{"id":4377,"date":"2017-03-15T10:18:23","date_gmt":"2017-03-15T10:18:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.discovery-graduates.com\/?p=4377"},"modified":"2017-03-15T10:18:23","modified_gmt":"2017-03-15T10:18:23","slug":"half-of-employers-believe-that-graduates-lack-basic-workplace-skills","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/discovery-adr.com\/us\/half-of-employers-believe-that-graduates-lack-basic-workplace-skills\/","title":{"rendered":"Half of employers believe that graduates lack basic workplace skills"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In a recent survey of UK employers, the Association of Graduate Recruiters (AGR) has found that <strong>half of employers believe that graduates lack basic workplace skills.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>These skills are said to be\u2026<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Self-awareness \u2013 understanding own behavior and impact on others<\/li>\n<li>Getting things done with or through other people<\/li>\n<li>Understanding the world of work and where they fit into it<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Fairly straight-forward skills we might think\u2026but actually, how can we expect graduates to be capable in these areas if they are not skills they have confronted and developed through their previous experience (this most often being school, college \u2013 education-based experience)?<\/p>\n<p>The AGR suggested that the most employable and workplace ready graduates are those that complete placement years in industry. This gives young people a good grounding in what the working world is like and they therefore tend to perform better in the workplace when they enter it as graduates.<\/p>\n<p>So how can we encourage these workplace experiences nationally?<\/p>\n<p>Stephen Isherwood of the AGR claims that work experience needs to play a bigger part in schools \u2013 and we couldn\u2019t agree more. Better collaboration between businesses and schools is critical to this issue. Even a couple of weeks unpaid work experience provides invaluable insight into how the commercial world functions and how people behave within it.<\/p>\n<p>Isherwood also states that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.discovery-graduates.com\/why-saturday-jobs-are-so-valuable\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Saturday jobs<\/a> play a key role in nurturing young people\u2019s workplace skills too. Working in a supermarket\/restaurant\/shop while in Sixth Form or college provides students with vital workplace skills. He goes on to say that the important thing is that the students are then able to <em>decode<\/em> these experiences and <em>reflect<\/em> upon them; what they were good at, where they need to develop and what they enjoyed about the job. It is only when these questions are explored that the experience can be used to guide future career choices.<\/p>\n<p>49% of the 174 AGR members surveyed said \u201cgraduates generally do not have the skills expected of them at the point of hiring\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>Yet, employers do expect to do some level of training with graduate employees. It is important that the focus of this training targets the skills that are lacking: self-awareness, problem solving, and decision making etc. And specialist trainers are likely to be needed for this.<\/p>\n<p>The current generation entering workplaces as graduates value feeling \u2018able to be successful in their organization\u2019 (CIPD). Access to personal development opportunities is significant for them and their desires include \u2018on the job\u2019 growth, combined with excellent job opportunities within their organization (CIPD).<\/p>\n<p>Skills development remains a top priority for graduate recruits and so we need to ensure we are cultivating the skills they need, while we work to establish better foundations for building these skills with school and college pupils.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In a recent survey of UK employers, the Association of Graduate Recruiters (AGR) has found that half of employers believe that graduates lack basic workplace skills. These skills are said to be\u2026 Self-awareness \u2013 understanding own behaviour and impact on others Getting things done with or through other people Understanding the world of work and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":29781,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_breakdance_hide_in_design_set":false,"_breakdance_tags":"","footnotes":"","_members_access_role":[],"_members_access_error":""},"categories":[20,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4377","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","category-employer-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/discovery-adr.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4377","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/discovery-adr.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/discovery-adr.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/discovery-adr.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/discovery-adr.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4377"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/discovery-adr.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4377\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/discovery-adr.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29781"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/discovery-adr.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4377"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/discovery-adr.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4377"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/discovery-adr.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}