RealWorldPlayBook Founder Genevieve Ryan on What to Expect From the Class of 2018

June 08, 2018 | Filed in: Your Career

Whether you graduated recently or haven’t set foot on a campus in years, graduation season is an interesting time, in that it signals the arrival of a new cohort of young people into the workforce. Each graduating class is different, with unique skills, challenges, and points of view that they will be bringing with them to work. We wanted to learn more about the class of 2018—and so we sat down with Genevieve Ryan, the founder of RealWorldPlaybook, an online platform designed to assist graduates with the transition from campus to the office. Ryan knows this demographic well—below, she shares her thoughts on why that transition can be so difficult, the learning curve for graduates, and what it means to be “real world ready.”

Tell us about your transition from college to the working world. 

After graduating from college, I went straight into law school. By the time I graduated, I was 26 years old and only just then starting my first real job. I was working at Goldman Sachs as part of their executive office division, and I realized pretty quickly that, although I was employed at a wonderful firm with amazing people and incredible opportunities, I was incredibly ill-prepared for the real world. Despite having had an excellent education, supportive family, and all of the things you would imagine really help set you up for success, when it came to things like changing my health insurance plan, or figuring out how to start saving for retirement, or even just signing an apartment lease in New York City, I had such a knowledge gap. I was so embarrassed and frustrated and also curious as to why there was such a disconnect between what we learn in school and what we’re expected to know to be successful in “the real world.”

I eventually decided that I wanted to really dive into this problem and figure out how to help. I went to analysts I worked with at Goldman, other students who were graduating from college at the time, and other people around my age, and I started asking them questions: “Do you understand personal finance? Do you understand how taxes work? Health insurance? Retirement accounts? Do you have a sense of what a typical office environment looks like?” The resounding and universal response was “No, and I’m so embarrassed about it. I feel like everyone else knows what’s going on.”

Today’s college graduates are highly capable—but many of them come into the workforce lacking certain life skills.

Why aren’t students learning about these things in school? 

This generation of college graduates contains some of the most educated, creative thinking, capable young people that we’ve ever seen—and yet they’re struggling with these tasks. I think this knowledge gap is due to a couple of things: One, there’s less of a sense of community responsibility to teach these skills early on. Schools, for the most part, do not teach personal finance or life skills. And I think because schools have not taken up the mantle of helping students prepare for these things, it falls on parents, employers, or just the students themselves to figure everything out.

Meanwhile, employers think that schools are teaching these skills, and by the time they receive these new employees, they expect them to be able to make smart decisions across all of these different verticals, when the reality is they haven’t learned how to do it yet. And the people who are most affected by this issue, these young adults themselves, oftentimes don’t know that they have this problem until it’s too late. They don’t know what they don’t know.

How did you come up with the idea for RealWorldPlaybook?

After doing all of this research, I decided that I wanted to help figure out a way to help young adults land on their feet when they graduate and are starting off in life, and I realized we needed to do three main things to solve this problem: The first was to create an educational platform to introduce young adults, particularly current students, to issues that they will be expected to be knowledgeable about when they graduate, from student loan repayment to personal finance to taxes.

Second, we needed to add tools and trusted resources to that platform that WILL help those young adults navigate these decisions in real time.

The third thing we needed to do was to build a community around this issue, and engage people who want to pay that knowledge forward to the next generation. My co-founders and I have been calling this the “real world ready” movement, and our goal is to make the next generation ready to tackle whatever life has in store. Ultimately, we want to create something that’s useful for 18-year-olds, 22-year-olds, or even 40-year-olds going through every life stage, whether it’s starting out in your career, or even re-entering the workforce after taking a break.

What’s different about the workforce for these students? What are some unique challenges they face?

I think one factor that has a huge impact on how young adults approach their first job, or even their first several jobs, is the student debt crisis. The impact that having debt has on your career decisions, on things like whether you go back to school, or choose a better paying and perhaps more traditional job, versus something a little bit more off the beaten path, is huge.

Another thing is that the types of jobs available are really different than they were in years and decades past. Technical skills are so highly valued—and students who come out of school with that technical training often are so much better positioned to find work than students who have not developed those skills. It can be kind of a scary thing for graduates.

The nature of the workforce is also changing so much. It used to be that you graduated, found a job and worked at a company for years and years. You often had a pension. Everything was really set up for you. Now, not only do a lot of young adults change jobs every few years, but many of them are moving straight into the 1099 economy. There’s much less structure in that type of a work environment—you don’t necessarily have an HR representative walking you through your 401(k) or health insurance options. The onus is much more on the individual to navigate those things.

Finally, there are more first-generation students who are graduating college today than there were before. Although schools have done a really incredible job of democratizing admissions, what’s still missing is that preparation for what happens after graduation, which can be incredibly important for a first-generation graduate. They don’t have the same knowledge network that someone whose parents went to college might have, where they can show them the ropes and tell them what to expect in an office environment.

In the 1099 economy, college students are expected to be even more self-sufficient, and their workplaces often lack dedicated H.R. representatives.

Speaking of offices, how are recent graduates navigating dress codes?

The environment in which we work is changing so much—from dress codes to organizational structures. Many offices are much more casual. It can be difficult in that environment to figure out how to maintain that sense of professionalism.

Earlier this week, our incoming intern emailed to ask how she should be dressed in the office this summer. It was so refreshing to get that email, because it was a recognition that there is a different level of professionalism required in the workplace than on campus. For many college students, leggings equal pants and the transition to an office can be jarring. Our hope with RealWorldPlaybook is that we can point students toward resources like MM.LaFleur that can help them figure out what’s appropriate.

For those of us already in the workforce, what are some ways we can support these recent college graduates?

I’ve been very lucky my entire career to have mentors, particularly women mentors. I feel like a sense of responsibility to pay it forward is something that should be on every experienced worker’s mind when that next group of junior employees shows up. Everyone’s been there. Everyone’s gone through that phase. I think the people who perform best in their jobs, who are the best managers and the best role models for the next generation, are the ones who really take the time to be a mentor or coach to more junior staff members. It’s easy to get a little frustrated with someone who doesn’t really understand what’s going on. But I think the investment of time and energy and support, more than anything else, not only really helps that young person, but also helps the company as a whole. It’s probably one of the best things that experienced employees can do to support their company and help it grow.

On the flip side, there’s so much to learn from 22-year-olds who are coming into the workforce. They have fresh perspectives. They have fresh eyes on what the company or organization is doing. They probably know about new and innovative services and tools and apps that can help the business grow. So I think that investment goes both ways. I feel very fortunate to have had people invest in me when I was starting out, and I think we owe it to the next generation to pay it forward.