Very early this morning a story sneaked onto the BBC Education website, to the effect that while demand for graduates is increasing, 40% of employers aiming to recruit graduates were facing skills shortages.
Now I am used to sifting through employer surveys, looking at reasons why vacancies are hard to fill, and the standard responses for generalist surveys are always that potential recruits lack technical skills or that they lack suitable experience. The former is usually a starting point for looking at skills shortage vacancies, the latter generally brings a response of how can people gain experience if you won't give them a chance? Indeed sometimes when the experience issue is probed, what an employer is looking for is so specific to the company that you want to take recruiting managers out and give them a good talking to!!
This survey is rather different, in that it is looking at people being recruited into their first post graduation job, so you would expect those recruiting to be less worried about lacking experience. The survey results also highlight that candidates are normally academically proficient, which takes care of the technical skills as well. What they lack is soft skills.
To a certain extent, I would expect a new graduate to be a bit raw on soft skills, despite the key skills curriculum elements that may be included in school or college education, before higher education. I think I would expect my potential graduate to lack team working skills to an extent (unless anything could be demonstrated from extra curricular activities like team sports, scouts, voluntary work and so forth). I might also expect that they would not be the world's greatest communicators, unless they had done a communications degree.
The thing that brought me up short was that the soft skills were considered to include verbal and numerical reasoning. Now to me, verbal and numerical reasoning are essential concepts of "graduateness" - no one should be able to pass a graduate level course without verbal and numerical reasoning (OK - some courses will be heavier on one than the other).
I was involved with one business degree course, where the university was considering making quantitative methods optional - and I was appalled, and said so very firmly. Perhaps this is a first sign that numerical reasoning is no longer considered important in business, but to me, that is the scariest thought I have come across in a long time.
Think about it - where are numbers not important in business? Cost control? Retail activity? Wages? Tax? Production efficiency? Activity monitoring? I wouldn't be interested in a graduate that lacked numerical reasoning skills - would you?
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