncommon to be making six figures. I mean, you have a rocket ship trajectory. If you can just get in the door. And the beauty about that is that you're not having to spend four years and $200,000 in a computer science degree. That's highly theoretical. You can go to a program like ours for fraction of the time, fraction of the cost, learn and immediately applicable skill and get that job that you probably weren't even going to make that starting pay after your four years of college. And now companies are saying we believe in programs like this so much, you know, boot camps like Bethel Tech that we want to work directly with them. We want to help frame what they're teaching so that we can we know exactly what we're getting from their graduates, but also so that we can send our employees through these programs and we'll pay for it. So this sounds to me like just good old fashion collaborative. So I love the conversation here and I share it because again, folks, technology is not going anywhere with all of the new AI stories that we seek, honestly, on a bait on a daily basis coming out of the media, how they're going to replace jobs, replace jobs, replace jobs. Let me tell you something, AI can only work with humans who help it work. Is it fantastic technology? Can't it do amazing things? Absolutely, but not in and of itself without someone working it. That's just one example. Cyber security. It's not going anywhere. It's going to become more and more of an issue as we see the rise of hackers. This is big stuff. Technology itself will spit off more jobs. It always does. So the trades have long been, unfortunately, looked down upon by Americans because of the cultural message that said you need to go to college, if you really want to be successful, that's the best way to make more money. So guys that are working blue collar jobs and women that are working blue collar jobs, they're not successful. Don't give me that. It's a bunch of crap. But with technology, what we're seeing is you can be trained in technology just like you can be trained for trade, a traditional blue collar trade. So this is the new collar world of work. You can be in your 50s and 60s and 70s and learn tech. And if you got high character and you can do tech, you are hireable. So Bethel Tech dot net slash Ken Coleman. You wouldn't believe some of the six success stories. The latest one I heard, single mom, make it about 39,000 a year, now making 80. Why? She listened to my show. She called Bethel Tech, Bethel Tech dot net slash Ken Coleman. Get into the new trade of technology. This is the Ken Coleman show. Welcome back to the Ken Coleman show. We're helping you win at work so you can win in your life. If you're enjoying the show via YouTube, would you do us a favor? We need your help to grow, grow, grow. You can do that by liking the video you're watching, subscribing to the channel and sharing. And then if you're listening via your favorite podcast app, give us a follow and then a four star review or five star. Geez, what am I saying? However many stars there are. Be generous. And share as well. Nobody's ever done that. I should stick with that. Like everybody says five star. I see the guy that goes, give us a four star review. No need to be greedy with my ask. All right, we're continuing our conversation with the CEO of Bethel Tech, Ryan Collins, because I am so excited about technology as the new trade. And now we're going to talk about how technology is disrupting the university and college system and what it means to you. Here's more of my conversation with Ryan Collins. Higher education has to work and collaborate with employers so that we can build what they're looking for. We can't assume that we know what they're looking for. That's prideful. And unfortunately, you see that in traditional education. Traditional higher education has failed the customer, the consumer, the student. We have over 39 million people in the U.S. alone who have some college credit and no degree. That's a waste of time and waste of money. You know, so what we're looking at, you know, Bethel Tech is in some ways, it's an accelerated learning program. It's typically 36 weeks long and it's, you know, 15 to $16,000 compared to four years and 200,000 for the same type of outcome that you get at a computer science program at a university. But now we're even disrupting our model. We would in and of itself would be considered a micro credential. But now we're creating a micro credential within our micro credentials. So instead of spending 36 weeks, you can do, we're actually launching this. I'm announcing it on your show an 18 week $5,000 program in front-end web development, which is highly employable. We're talking 75,000 to 85,000 starting pay. You get your foot in the door, get a job, and then if you want to persist on in our program, you don't have to start from zero. You just continue on so that you can get the full program. And there's a good chance that the company pays for it. Yeah. So here's a scenario. You go through our program, front-end web development. It's 5,000 plus we're doing a special discount for all King Coleman listeners. So it's less than 5,000. Yeah, it's, you know, it'd be a 10% tuition reduction. Right. And you get the job, $75,000. Let's say you get a job at Verizon as a as a junior front-end web developer. And then they give you $10,000 a year to go or 8,500 to go back to school up front. So now you can continue on and go through our full stack program, starting where you left off on the front-end web development. And you're not having, so that's saving time and money except for now the company's paying you. And then if you want to get your degree, our program transfers as 27 credits toward a computer science degree. And the company continues to pay for your education. So you see we're stair-stepping the degree. We're unbundling education. Yeah. In the same way, the way that the metaphor I like to use the illustration is that remember when we were growing up in the 90s, if we liked, we liked a song, you know, maybe it was I loved Pearl Jam, so I'll use that as an example. Oh, there we go. Vitality versus 10. You don't get me humming it right now. I'm gonna resist the resist. I'm gonna resist the urge to sing right now, but it's good to me. But if you liked a song on the radio, you went to Best Buy and you bought that that CD. That's right. You know, for the kids out there, we used to buy CDs. Well, I'm gonna go ahead and age myself just for a little bit of fun. That's what you would do. At my age when a song came on. And so let's say it was Van Halen. Oh, come on. Okay. And you wanted it. What you would do is is you would have a cassette tape. Just set tape. In the boombox. Yeah. All right. And when the song came on the radio, you would press record. You did. Yes. That's what we did. Oh, I did that too. I did that too. Yes. I used to wait for the top 10 at 10. Yeah. And I would just push record. Yeah. You know, it's perfect. But you would go and buy a tape or you go and buy a CD for 20 bucks. Yeah. And you would hope that there were three or four songs on that album that you like. That's correct. But you'd have to throw out another six. You're like, oh, let me, you know, how do I fast forward pass that or go to an example? But then Spotify happened, right? And then you got to create your own CD. You got to create your own playlist. And maybe there were three or four songs from Pearl Jam that you like. Maybe there are three or four songs from, I don't know, Sound Garden or. That's right. Whoever. I'll throw in some old ones counting crows. Counting crows. You know, a little bit of that in there for the old days. Little R.E.M. Yeah. Yeah. It's the mixtape. It's the mixtape. You know, but you got to, you got to build it the way that you wanted to build it. Now we're doing that with education. Right. And you're, you're finding micro credentials that are employable skills so that you can get that job you're looking for. But we create a lifelong learning continuum in which you go from here to here. You're always learning. Right. And you're, you're actually, you're not having take out copious amounts of student loan debt. Right. But you actually have the company that will help you pay for it. And it leads me to this. At what point? At what point? And I would suggest it might be happening. But at what point do we start to see high school kids by the tens and tens of thousands? Start to go straight from high school into tech jobs. Yeah. It's already happening. So it was fascinating with Bethel Tech. You know, when we started Bethel Tech, our typical demographic was a career pivoter, 30, 35 years old, stuck in a dead end job, wanting to change your life and not having to drop everything to do that. So we met them where they're at, you know, they could do it online. They could do it on their own time. They could do it in nine months and go and get that lesson a year, go from making $35,000 as a call center rep to $70,000 as a junior developer. When, when COVID hit and all of the campuses for traditional universities were forced to shut down, these 18 year olds that were graduating high school, they were forced to take a gap year. So all of a sudden, we started getting these 18 more and more 18 year olds coming through our program and going through our program in nine months, which they crushed it because this is like second nature to them, like even if they'd never coded before, they just got it. Yeah. You know, and then three months later, get $65,000 jobs. And they're like, Ryan, yeah, I would have spent four years trying to do this and get this type. Now I've got everything that I want and I'm continuing to learn and my companies helping me get certifications that are important to me being promoted within my organization. And can I make the case that if the kid goes to a four year program, spends a whole lot more money, a whole lot more time, they're going to come out and maybe start at the exact same salary. Yeah. If not less. If not, okay, I want to pick up right there because I'm so excited. If we could get just a few parents in every state, just a few, it's all a take. It literally would be a dominant that I believe could revolutionize this country. And we could get a few parents who, who had the courage, the guts to sit down with their kid and go, hey, you've always been into technology, you told us you want to go into technology. We want to have a family conversation. So we saved up money for school. We, or we don't have it, we got to get out some loans, or we're going to cash flow, whatever the financial situation is. But we want to tell you that you could go to a trade school, a technology trade school like a baffle tech or any of the other ones that are out there. And in less than a year, and for a fraction of the cost, you can get a really good job on a ladder to success in technology. And you'd be 18, 19 years of age. Now, you're going to miss out on the fraternity parties, sorority parties, you're going to miss out on the campus experience. And I know most of your friends are probably going to go to college. But let me just show you what you're, what you're now and your next looks like. And the parents had the guts. And I mean guts because it is not a popular cultural message to sit down with junior and say junior, you don't actually have to go to college to do the work you want to do. But if we had the guts parents to have the conversation, you might be surprised to see some kids who go, you know what? I don't want to go to college and spend four years studying, partying, whatever it is they're doing at school. I want to get right into the work. I don't want to go into debt and be like millions of Americans who come October are going to be up a creek. It's all it would take because we got kids that could go right out of high school right into the technology world. New collar jobs make great money. Contributing and maybe starting in business, which is good for everybody in this economy. I don't know parents, what are you scared of? This is the Ken Coleman Show. Thanks for listening to the Ken Coleman Show. For more, you can find the show on demand wherever you listen to podcasts and watch the show on YouTube. You can also find Ken across all social media by following at Ken Coleman.