It’s time for a wake-up call. As much as we want to blame it on other people and outside circumstances, it’s time we took some responsibility for the recent graduate unemployment rate. So many of our peers either graduate to unemployment or to a job they are way over-qualified for. Now, I realize there are indeed external factors at play, but we need to realize how our own behavior is affecting post-grad job woes.
Time magazine recently reported on several surveys of employers that aimed to answer the question, “Why aren’t you hiring young post-grads?”
A recent survey by the Workforce Solutions Group at St. Louis Community College asked employers what young post-grads were missing. The result? Sixty percent said applicants lacked communications and interpersonal skills. Another survey by another staffing company reported that 44 percent of respondents said applicants were lacking soft skills, such as critical thinking, creativity, collaboration and communication.
As a result, jobs are going unfilled, according to Manpower Group’s annual global Talent Shortage Survey. One in five employers reported not being able to fill positions because they couldn’t find a suitable employee with the soft skills needed to excel, innovate and work on a team.
The jobs are out there, we just can’t seem to get to them. That’s a problem. So where does the issue stem and how can we fix it?
An important part of developing interpersonal communication skills, as well as creative and innovation-related skills, is work experience, especially internships. The same Time article I cited earlier included a Harris Interactive survey of college students and hiring managers. According to the result, 80 percent of employers said they wanted graduates to have completed at least one formal internship, but only 8 percent of students said they spent a lot of time interning in a field related to their major.
Looking around, the results make sense. There are a lot of students at Harding who take internships and job opportunities very seriously. But for every one of those students, there is one who is just trying to scrape by. They get good grades and say they are mindful of their future, yet they try to get away with worthless internships (or no internship at all). You need the real-world training, the interaction, mentorships and opportunity to learn to work on a team and under a superior.
I am bothered by the sheer apathy of this sort of mindset, but I also worry about the impact on creativity and innovation. Creativity isn’t about the knowledge you can retain, or the technical skills you can list on your resume or even the work you do through a job or internship. The jobs and internships are a vehicle through which you learn the things that are truly important in the workplace, such as interpersonal communication and collaboration.
To me, it will always mean more to be curious and wide-eyed and eager to learn and work than to be skilled in any other technical way.
I urge you to step back and really look at what you’re doing with your education. It may be time to wake up and make a change.
