These Are The Biggest Skills That New
Graduates Lack
Plenty of newly
minted members of the workforce think they're well prepared for success. Hiring
managers aren't convinced.
Managers and employees don’t always see eye
to eye. Fast Company uncovered a wide gap in the way each
group thinks
about business culture and their radically different
ideas about work-life balance.
But there’s another disconnect brewing, and
this one is between managers and the newest members of the workforce: college
graduates. A new report from
PayScale, a provider of on-demand compensation data and software, in
partnership with Future Workplace, an executive development firm, reveals that
while 87% of recent graduates feel well prepared to hit the ground running
after earning their diplomas, only half of hiring managers agree with them.
This isn’t totally surprising, as Fast
Company reported that the class of 2016 is overwhelmingly optimistic
about their prospects for getting a job within their field of study.
Unfortunately, recent studies reveal that underemployment
was the reality for more than half (51%) of those who
graduated in the past two years.
The report, titled "Leveling Up: How to
Win In the Skills Economy," takes a deep dive into the so-called skills
gap and illuminates the skills managers are looking for that many college
graduates are either deficient in or don’t have at all. The report also reveals
which skills bring in the biggest paychecks and get the employee a promotion.
It also found which are the best ones to leave off a resume.
Some of the skills hiring managers find
lacking or absent are unexpected. Critical thinking, problem solving, attention
to detail, and writing proficiency top the list of skills managers find missing
from job seekers’ personal tool kits. On the flip side, managers didn’t find
graduates wanting for know-how in search engine optimization marketing, foreign
languages, and coding.
Overall, hiring managers found soft skills
such as communication, leadership, ownership, and teamwork were missing in this
new crop of workers.
"Graduates need strong communication and
problem-solving skills if they want to interview well and succeed in the
workplace, because effective writing, speaking, and critical thinking enables
you to accomplish business goals and get ahead," Dan Schawbel, research
director at Future Workplace, said in a statement. "No working day will be
complete without writing an email or tackling a new challenge, so the sooner
you develop these skills, the more employable you will become," Schawbel
adds.
It’s important to note here that age matters
in this report. Fifty-five percent of managers who are millennials themselves
believed graduates are prepared to enter the workforce versus 47% of gen Xers
and 48% of boomers.
Katie Bardaro, vice president of Data
Analytics at PayScale, tells Fast Company this may be due to
the fact that managers from older generations are likely more versed in these
skills and thus have higher expectations for them then managers from younger
generations.
Bardaro notes that since this is the first
time the study was run, there isn’t any comparison data to previous
generations of college graduates. "We can say that the increase in
dependence on technology and the recent Great Recession has widened the skills
gap," she says. These two factors have worked together to make employers
pickier and make it harder for students and their schools to have the ability
to learn and teach new technologies. "It takes time to build a curriculum
and obtain an expert who can teach and disseminate that information to
students, and the technologies are just changing too rapidly," Bardaro
says.
Bardaro doesn’t think the focus on STEM
careers could actually be preventing job seekers from taking the type of
coursework that would boost their writing and public speaking skills. Instead,
she points to changing technology and its effect on communication.
"Younger people defer to a quick text or Snapchat rather than a phone
conversation or letter," she notes.
She also points out that many STEM programs
still require a general English course and schoolwork often requires presentations,
but there is potentially less education around these skills then there has been
in the past.
The skills that are getting workers the
biggest pay bumps are emerging in the STEM field. Overall, the programming
language Scala is the skill that will get you the biggest pay boost (a 22.2%
increase in earnings), followed by Cisco UCCE/IPCC (enterprise communications
software) at 21.1%, and Go programming language at 20%. This makes sense, as
technology jobs are in the greatest demand and command
some of the highest salaries across
industries.
But the most common skills held by workers at
the executive level are also hard skills such as business and IT management. At
the director level, donor relations is most common, but software development
and senior financial management come in second and third.
As for what is best left off the resume, the
report reveals that "foundational skills" should get the heave-ho.
Those are the ones most frequently cited as skills by employees within each
industry represented. For example, a job seeker looking for employment in tech
shouldn’t list their experience in data entry, Wordpress, or even system
repair. The reason, the report notes, is that placing these among the top
skills on a resume could translate to placement in a much lower-level job,
earning significantly less than a peer with more high-level skills.
LYDIA DISHMAN
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