New Grad Hires: Ready and Willing, but Are They Able?
The AMA Moving Ahead newsletter tells us something that isn't terribly new: New Grad Hires: Ready and Willing, but Are They Able?. Companies are hiring, but
Two-thirds (63%) of employers say college graduates lack essential skills to succeed in today’s global economy, according to a report by the National Leadership Council for Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP) and the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U). “College graduates will need much more cross-disciplinary knowledge and an advanced set of communication and analytical skills to apply their knowledge to real-world problems,” concludes the report.
I heard this when I came out of college over twenty years ago, and I assume it was the same twenty years before that. Get over it already!
The solution is to hire people who have the general skills, capability, and/or experience you need and then train them in the missing aspects. That's the way it has always been.
An extension of this for those looking for jobs later in a career, when the candidate has the real world experience and accomplishments, is the perceived need on the part of hirers for experience and accomplishment in their industry. Result: inbred groupthink and in-the-box thinking.
That's my whine for the day.
-- Frank