Even the most pretigious universities need to get clear jobs done for their aspiring students
Choosing Colleges with JTBD | New Markets Advisors
5/29/2020
Applying Jobs to Be Done to College Selection
Fortunately, Forbes contributor Michael Horn and Bob Moesta published a book called Choosing College last year which delves into these issues. Based on over 100 interviews with students who had recently selected a wide range of colleges, they discerned five overarching jobs to be done which guided their choices:
Get into my best school
Do what’s expected of me
Get away
Step it up
Extend myself
The nature of their work covered students from traditional high schoolers seeking a four-year residential experience to adult learners seeking a career change. So, some of these five jobs may not be that pertinent for your family. What you can do – as Horn and Moesta suggest in their book – is to try to discern your own children’s priorities.
Critically, you must avoid a tempting question: What kind of college do you want to go to? It jumps straight to the solution, and – after 15 years of applying Jobs to be Done methodologies – I can assure you that you will miss a huge potential trove of findings by doing so. It would be as if I had asked my son after he’d expressed his desire to see the Patriots game, “Easy opponent or hard?” Wrong tack.
The Most Common Mistake Parents Make When Asking About College
Equally, don’t go to the other extreme and put the whole methodology into one uber-question: What do you want to get done by going to college? That is what we call a Martian Market Researcher question. It’s good to be removed from the hullaballoo of our usual perceptions and lenses, but this question isn’t framed in human language. People don’t think this way.
Instead, go at this obliquely. When BMW first studied the potential market for relaunching the Mini brand in the 1990s, they didn’t even reveal they were researching cars; instead, they inquired about peoples’ overall priorities, and they discovered that the need for uniqueness and self-expression was a frustrated one which they could anchor their car’s identity around. Use a similar tack with your child, stepping into the subject of college choices bit by bit.
How to Use Indirect Questions to Surface Real Priorities
Here are some suggested lines of questioning, in sequence as you gradually address the topic more directly:
Gee, X years from now it’ll probably be about the time of your college graduation. How do you think that’s going to feel?
What do you think might be different about you at the end of college than at the start?
Do you think that those differences might be affected by the type of college you attend?
What about in your first year there – how will the type of college affect how you feel about what you’ve changed by going to it?
Are there some of those changes that you fear? How would the type of college affect those anxieties?
So, what do you think different types of colleges would help you achieve? What excites you and worries you about those different college types
What else are you looking for in a college?
Given all that, let’s talk again about what might be different about you at the end of college than at the start? Have your feelings about that changed now that we’ve talked these things through?
What does this mean for the types of colleges that might be best for you?
Of course, this list isn’t exhaustive. If the conversation is going well, you’ll cover a lot of topics you hadn’t anticipated. That’s good – this conversation is meant to be exploratory.
I know, I know. Teenagers might just want to grunt a response. Market researchers have the privilege of paying people for their time, so they’re required to answer. For family, you have to find the right moment to have these conversations and give the kid plenty of time to answer discursively. That’s fine; the human mind seldom works in strictly linear ways, particularly when the subject is so emotionally fraught.
I can remember being asked all too many times, “What kind of college do you want to go to?” How I hated that question! Don’t fall into the same trap. By using Jobs to be Done techniques, you can get a truer, more detailed, and more useful set of responses. Just as in business, in personal life the secret to getting great answers lies in asking great questions.
About The Author
Steve pioneered JTBD alongside Clayton Christensen and has led innovation work worldwide. He authored Jobs to Be Done: A Roadmap for Customer-Centered Innovation and four other books, and his thinking appears regularly in publications such as Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and The Financial Times.
