Long time friend and pollster, writer and historian, John Zogby told a Utica College, NY audience recently that the future for young adults and the job market will definitely change.

While parents and tight knit families may be saddened by the thought, it’s possible that their children and grandchildren may be working in a foreign country by the time they reach 30. And those in their 20s can expect to have to change jobs four times in the decade. 

Since I changed jobs seven times in my 30s and 40s and made two  career changes to boot in the 1960s and 1970s, I think John may be conservative but I trust his expertise.

On his way to becoming one of the country’s foremost pollsters, he made his own changes, too. He used his bachelor’s in history at Le Moyne College and master’s at Syracuse to become a school teacher.  Within a few years, John’s interest in politics (it’s difficult to teach political science without thinking you could offer the public something better, I think) led him to run for mayor of his hometown Utica, NY.  He lost but undoubtedly it was for the best; he embarked upon a new career as a pollster from his home.  While campaigning he had used enthusiastic students from his classes to serve as his field workers and he continued to recruit students and young adults who were activated by John’s approach to solving the country’s woes. 

His personal success and the success of his enterprise is one of the great ethnic and local achievements in Central New York, I think.  A proud Lebanese-American from a family that instilled a strong work ethic, I was equally proud to be the presenter of John for an honorary award in the Oneida County (NY) Historical Society.  To me, John is one of the important stories in New York which  need to be told not merely to promote his business but to demonstrate to millions of young people of all races and nationalities that America really is the land of opportunity.  I think that’s crucial today.

Today John heads Zogby International which has worked on the global scale for years unlike others in the field.  Not long ago, John announced that he was involved with a corporate change to involve a major Brazilian company.  While company headquarters will remain in Central New York, Zogby International will actually live its title in real life. 

The company’s president is a doer and his efforts to fundraise, sample opinion and write are the indelible stamp of approval from a national audience that has grown up with his name and not George Gallup.

Author of books and periodicals like  The Way We’ll Be, the Zogby Report and Transformation of the American Dream (Random House)  he has continued to define how Americans think, act, play, vote, go to church, earn and spend their money and other subjects for a host of small, medium sized businesses and large corporations.  He does business in 70 countries.

While his polling technique was criticized in the early days, his use of well trained live telephone operators was his bread and butter.  Today? He has developed an interactive polling methodology that has been become “extraordinarily accurate.”  He believes, and many agree with him, the future of polling will be online. 

John is a hands-on executive, who gets involved at all levels.  In the 2008 election season, he worked with Reuters, the world’s leading news service and C-SPAN.  Since 1996, he has polled for NBC News, MSNBC, CNBC, the New York Post, Fox News, Knight-Ridder, Gannett News Service, Houston Chronicle, Miami Herald, Atlanta Journal- Constitution, the Albany Times-Union, the Buffalo News, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle and nearly every daily newspaper in New York state as well television station.

He is a founding contributor of the Huffington Post web site, writes a weekly column for Forbes.com and a monthly for Politics magazine and he’s done opinion pieces for the Christian Science Monitor, Financial Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Newsday, the Wall Street Journal and the Boston Globe. In the field of public response and sifting and sorting data to find public trends and moods as well as attitudes, John has been a pioneer.

What are your thoughts?  Write me at jbehrens@roadrunner.com.