Well, technically, the article's title is:

Employers: Entry-Level Applicants are Just About Useless.

I ran out of room in the subject line, so I cut out the less emotionally charged words.

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- At perhaps a bad time in U.S. employment, it seems there's a "perception gap" between what workers think they're worth on the job and how employers see them.

Analysis by Bryant & Stratton College with help from Wakefield Research from a survey among U.S. adults age 18 to 34 found that 80% of workers believe they are "job ready and possess all the skills, experience and education needed to advance in their desired career path or obtain their next job."
Yet 40% of U.S. employers say most entry-level job candidates lack even the basic skills needed to fill job openings.

Then there's the issue of so-called "soft" job skills such as critical thinking and sophisticated problem-solving. Only 16% of the 18- to 34-year-olds surveyed see such skills as necessary for career advancement.

But that's a huge swing-and-miss by employees, the college says. In fact, 93% of U.S. employers say soft skills are "weighed more heavily" when vetting job candidates -- much more so than a candidate's college academic credentials.

"Being employable today is all about knowing how to communicate to employers that you have intelligence quotient as well as educational quotient," says Scott Traylor, associate campus director for online education at the online college."

http://www.thestreet.com/story/1195...e-just-about-useless.html?cm_ven=RSSFeed

It's ironic that while employers put such strong emphasis on "Soft Skills" the majority of them insist that the application process begin with an online application where very little if any of those soft skills can be recognized, rather, the application is just a summary of raw data.

When I was an employer (Long time ago), the application process was for skill sets, the interview was for how well you would fit with the group, temperament, and communication skills. The questions I asked where not nearly as important as the way in which you answered them, the way you present yourself, and the overall way you may fit within the environment you would be placed into.

I think that there is plenty of blame on both sides of the hiring equation, actually-- college students (and many recent grads, for that matter) haven't really been taught to value authentic critical thinking, communication, or problem-solving.

They also resist learning those things, come to think of it. Apparently, such skills are for underlings. (In my experience as a prof, I mean.)

On the other hand, potential employers (rightly!!) see those domains as the best predictors of overall job performance and value to an organization and its mission.

But they sure don't capture that level of concern/awareness by gatekeeping via quantitative measures such as specific certifications and degree titles.

If children are involved in the Yale achievement arms race, when are they supposed to learn soft skills?

Well, they don't.

Of course they DO learn that anyone that needs to learn those trivial things is irrelevant. Such people and their concerns are largely beneath them anyway. So that part is fine. Until it isn't, of course.

This reinforces what Selingo says in College (Un)bound - too many kids are entering college and the work force without preparation or necessary skills. Over 70% of students attend college now for the social aspects and extracurriculars rather than for the intellectual rigor or actual coursework. I would classify social aspects under 'soft' skills, though that doesn't necessarily carry over into 'job ready' skills.

On the other hand, I'm sure employers are all too willing to take college students as interns and free labor. You don't hear about how employers are relying heavily on them too much.

I agree with you HowlerKarma, but I don't think it's necessarily an issue of not being taught or appreciating critical thinking or problem solving. To me, it's a much, much larger problem of autonomy, motivation, and learning that stems from how public/private schools are structured and operate. I think kids, in general, often see little to no relevancy or point between the curriculum and their future lives. They're so disengaged from learning and having control over their lives that they often don't know how to make a decision or self-direct/ self-motivate themselves.

I agree. Those "job ready" skills include showing up on time and getting stuff done on time. Too many young people don't learn these skills these days. Those jobs at burger joints and the like have a real way of teaching those skills while still not asking a whole lot of the employee otherwise.



I think the home environment is also very, very important in this regard.

That which gets measured (and rewarded) gets done. If employers want soft skills, they need to screen for them and reward them at all levels of employment. The problem is it takes more than the modicum of resources that most firms choose to allocate to HR decisions.

We can easily trace this back to universities and prior schools not valuing these skills at least in part because they aren't easily measurable for testing purposes. Universities are becoming undergraduate (and graduate) degree sausage factories. Everyone and his dog is expected to have a master's at a minimum, no matter how inane the field or unqualified the candidate. I can appreciate why companies like Google entertain multi-step hiring processes. It's a caveat emptor world.

That quickly morphed into vitriol. Let me just wipe the sneer off my face.

I'd argue that most university faculty DO regard them very highly and do their best to foster/encourage students in that direction...

but...

K-12 education has become so bad this way that by the time higher ed sees these young people, most of them are hopelessly behind on the curve.

They expect to be given many chances to get it right, expect that A is for effort, expect that everyone will treat them with respect (regardless of their behavior), and expect that THEIR time is more valuable than anyone else's.

Honestly, secondary schools and their parents tend to coddle them too much for far too long.

My DH and I both believe that executive functions probably do NOT develop in the absence of load/demand. My hypothesis is that the reason why that maturation curve doesn't reach a peak functional level until the early-to-mid 20's in most modern humans is that we don't place adult DEMANDS on people until then. We have found the trend toward "It's okay, try again... it's okay, try again... here, let me fix that for you... oh, it's all right, always a second chance" to be kind of toxic, because it does rob adolescents of the drive to seek excellence. There are no consequences for not being responsible and diligent anymore-- and yes, I think that many times, parents are also part of that problem, but schools aren't doing their students very many favors either when they cave to pressure to inflate grades using whatever means necessary.

Someone who needs to take the (same) final exam four times hasn't earned an "A." Not IMO. I'm perhaps a bit more hard-nosed than most people about that kind of thing, but my feeling is that real life doesn't give a lot of second, third, and fourth chances at much of anything. High school kids should become acclimated to that.

Val and Aquinas, I totally agree with you. I read Kio Stark's book, Don't Go Back to School, and realized that darn I didn't need those master's degrees in the end to learn something, never mind the PhD work. Oh well.

Between the schools, families (as Val pointed out), overemphasis on standardization and testing (as Aquinas pointed out), etc. we've got a lot of tinderbox societal issues. So there's plenty of places for improvement. I do somewhat agree that even in an ideal school situation, it's debatable whether you will actually find out the way you learn or why you need certain knowledge/training/material.

Most schools, and I'll include colleges here, operate on a linear path with linear textbooks and linear tests. Well, that's fine and dandy but I'd say flipping burgers probably gives you more an inkling and a concept on how things operate in a chaotic, unpredictable manner despite the standardization within the fast food industry. And let's face it, not everything in life goes so linearly and is predictable with empirical standards and measurements.

No, HK, you're not being hard-nosed. I nodded my way through your post. If we expect little of students and employees throughout their development and reward dependence, an incomplete skillset, and immaturity then it's unsurprising that that's what we'll get. Life doesn't come with a safety net.

"Until it isn't" certainly happens when you need the $2,000,000 book of business to remain employed with your firm.

Employers ask for this problem when they insist on a specific list of skills, task experience, and certifications/degrees instead of asking for soft skills. Smart people who do not have the requisite skill set are rejected in favor of the mediocre mind with the skill set, even though the smart person could probably master it all in a short time and thenceforth be much more valuable than the mediocre person. That's what they get too by having an HR person, rather than an expert in the field, do the initial cull. I have no sympathy for employers who can't find good employees. They don't try very hard.

Secondly, the increasing emphasis on education as a means of preparing for a job rather than as, well, education is a big part of what is causing the problem of new graduates unprepared for a workforce that demands creativity and thinking on the fly.

Hmm.

I've been thinking about the job situation in the US (possibly elsewhere, but I don't know enough about other economies to say). for a while. I think that a huge part of the problem is that manufacturing jobs and other skilled labor jobs have been shipped overseas. So people who would otherwise have taken union-type jobs now have no other choice but to seek white collar jobs. This fact is probably driving the everyone-must-go-to-college mindset. People have no choice: there are fewer jobs requiring skilled labor, ergo many people must move into white collar jobs or work in relatively unskilled and poorly-paid service jobs.

So it's really no surprise that employers have trouble finding "good" employees. There probably aren't enough intelligent people to fill them all and the employers may be doing the best they can to find people who can do the work.

I'm not saying that the other factors we've discussed here aren't also problems. I'm just saying that what I've described is one more (big) problem.

If you can train less intelligent people properly, then they can generally do the work in question.

I wouldn't have believed this until I started dealing with the so-called educably mentally retarded.

Pretty solid work histories in lots of cases.

But employers have pretty much shrugged off the idea that workers should be trained. They tend to look for the fully-qualified individual, which means experienced in their particular line of business, with their particular set of tools. Then they wonder why they get so few applicants.

I think the soft skills are a problem of parenting. Soft skills are not part of IQ. A project manager on a construction site needs great soft skills, anyone running their own business.

Kids developed soft skills when they were given money and told to go to the store to buy some bread and milk. And they were 6 years old. They navigated their way, knew how to cross streets figure out how much money was left over for penny candy.

I learned how to read a map when I started school. I learned I could get anywhere from anywhere, I just had to figure it out. Now we have GPS. I don't have to look up a word in the dictionary or research in the library. I have the Internet.

In the park last week DD was climbing a tree and having a whining tantrum because she was having trouble. I said you have to figure it out. Place your foot where you have friction and some support, place your hands where you can pull yourself up. Try this place, if it doesn't work, but you have to figure it out. I was really tempted to help her into the tree but I thought I have to stop the helicopter stuff. She has to learn to how to figure out solutions for the little things. Climbing a tree isn't about IQ, it is about problem solving.

All those little things in childhood are about problem solving. All those things we have taken away as helicopter parents.

Ren

Could someone please define "soft skills"? What is it about them that makes them "soft"?

Here is a heart-warming example of how soft skills helped someone get ahead:

http://online.barrons.com/article/SB50001424052748704878904578537580549304820.html
CEO Spotlight
Barron's
SATURDAY, JUNE 15, 2013
A Model Success
By SANDRA WARD

Soft skills = interpersonal dynamics. Things related to human nature and culture. Self-regulation of your internal world in terms of getting things done, flexibility, etc.

Hard skills = Mathematics. Calculus. Internal Combustion Engines. Astronomy. Objective stuff related to the outside physical/natural world.

At least, that's my off the cuff answer.

Soft means that they aren't governed by hard and fast rules. For example, there is no "law of physics" for how to talk to an angry customer.

There also is no algorithm for "how to get an impossible number of tasks done on-time," but people who can find a way manage to make themselves pretty much indispensable, and those who can't are often the first ones to go in a restructuring.

I think that some individuals are just not as capable when it comes to theory of mind, quite honestly. Problem-solving that involves other people requires it, because your solutions ideally will not make enemies out of your boss or coworkers.

Bostonian's example demonstrates that principle in action, actually. There's more than simple problem-solving at work there-- 'getting free' is one solution, yes, but one that would have consequences for the other individual which would ultimately render it non-ideal interpersonally. Some individuals would never have even seen that. Maybe not even in hindsight.


I suspect that modern helicopter parenting also contributes to very low level development of theory of mind in afflicted offspring, in addition to the more obvious learned helplessness that Wren discussed. It just never occurs to some individuals that other people have thoughts, feelings, and personal agendas. Seems to me that this is an increasingly serious problem, in fact-- the belief that the world exists to fulfill one's personal needs and wants, I mean.

TO be clear, I recognize that this is a lifelong challenge for some individuals who are not NT. But that is not the people I am referring to. I'm referring to otherwise NT people who simply haven't ever really had it reinforced to them that they should consider others as part of decision-making.

Okay, that is just...blechy (to me at least).

My post? Or being head-locked as part of an... er... "interview process?"

Because I can think of SO many reasons why the latter would make me turn DOWN a job offer...

Oops! The headlock thing.

Hmm, I like the example. It might seem abrasive, but the type of soft skills that Friedman was testing in the headlock manoeuvre are exactly the kinds of abilities a good I-banker needs: quick thinking, being able to behave appropriately within the politics of an organization, using the resources at hand (his wrestling acumen), grace under pressure...

It's also a great 3 second test for organizational fit. I hate to say it, but ibankers face considerably more workplace assault than that in a standard day. They have to have thick skin and roll with the punches.

Too bad a move like that would land Friedman in an assault lawsuit today. So much information could be gained that way in the blink of an eye. Instead, a psychologist would have to design that as an "assessment center" and waste tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars on set-up and interview slots with senior bankers.

Or, they could just learn to behave. Which would include maybe not wrecking the world economy.

There is that.

ROFL. I think it's increasingly clear why some of us are quite ill-suited to that form of employment.

Feels that physical assailants should not be bosses or interviewers.... check.


I can't IMAGINE what this dude would have come up with to similarly "test" a female candidate.

Sort of like the real estate situation. When there's little on the market, homeowners who wish to sell don't have to spruce up much of anything; the looks of the home, the price, the terms, etc. They call the shots. That's how employers think these days, imo. They know that they have what many "buyers" want and so they ask for the moon.

Perhaps those "buyers" realize they need to spruce themselves up and so listen to those who say go back to school. Who could blame them? Where else are they to get the required "must haves"? Especially true in the case of a change in career due to "free trade" with other countries out-sourcing one's prior area of expertise.

Easy answer: there were none.

Oh, come now! Once you get over the flaming wreckage, they're not so bad. Some of them are even cuddly.

But maybe I'm just an internal-locus-of-control sort of gal.

So, if I interpret this in another way...
It's good to have the "goods" on one's boss? He knows it and so do you, so a conversation can be had while the outside world looks on none the wiser?

I enjoyed 2008 very much.

Lots of fun, the crash was exciting, what with watching watching the web of lies and fraud unwind, and I made money.

And I got to be part of a real stock market crash.

Good times.

Yup! Choosing to be diplomatic and "lose" from a position of strength speaks volumes.

I get the warm fuzzies just reading that.

Debating the headlock is not really the point. It is the lack of strategic skills and that most young people have the political sense of a cow. They focus on their own path without any regard to the environment.

Problem defined, what are potential solutions? How would you help your child have better soft skills?

By actively coaching them in a metacognitive sense.

At least that is my theory. I'm conducting an experiment with an N of one, but so far things look excellent on that front.

My DD has always been pretty interested and tuned in to other people and what makes them tick, though... so I probably can take very little credit for her skills here.

I imagine that it involves a lot of the same kind of 'social stories' training that parents of children on the spectrum are quite familiar with, however. I just contrast how I see parents behave (even really good ones) now with how they spoke to children when I was one, though...

It's a really striking difference. Parents now generally avoid comparisons with other children. They seem to use me-centered language with kids, rather than more prosocial, outwardly directed language.

It's an entirely different way of looking at the world, basically. Does the world exist AROUND one? Or is a person just a small part OF that world? Basically, I like to think it boils down to convincing my child that not everything is about HER.

In her case, that was pretty essential since she had to learn that pretty early. Even family members who love her to pieces are totally capable of hurting or even killing her accidentally because of their ignorance. Some of them are quite difficult to educate on that point, even, which is far worse. That is a lot for anyone to process, but in order to maintain a healthy relationship, you have to be able to compartmentalize it properly and not take it personally.

Adolescents tend to naturally regress and think that everything IS about them. So I find myself issuing gentle reminders that her friends aren't 'ignoring' her because they hate her or because she did something awful... but probably because they have other things going on in their lives sometimes. I have to poke at her to get her to think of innocuous reasons why Joe/Jane hasn't been on Skype, or why Sam/Sandy has been grumpy lately.

I just have a feeling that this is a lot, lot harder with a kid that has been taught from toddlerhood that the world exists solely FOR him/her.

The problem we have in my industry (IT) is that they shipped nearly all the entry-level work overseas, so no one locally can even get INTO the field.. that means that every year that goes by, more and more of the older generation retire, and there are fewer and fewer of us who are actually proper senior engineers... there's no one coming in the door to replace at the moment. I suppose we'll have to keep granting H1B visas to bring over the Indians...

I think a bigger problem in IT is that the entry-level folks we do get here come from pointy-clicky experiences, which have so successfully abstracted the user experience from the internal programming that they have no idea how the processes they're performing actually work.

But also, see my previous post on the tool-specific requirements that employers are posting, which is worse for IT workers than just about anyone. In order for an IT worker to get their resume past the automated selection process, the resume has to be turned into a nearly illegible alphabet soup of acronyms and brand names.

Also, there's very little appreciation for how someone with relatively similar experience could make a quick transition. Red Hat is not fundamentally different from SuSE, relational databases are relational databases the world around, object oriented programming languages all share certain characteristics, etc.

As for H-1B workers... if you think our soft skills are bad...

The Indian soft skills... So much laughter here.

Pro-tip for everyone - when you call a tech support line, hit the option for Spanish, then when you get connected just play like you hit the wrong button.. They all speak English and are based in CA, NM or TX for the most part. :-)

I do a lot of hiring. I really do not care about resumes or education. My top performers do not have degrees.

I carefully question the candidate about their technical and other skills until I find holes. I walk them through open ended scenarios. I let them ask questions and give partial answers to see if they follow up.

One problem with corporate America is that they do not want to train. That leaves a lot of talent on the table and raises labor costs long term.

Why bother training when you can simply pay a politician to approve more H1Bs for people that hardly know that job either but will work for nothing under constant threat of being deported?

NOTHING depresses consumer spending (which rightly or wrongly IS the main driver of the US ecomony) than artificially lowered wages.

I agree.

Austin! You're back. This is great.