Here’s some advice your commencement speaker didn’t get the chance to share

To the graduating seniors of the class of 2020 (high school or college):

As we prepared these virtual remarks for your virtual commencement ceremonies, we spent a lot of time thinking of positive notes we could sound, upbeat things we could say to provide some positive reinforcement and encouragement, some scattered rays of verbal sunrise to lighten the mood in an otherwise relentlessly gloomy climate.

We came up with two.

1. You have been spared the tedium of sitting in a stuffy gymnasium or auditorium listening to some politician drone out clichés about your future. You may harbor some resentment that the coronavirus has deprived you of opportunities to celebrate the completion of this phase of your educational career, and that you’re missing out on events the memories of which will stay with you for a lifetime. Trust us – a commencement speech won’t be one of them. Very few graduates even remember who their commencement-ceremony speaker was, much less what he or she said. No prom, senior trip or picnic? Yeah, that’s a bummer. No commencement speech? You ain’t missing nothing.

2. In games of one-upmanship over who had the hardest or weirdest educational experiences, it’s going to be darn tough to top the stories you’ll be able to tell.

If that seems meager gruel from which to draw sustenance for your morale, welcome to the times we live in and into which we’re graduating.

But then, at least some of you likely suspected you weren’t being done many favors by the economy and the job market even before the COVID-19 show rolled into town. Never mind what you learned in the classroom, just what you’ve heard from your parents and other adults and what you’ve absorbed through pop culture and social media have clued you in as to what you’re in for. The Great Recession may have been on the periphery of your current-events consciousness when it started, but it hasn’t been so long ago that the aftershocks escaped your notice.

And if they did, your elders will helpfully remind you, just as many of us heard plenty about the Great Depression and the war years, even though those calamities occurred long before we were born. Your kids, once you have them, will no doubt get an earful from you about what it was like to live, go to school or find and keep a job in the era of COVID-19. Thus is the wisdom of the ages passed on from generation to generation.

The disruption to business, including entire industries and professions, you’re hearing so much about is nothing new. Retailing, for example, has been in a near-permanent state of disruption, with constant upheaval triggered by such societal and technological innovations as the mail-order catalog, the rise of department stores and discounters, the interstate highway system and the migration to the suburbs, and online shopping.

Long-standing notions about careers and working life generally – like spending decades with one employer or in one career – have been under assault for years. And we’ve been hearing for years how computers, automation, robots and artificial intelligence were going to wipe out most jobs.

The coronavirus pandemic accelerated and amplified those trends, to the point of pushing some businesses already in a weakened state over the cliff and many others closer to the edge. It has also introduced some new uncertainties and reinvigorated ideas once thought unlikely to evolve to mainstream status in our lifetimes.

Office work that’s done almost entirely from a home office, with no interaction with co-workers other than via group video call? That’s the way work has been getting done in this country the last three months, and it may well become the way many businesses operate in the future. Those of you who have more schooling ahead, be it in grad school, four-year college or a community or technical-college training program, may never see the inside of a lecture hall.

Given that those who have been out in the workplace and the economy a while are as discombobulated about where we’re headed as those now entering, members of the class of 2020 can be forgiven the sentiment that any advice we have to offer is mere guesswork. True enough, but we’ll still make a few recommendations for strategies that will help you work your way out of this mess:

■ Keep studying. The opportunities for learning new skills and subjects are so much greater today. It’s not just do-it-yourself haircutting that people are learning during the lockdown from YouTube videos. Useful instruction can be had for the price of an internet connection and in easily digestible chunks, on your timetable and terms.

■ Here’s a dirty little secret about degrees from high-tuition elite-level establishments. People spend those huge sums to get the brand-name on the diploma and the recognition and contacts that come with it. You can replicate that by paying close attention to your instructors, your classmates and others already in your field of interest you come in contact with, and building your own professional network to assist and boost one another. Effective networking doesn’t mean seeing how many people you can annoy with requests to connect with them via LinkedIn (unless you want to find out firsthand how many of those requests that come with no explanation are ignored).

■ If disruption destroyed notions about long-term job stability and security, it also made the idea of entrepreneurship more acceptable and accessible. Join a big company if that’s the best opportunity at the moment, learn all you can on its dime, but keep the idea of venturing out on your own close by, tinkering with it and refining it until it’s ready, you’re ready, or necessity forces you to make it real.

■ In pursuit of the first three strategies, make use of all the wonderful tools and gadgets now at your disposal, and those still to come. If there’s one thing we oldsters envy you young’uns (aside from your youth), it’s personal computers and mobile phones and the internet and email, all of which would have made life and work a lot easier when we were starting out.

There, four bits of useful information and you didn’t have to spend two hours sweltering in some silly gown to receive. To the class of 2020, you’re welcome, congratulations, good luck and, um, sorry.

This story was originally published June 13, 2020 at 11:00 AM.