English
Dansk
Nederlands
Français
Deutsch
Norwegian Bokmål
Svenska
EspañolLearning at work week: Are graduates’ soft skills an employer’s responsibility?
What are the key skills that graduates are lacking according to their first bosses? Two years ago Payscale conducted a survey among nearly 64,000 managers and over 14,000 recent graduates to find out.*
Contrary to what you might expect, the most important missing skills according to managers are not specific to the job or business. They are mainly soft skills and personal effectiveness.
Here are a few examples of the skills which managers find are lacking, with the percentage of managers that have pointed this out:
- Critical thinking/problem solving (60%)
- Communication (46%)
- Writing proficiency (44%)
- Leadership (44%)
- Interpersonal skills/teamwork (36%)
The missing link with real work life
This isn’t all that surprising when you think about it. Most universities provide ample learning opportunities for the above in the form of written assignments, team projects, specific courses, etc. but what’s often missing is a link to real-life work scenarios.
What’s more is that the time between learning and implementing is way too long. By the time students graduated and have started a job, most will have forgotten the specifics of what they’ve learned at university.
Minimising the time between learning and applying is essential to upskill your employees (graduates or not). This should be a call-to-action for employers.
Businesses shouldn’t expect graduates to have perfected their soft skills at university. They need to offer practical and hands-on learning opportunities at the point of need.
Thomas Buus Madsen is the COO and co-founder of Bookboon, the world’s largest e-book publisher for employee effectiveness and soft skills. By making its platform incredibly easy to use and only publishing industry-leading experts, Bookboon boasts some of the highest usage rates in the digital learning sector.
Get a free copy now of Bookboon’s “21st Century Corporate Learning & Development” by Prof. Dr. Nick van Dam, Global Chief Learning Officer at McKinsey & Co.
