My Son Told Me His Degree Wouldn’t Matter. He Was Right.

In this episode of The Next Workforce, Phoenix Jackson, reflect on parenting in a time where the future of work is rapidly shifting.

Drawing from a personal experience with her 19-year-old son, this episode explores what happens when traditional pathways like college no longer feel secure or relevant. 

As AI reshapes industries and young people begin to question long-held assumptions about careers, parents are being asked to guide without clear direction themselves.

Phoenix shares how she chose to support her son through uncertainty by encouraging exploration, travel, and real-world experience instead of forcing a predefined path. 

This episode covers:
 • Parenting through uncertainty in the future of work
 • The shift away from traditional college expectations
 • Why trades and hands-on careers are gaining relevance
 • The importance of exposure and real-life experience
 • How to help young people find purpose, not just employment

The future of work is changing. The way we raise and guide the next generation must change with it.

Watch, reflect, and join the conversation.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:14

Hey there, Phoenix here. Oh my God, I already know it's been probably a couple of months, and I have been off the grid with this podcast. Okay. Um, welcome, welcome to the next workforce. I promise you they're rolling content that's going to be coming out, and I'm shooting a month in advance. So you're gonna get your your information. Please like, share, subscribe if you have not. All right. I'm kind of still new to these YouTube streets, meaning um, I started a YouTube channel a few years ago, but I've never just really been on top of it consistently because I'm for my day job, I've ran a company, I run a full agency. So design, um, web development, business development. We actually do communications and operations support. I mean, it's like a full stack agency. Um, and on top of that, in the midst of that, um, I have been in the background working on a tool to help really solidify and do a better job at fine-tuning the future of work around the construction infrastructure trades for all of us. So I'm super excited. It's, you know, I've been in the midst of this work for a minute, and um we've been two years going, and we just got some recently great news, um, which I'll talk about in the next podcast. But we just got our first sort of large-scale validation from a um Fortune Pie Printer company saying, hey, we see what your guys are doing, and we want to back you. So I'm super excited about that. I'll talk to you guys about that in another in the next episode. But what I wanted to talk to you guys about today is parenting in this age where work is changing. This episode is for the parents. I want to talk to my moms, my dads, who are the guardians, the ones that are in between, because it's real. It's like if you are in your 40s and 50s and you're shifting and you don't know where you want to go and what you want to do, how can you properly guide the people who are coming up behind you, right? So I'm gonna tell you guys a quick story uh about me and my son. So um my son is 19 years old, and he is the light of my life. People who've been following me for a long time are probably very aware of like what I think about him, how much I love him, and just like how he has really grown up with me, and how in some ways he has raised me. But what has happened is I have noticed as his parents the shift that we were taught versus what they're taught in their generation. We had all this push and guidance to pump through the academic system and then to come out with our careers and whatever shape or form. It was in our movies, it was on TV, it was just what it was. You didn't question whether or not you wanted to go to college. It was just expected. Even from parents who weren't even in their kids' lives full-time, expected that you were gonna go to college. At least that's what I saw happening. So imagine me as a parent who like I kind of pushing my son to the hey, I do want you to go to college, even though in the deeper parts of me, I understand that you don't need a degree to really get somewhere in life. And a lot of the more intelligent and multimillionaires and billionaires dropped out of college at some point because they were like, this doesn't fit, and I gotta, you know, I gotta create something, and I don't need a degree to create something that nobody in here with these degrees have created. So there's a fine teetering line that we are faced with as for me that I was faced with as a parent, knowing that, right? Knowing that you have your millionaires on one end who have built things without a college degree. And then we were taught our whole lives, hey, you got to go and get that degree. And what I'm seeing happen is something I didn't think was gonna actually happen in this lifetime. I don't uh believe in the sentiment necessarily that everybody's gonna be entrepreneurs in the future, which is something that was said recently in a podcast or recently on a panel concerning the future of work. I think the future of work is gonna revolve around tactile creation and it's gonna revolve around leisure and humans learning to be stiller. Another conversation. But with that, I've seen shifts and change, first with the collegiate error. There's an 8% decrease in people going into college from year to year. And I'm seeing this, I'm seeing this in my community of there's there's black, white, everything in my community, Asian, Southeast Asian. There's a decrease that is happening. One, people everyone can't afford to pay to go to school. Two, people feel like they got to give all this money, go into debt when they really don't know what they want to do. And three, people are like, hey, I know folks who got certain degrees who don't have careers, who are getting laid off, specifically in tech and white-collar roles, right? So imagine me as a parent, my son comes to me, he's halfway through his first semester in college, and he says to me, He's a computer science major, mind you, I'm not gonna have a career when I graduate. The AI is able to code effortlessly the functions that they're trying to teach us. So they're trying to teach us something that in a year, even, it's not gonna be relevant because we can plug it in and have a system do it for us. He said, I'm absolutely absolutely not gonna have a job. I need to switch my major. And six months later, mind you, this was his, he was actually in, yeah, halfway through his first semester school. Six months later, I see a New York Times article where a Southeast Asian young woman who was going to a top university in the States said, Hey, I'm working at Chipotle. I thought I was gonna get out, I thought I was gonna make$150,000 a year, and I'm not. And I don't know where to go, I don't know what to do, but they're not hiring uh for computer scientists, they're not hiring coders in a way that I thought that they would. So my son was absolutely correct in what he saw. So what has happened is I've had to look around him, I've had to allow him to take a break. I'm allowing him to take a gap year so that he can travel, so that he can experience places in the world, so he can see what breaks his heart, so he can see what he wants to fix, so then he will be more informed on what he's gonna do next in his own lifetime. I want to give him the opportunity that I didn't give myself, right? Or that my parents didn't give me. So him going to another country where he's gonna tutor underneath my friend, who's one of the top chefs in the country, for him going to Europe to go hang out with one of his best friends who was his college roommate last year, who one of his parents is runs a nonprofit in Europe, the other parent is a medical doctor there as well. And then I'm gonna take him to South Africa in Zimbabwe, where we will spend time with one of my clients and spend time in some of the schools there so he can see what it looks like to be an educator in an impoverished area. Let's explore what some of these other children are going through and experiencing. And like, let's really see who you want to become and what you want to do in the world. There are some people who would be magnificent humanitarians and who will create magnificent and really cool, like multi-million dollar social entrepreneurial-based businesses if they only had a chance to be out in the world to see what was out there, versus being shuttled off saying, Hey, I gotta go to college, I gotta do this right now. And I'm hoping that with that, he'll be able to come home, reset, and say, okay, this is what I want to do, right? And I don't and I don't I don't want to push him in between, like, oh, you got to get a degree or you gotta do this and that. I'm also letting him explore the trades, right? Like I have a whole business that's focused on getting us into the trades, getting men, women, people who need a second chance in society, as well as people who want to change careers and people who are already in construction and infrastructure in green tech. My goal is to make sure that they are very well connected with our communications tool around the country so that they can find those next jobs. So, of course, when my son's like, yeah, I want to explore being an electrician or being an electrical engineer or mechanical engineer. I mean, he built his computer from scratch, you know, like this dude knows what he's doing. And if he says, Yes, I want to do that, hey, cool, you decide you don't want to go to college and you want to go into the trades, you know what? We we have all the tools for you to do that. So, yeah, let's explore that. And it's interesting because as soon as we start exploring his future in work, exploring what he wants to do, I'm getting all this like information about this apprenticeship program, about this. The guy who came in our house and set up our new internet service was like, oh yeah, my son, his son, who's 19, works out of you know, the state and is always always gone, and he works to like flush out pipings. And I think he's like a pipe fitter and welder, and he goes from data center to data center, flushing out systems to make sure that they're actually more efficient for cooling and heating and things like that, which is a good thing. And he was like, Yeah, my son's getting paid like$3,100 a week. He said, and when my son's home, he loves being home, but then he misses that chat, you know. Um, and it's just it and the father was talking to me and he said it just for him was like, Yeah, he put most, he put his first three children through college, and then his fourth child was like, I don't want to go to college and did something different. And he said the fourth child is actually has more job security than two of the other children. One's a doctor, so they have their job security, but the child, the 19-year-old, has more job security than two of his siblings who are like five and then 10 years older than him. And I I thought that that was like very telling, right? And I've always been about the trades, I've always been about like, hey, make money where you can, and a working man is a good man, okay? A man working with his hands is a is a good man, all right? Um, but it also takes a level of intellect to even be in those careers, you know. So as a parent today, I would 100% recommend that you take the time to sit down with your child, age 15 plus. I say 15 because 15 is really the age where children start to really think about work and money in a different way, right? So sit them down and ask them like, what do they see themselves doing? Look into your resources and look into your network. Where can you send your child for even a week where they can be under someone's internship and tutelage? That they can actually follow this person around in their career, go to the office with this person, go to the court or fill with this person, whatever this person does for a living, what can you expose them to so that they can get some quick hands-on experience or even just a peek into another world in real time? Not on the internet, not on their phone, but actually in real time, where they can figure out and think about who they want to be and what they want to be in the world, right? With the world changing so much and foundations shaking, we can make sure that their foundation is not something that feels so unstable, right? We can make sure that we can sit down with them and actually hear them out on what would work for them, right? And when my son came to me and said, Hey, I I I don't know. Um, I've wanted this thing in computer sciences for so long and in aerospace engineering, but I just don't know if that's a fit for various reasons. I don't know if that if I could keep up with the mathematics. You got to be honest about these things. I don't know if I can um, I know that AI is gonna be able to do everything that they're teaching us already. So what do I do? And also I want to do something with my hands. I don't want to be in front of a computer every single day, right? It took him to have his own self-awareness and his experience in a classroom to know that. So as a parent now, what I'm doing is saying, all right, I'm gonna put you in some different scenarios, and then from there we'll figure it out. But first, you need to have some experiences. So um I think it's a nice route. I think it's a way to go, even for yourself. Let's say you don't have children and you are parenting yourself as we all are, all right, in our generation as millennials. Where can you shadow? Who can you follow in real life? In real life, uh, not online, because a lot of stuff online doesn't show the nitty-gritty, the stuff that's not shiny, right? It doesn't show you everything, it just shows you what you want they want you to see. Okay, it shows you what they want you to see. But what can you do as a parent of yourself, even to say, let me go back to the beginning and think about the impact I want to make, what actually makes me happy? Because some people like doing things with their hands, some people like talking for a living, some people like motivating for a living, some people like moving their bodies for a living. You don't have to do what you've always done. You have one life and you can't live it for everybody else. You have to live it for yourself and the people that you birthed. To me, those are the only people that you really have like obligation to, unless you're married and you've chosen to do life with someone, then that's your own business, right? But first and foremost, yourself and the people that you bore into the world are your responsibility. Bore into the world or for a man, seated into the world, right? So try this. Let me know how this goes for you and your child. Let me know how the conversation goes if you want to in the chat. Let's talk about it. Um, I'm very much interested in seeing how we navigate as parents for our children who are also going through their own identity struggles during this time. All right.

unknown 15:11

Right.

SPEAKER_00 15:12

Thank you so much for uh listening in today, and I hope it was helpful. Um, and I look forward to sharing more things with you all, and I look forward to the next episode. So um thank you again for watching, and this is the next workhorse with Phoenix. Bye.