In this changing world scenario, looking for jobs and getting one is harder than ever. If you have ever wondered why employers are inclined to hire prospects that are more diverse in their skill set than those, who have mastery over what the job description requires, you’ve come to the right place. After you’ve read the discussion, you would want to consider DoMyHomeworkNow to give you more time from homework for developing skills that employers prioritize in 2021.
Bernard Williams is a researcher and writer, who specializes in education and education-related complexities students face.
1. Absence of Soft Skills:
Employers constantly complain about fresh graduates not developing soft skills. While it’s not up to the students to learn soft skills through a course, colleges are supposed to teach valuable life lessons of influence, negotiation, and persuasion to their students.
In this era of automation, companies are trying to find employees with soft skills rather than technical skills that today’s universities invest more resources on. Having more human skills is on top of their priorities when hiring new candidates.
The Society of Human Resource Management found that half of the members said that education systems have failed to address the skills shortage which the companies require. With an inclination towards teaching technical skills, colleges are neglecting to teach students how to “learn”.
Vocational training, which exposes students to theoretical or practical education approaches, aren’t specifically designed to introduce experience-based life lessons to the brilliant students being produced by the college.
Chris Kirksey from Direction.com says that there’s no way it’s good for a student to know something only to know about it. If they can’t utilize it in real-life scenarios, it’s of no use to an employer.
As tuition fees are touching new highs every year, colleges are going berserk to make parents understand their fees worth. Students are looking into college fees as investments and asking about education that gets them jobs. Complying with that, colleges now have ditched histories and social sciences from their business curriculum, just to make sense.
2. Lack of Communication Skills:
Oral and written communication skills are necessary to have in a workspace. When you are working with people of different origins, ethnicities, and backgrounds, your ability to empathize and communicate with them effectively needs sound communication skills.
Students aren’t being taught enough of that in college.
While students are generally good listeners, they lack the skills to convey their thoughts to the other persons involved. In an academic environment, students can and do communicate easily with their peers and professors, but when it comes to workplaces, they easily get overwhelmed by the randomness of the conversations. Students don’t get trained to initiate small talks with random strangers about the weather or a game. In a professional setup, which may seem unfriendly.
Non-verbal communications are also important for a student to get started in the workplace. Having an aggressive stance, absence of eye contact, defensive gestures, all indicate a non-empathetic person, which most of them aren’t. They just aren’t being thrown into social pools enough in colleges. This inability to navigate through office culture is making students less valued as employees.
Being too friendly could be a problem too. Not knowing when to act friendly towards a certain individual may present a problem in the workplace.
Millennials are writing more aggressive emails than ever without any ample reasons. They are just being angry for the sake of being angry, making them not the perfect candidate for some offices.
3. Lack of Critical Thinking Skills:
Interpretation, analysis, explanation, inference, self-regulation, problem-solving, and open-mindedness are the critical thinking skills that students are required to acquire. Students seriously lack the last two. Logically connecting ideas, evaluating arguments, solving complex social problems need to be practised throughout their academic years, which are tactfully being neglected by colleges to make room for more commercial subjects.
Accumulation of information is not as important as knowing how to utilize that info to explain and convey the deductions that a student should be able to construct. Employers are specifically looking for skills that an automated system can’t do. Gathering data, filling out spreadsheets are the jobs of the past and are being replaced by computer programs. What an employee is expected to do is analyse the results and explain them profoundly.
Critical thinking as a professional is required to:
- Improve decision making.
- Be happier at the workplace.
- A well-informed critical thinker is an asset to the employer and company.
- The knowledge economy is strengthened by critical thinkers.
The aspect of critical thinking helps the company judge its employees based on their productivity and not by billable hours.
Critical thinking skills can be practised and mastered by playing brain games, maintaining a journal, writing essays, researching certain topics, reading, and doing group tasks.
4. Technical Skills Profoundness:
Admit it, students nowadays are more knowledgeable and trained in technical aspects than their previous generation. To build the technical skills, they have invested all their time and talents in the college education, which left them with a lot to catch up on social skills.
Technical skills are pretty much all that a company needs in 2021. To program the automation, you need a technical person. To solve the bug your program is facing, you need an analyst. To generate a huge amount of data, you need a data scientist. But, with that kind of knowledge, students now are being less empathetic towards other employees due to their lack of communication skills, which is detrimental to working in a team project.
But, with the rising economy that depends solely on technology, employers are starting to care less about how a certain individual behaves in a workplace and are more inclined to implement a result-oriented approach. Despite the fact that your technical skills are much more important, having social skills improve the chances of promotion and appreciation in the workplace.
5. Driven by Passion and Not Money:
Students of today are now being driven by passion. They want tasks to engage them in learning and not get bored by the sheer repetitiveness of it. That’s what makes students less valued as full-fledged employees. They get bored easily.
Working in a professional place means being able to concentrate for a long period of time and doing what you are being asked for, even if it’s the only thing you dislike the most. Students, who are not driven by the monetary aspect, present the risk of quitting too early, looking for better jobs and more creative work.
When an employee leaves the company too early in their career, the employer is forced to reinitiate the hiring process to fill the vacancy, which costs both money and resources. That’s why employers are putting more pressure on student employees to accept a long term bond before employing them.
The Bottom Line
Students can work hard. Employers want them as full-fledged employees for their institution, but the absence of certain social skills and emotional aspects are making them look for individuals with experience. If you are a student, make sure that you address these issues before interning for your dream job. Rest assured, your skills aren’t outdated, they are just designed for a specific purpose.
Learn how to use them efficiently and rock on.