"“I know I am a creative person who can do many of these jobs, but I think employers have these expectations that an applicant must bring a mid-level professional’s work experience and technical skills — even though it’s only an entry-level job,”"<p>High expectations from employers for not enough pay. No willingness to train people to spec, instead expecting everyone to be ready to go out of the box. It's easy to forget that people are messy, and not machines.<p>EDIT: I beat this drum all of the time on HN... you will never have enough "technical skills" or "in demand skills" or "communications skills" to cheat your way out of the ability for someone to turn you down for the unicorn (who, ideally, will then be underemployed in the position) they're looking for.
<i>As the job market gradually improves, businesses say they aren’t finding enough savvy graduates who can start contributing from day one on the job.</i><p>Can someone decode this euphemism? Even people that have been working at the same company as I am can't transfer to my project and start contributing on day one. Hell, they'll drag down my productivity for a while to get ramped up. So all I see is a desire to have the ramp shorter...<p>So you can see why I'm struggling to find any point in this article that doesn't boil down to "I want someone with industry workspace experience, at the cost of someone with zero experience."
Education is irrelevant. It's not like entry level candidates of yesteryear were any more skilled in "written communications" or "critical thinking skills." Yet it was much easier to get an entry level job back then. This sort of focus on the content of education, as if that means anything, ignores what is fundamentally a supply and demand problem.
> schools are going to have to pay more attention to careers and what employers want<p>I think it's time that we stopped seeing education as the means to get a job. Education != training and universities shouldn't exist just to get graduates employment. We used to have technical colleges for this sort of thing. I think it would be a shame if universities started adapting themselves to fit what employers want.<p>Having said that, if it is true that "they rate young applicants as deficient in such key workplace skills as written and oral communication, critical thinking and analytical reasoning", then this is a serious problem with the education system. Not because it doesn't train students to get a good job, but because their minds are clearly not being trained to think properly.
<i>There are jobs to be had, but you keep getting rejected. Are employers expectations unrealistic or are university grads really ill-equipped for the real world?</i><p>Not unlike many BBC articles, this one begins with a question presenting a false dichotomy. Why are you being rejected? Perhaps there are simply more people seeking work than there are jobs, and that however "well prepared" you are, the probability of being chosen for any particular job is therefore lower.<p>Perhaps it's a mixed blessing that our generation has faced such sobering difficulty in finding stable and meaningful employment. At some point as a result, our society might be prepared to recognize that the freer a market is, the less it guarantees a satisfactory way of life for its participants.
Said it a million times and I'll say it a million more: you don't learn how to work by sitting in class, you learn to work by going to work. College is expensive and it isn't right for everyone.<p>We need publicly funded apprenticeships starting at 16 so anyone can get a job and real training at a reduced cost to the employer.<p>I'm not a big fan of Reagan but when he was right, he was right:<p>"The best social program is a good job."
> “Now, we need to design curricula that are more aligned with employer expectations...”<p>What would that be? Classes in blame management? Email necromancy? How to beat your peers in stack ranking? How to obtain mandatory technical skills without training? How to live cheaply when your employer doesn't pay enough?<p>How about employers just admit that <i>their problems are not unique</i> (even though their software might be) and that training and retaining general-purpose employees is far more useful than hiring a bunch of (expensive) niche experts for every little project.
I thought the real reason was that fewer and fewer industries are labor-intensive? New grads aren't the only ones who can't get hired.<p>There's only one solution, give everyone free food/housing/healthcare/jobs. (Not just money, because that will just bid up the price of everything.)<p>If you're unemployed, vote for a stronger social safety net. That will not only yield free stuff for you, but also reduce the amount of hungry people competing with you for every job. Total no-brainer.
I think part of the issue here is that back in the day with less automation, you could prove yourself useful merely with the skills that come along with having a pulse and a functioning brain. Your utility one just doing the unskilled parts of your job would let you keep a job long enough to learn the hard skills to really be useful within a few months to a year. Automation of all these menial tasks has gotten so good that you no longer have low hanging fruit to justify employment that the level of skill a recent college grad has coming out of school.<p>Take some of the skills cited like statistics. Most people in the workforce have atrocious practical stats skills, but enough to get by. For recent grads, it's abysmal to non-existent. A few years ago to back in the day, you wouldn't have been expected to apply such skills on day one. You'd have enough time to realize your skill gap and address it. Not anymore.<p>Anyone thinking about university is best served by choosing schools like University of Waterloo, where there is a strong culture of having kids do real work during the summer months at real companies (instead of summer school). Any school where kids are doing summer school or goofing around all summer are going to be left behind.
Answer: "Is the problem that employers have unrealistic expectations or that universities and students are failing to develop critical skills? A little of both, most workplace experts say."
"schools are going to have to pay more attention to careers and what employers want". India being one of the countries focussed on, this is definitely a huge problem. Most students aren't sure of what the real world applications of what they learn are. Compulsory 6 month internships, exposure to a lot of companies and the work that people with their educational qualifications do and of course very simple interpersonal skills can go a long way. I run my own company and I still get resumes in .doc format, which were forwarded to me after being sent to another employer! Recommendations have proven to be the best way to hire for us even though those resumes have not been too impressive to begin with!
Another unwarranted push of the higher education, which is by definition all about science and ivory towers, into the totally irrelevant "employability" bullshit. Please stop undermining the value and the role of the universities.
"Employers say students don’t have the ability to … think critically, innovate, solve complex problems and work well in a team." otherwise known as "work place experience".