From the course: Career Advice from Some of the Biggest Names in Business

Mary Barra finding your passion and working hard

From the course: Career Advice from Some of the Biggest Names in Business

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Mary Barra finding your passion and working hard

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(chill music) - I assume that you have a lot of people who come to you and ask for career advice. I know you talk to students a lot of the time. What do you recommend to someone who says, I want to be Mary. This is my career goal. (laughing) - [Daniel] I'm 14 right now, I need to be the CEO of GM, I need to follow, stand in Mary's shoes at some point. - Well if you really want to aspire to be the CEO of General Motors, first of all, you're 14. You need to pursue math and science. So you need to follow a STEM profession. Just because there's so much technology in the vehicle. Whatever you do with it, you've got to understand it, I think, as a core. But what I tell people when they say give me career advice. I would say find what you're passionate about. And work really hard. My parents were both born and raised in the depression, so I grew up with a really strong work ethic. And there's no substitution for hard work. So if you're passion is General Motors and the auto industry, go for it. - And when you went to college, it was essentially a GM run trade school. Do you think there is room for that today? Do you think companies should have more programs, internship programs, trade school-like programs, places where people get trained to enter the workforce rather than having kind of a broad, liberal education? - I think a co-op program or an intern program, which is what General Motor, at the time, it was General Motors Institute, now Kettering University, still exists. Many companies send people there. But one of the benefits of co-oping is you go through, at Kettering it happens to be, go through three months of school, and then you're three months on the job. So you really get to see what it's really going to be like much more quickly as opposed to getting a degree in four years and then saying, oh, wait, this isn't exactly what I thought. So I think it's huge. Again, whether it's students coming from Kettering University or any number of schools, we do broad internship programs and co-op programs with a number of universities. And we find it's a good match. Because they come and they understand the work and they say, yeah, that's what I want to do. And at 22 they're graduating from college and they're well on their way. So I think the opportunity, intern or co-op, is a great opportunity.

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