Last week I volunteered at my son’s school to hold mock interviews for high school sophomores (my son is a 6th grader, so I don’t have to worry about this for him quite yet). But it’s a STEM school – with a focus on science, technology, engineering, and math. And the kids who go there are for the most part highly focused on some aspect of the acronym. Which means I interviewed kids who wanted to focus on digital music, aviation, mechanical engineering, animal behavioral research, aerospace engineering, to name a few, and yes I met some software developers in training, too.

I was not necessarily struck by their focus – there were plenty of kids who had no clue what they wanted to do in life, much as I had no clue what I wanted to do as a 10th grader. What struck me was how little they understood technology as a stand-alone entity. Google was the same to them as Chrome, for example. They did understand the difference between hardware and software, but they did not understand the difference between Python, Ruby or Java vs. Photoshop or Google Sketchup. All of these technologies were the same to them – tools of creation.

It made the interview a little strange on my part. We didn’t speak the same language about technology. It showed in every aspect of how they presented themselves. For example, they understood the concept of keywords quite well. But when it came to the application of keywords to their own experience, they came up short.

I interviewed one girl who is clearly destined to be a software developer. Her technology teachers have been giving her special projects to keep her from being bored, and she has an internship doing QA for an IT department at a security firm. She knows Python, Ruby, Java, HTML, and some robotics programming language that I’m unfamiliar with. Did any of that make it on her resume? No. She has computer skills. Which, in my day, meant I knew how to use Word.

And it’s not like they weren’t shown what to do. I participated in that phase of this mock interview thing, where I along with other professionals talked about what to put on a resume, and how to manage LinkedIn, etc. etc. I don’t think the gap was between instructions and understanding – I really think the gap was in understanding which technology terms are going to be important. It’s all just computers to these kids – even the ones with deep understanding of the technology tools they use.

In retail, we talk all the time about how to engage these kinds of kids as store employees. And plenty of them were interested in the whole job process not for college or beyond, but for this summer’s job. So I have two thoughts related to this. One, if you ask them “what applications do you know? “ and they give you a blank stare, don’t assume it’s because they don’t know any applications. They just don’t see a difference between an application, a development language, or an internet site. The language we use to describe technology is somehow completely lost on them. They are truly digital native.

Two, as has been true for a long time, you have some extraordinary talent walking through your store doors this summer. Kids who are on the cusp of changing the world. Retailers get first shot at this talent. Will you let it slip through your fingers yet again?