College students have great aspirations that usually hit all of the plot points of a typical Hollywood script: graduate in four years, get an entry-level position in the field of your major, and work your way up the ladder to the job that you worked years to attain. This situation is the dream for all of us, but the reality of the situation is graver than we realize. The fact is that we are entering the roughest job market in decades, we have to find ways to distinguish ourselves from the crowded field. Susan Eisner, a Management Professor at Ramapo College of New Jersey, studied what skills employers are looking for when they are making new hires, and reported her findings in her article “Grave New World? Workplace Skills for Today’s College Graduates,” in which she gives finds the necessary job skills that employers look for. In this paper, I will summarize her findings on the recent job market, what the different studies and surveys have shown what skills employers are looking for, and which skills would help humanities students the most. Hopefully by the end of my paper, we all will know the skills that employers look for when hiring new employees for their company, because we will need them.
Overview
Because of the Great Recession, a high GPA and a diploma aren’t enough to guarantee employment in the field that we have been working hard to get into. Tasked with having the choice of hiring between the fresh-faced rookies and the unemployed veterans, employers are now looking at other factors when deciding on whom to hire. No one knows this better than Eisner, who studied the qualities that employers look for. She did this by looking at studies and surveys conducted by experts in the field, including Careerbuilder, Collegegrad, and the Occupational Information Network (O’Net), among many others. Eisner herself conducted a comprehensive qualitative pilot study for the paper, giving further, first hand advice on the topic.
Eisner also tracks the recent developments of the job market, and how the Great Recession has led to employers being more selective in their hiring process. She states that it’s not just that companies are getting more stringent on who they hire, it is the fact that there aren’t enough jobs out there to keep everybody employed. In fact, she notes that the “number of those seeking U.S. work outnumbered available jobs by a record 6 to 1” (27). That number is just staggering, which drives home Eisner’s goal when she started writing her paper; which was to inform college students on the necessary job skills that will help us land the job of our dreams. In my opinion, she succeeds in her goal.
The Current Job Market
We, as humanities students, have to face the facts; we are entering the toughest job market in decades. We are entering a workforce that Eisner compares to the time after World War II, where “the disappearance of more jobs proportional to the workforce,” and an estimated “1.9 million U.S. workers holding bachelor degrees or higher were unemployed” (27). What she writes here is simple, there are not enough jobs for everybody. Looking at these numbers just drives home Eisner’s point, that we need differentiate ourselves from the field if we want to find a job. If we don’t, we’ll just be left in the dust.
Digging deeper into the job market, Eisner looked at a survey conducted by the NACE
(National Association of Colleges and Employers) who believe that employers (as a whole) will go into a hiring freeze, which will lead to a decrease in the number of jobs available. The NACE looked at the college graduate class of 2009, which Eisner points out that only “19.7% of those who had applied for post-graduation jobs to have been hired, as compared with 26% with jobs upon graduating in 2008 and 51% with jobs upon graduating in 2007” (28). But it is not all bad. Eisner also discusses a survey by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), which states that 43% of employers plan to hire college graduates. Some may ask, what do these contradictory numbers mean? The answer is actually quite complex in its simplicity.
These numbers show that we have to find ways to become a diamond in the rough, something that Eisner drives home again and again. She continues to do this right until the end of her paper, writing, “Today’s college graduates face an uncertain and demanding job market in which they are likely encounter evolving skill needs, reduced hiring, and heightened competition from experienced laid off workers and globally available labor” (42). This point is so important for us to know that it needs to be hammered home to us. The job market is in the proverbial toilet at the moment, and Eisner paints this upsetting picture for us to discuss how important it is to differentiate ourselves from others. She shows us that our dream may be just that, a dream that we may never be able to obtain.
Will College Help you Land a Job?
While the job market is scattershot at best right now, many would guess that going to college will give us a leg-up in the workforce. Through Eisner’s research, she found that college does help in landing a job, but she also found sources that it makes no difference whatsoever. She notes that the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) believes that half of the jobs that will be created by the end of the decade will require a college degree. Eisner goes more in to detail about this, writing that the BLS projects that there will be almost fifty-one million jobs available, and fourteen-million of those jobs will require some type of college degree. To put a percentage on the future job market, Eisner states that 85% of the job market will require a college diploma. Going to an Ivy League institution will also increase the chances of getting a job, including earning a higher than average salary compared to the rest of the population (including undergraduate degrees and the uneducated).
Looking further into this theory, Eisner cites a report done by the BLS, which shows that the unemployment rate drops as the level of our education rises. She writes of this report that “77.4% of those with bachelor’s degrees or higher were in the 2009 labor force as compared to 70.6% with some college education but no bachelor’s degree, 62.1% with high school diplomas only, and 47.3% with less than a high school diploma” (28). These statistics that Eisner show back up the claim that college does help. So according to this report, we have made the right decision continuing our education. But unfortunately, it is not that clear cut.
Eisner follows through on this theory by looking at the flipside of the coin, discussing a
survey that paints a more troubling picture for us. She Cites a New York Times article entitled “Teenage Jobless Rate Reaches Record High,” which states that the college graduating class of 2009 had a high rate of students who were working in jobs that didn’t require a degree to work in. This is the situation that the majority of us are looking at when we graduate. What’s even worse about this situation is that we will have basically wasted the last four years of our lives (and for some, eight years) and we will be heavily in debt. At this point in the narrative, we are waking up from our dream. This is why it is so important for us to know the skills that employers like for us to have, to give us any advantage over the competition that we fight against.
The Job Skills that Employers Look for
After Eisner successfully lays the groundwork on the current job market for us, she moves on to discuss the main point of her paper, which is the aforementioned job skills. Eisner looks at a literature review done by Tanyel, Mitchell, and McAlum, whom that looked at the core skills that students should have. These skills include oral communication, writing, interpersonal, dependability, being a self-motivator, responsibility, and problem-solving. All of the studies that they looked at show that these are the core skills that are need by graduates to get the job they wish to have. The fact that these studies were done in the 1990s show that the necessary skills to get a job haven’t changed, and probably never will.
Another study that Eisner looks at is one done by the NACE. This study shows that graduates should the ability to work with others, having the drive and motivation to work, and do the job to the best of our abilities. Eisner puts her findings in a table (table 5), and lists the rests of NACE’s findings, which includes verbal and written communication, a strong work ethic, teamwork, showing initiative, they can relate to others, problem-solving skills, among many more. What is interesting about the table is that Eisner lists what graduates tend to lack, which include a few qualities that employers look for, and other characteristics including a good work ethic, time management, job loyalty, and professionalism. Eisner also looks at data from O’Net, who believe that time are the most important include active listening, which 97% of the different jobs that they looked at. O’Net also looks highly at reading comprehension (96%), critical thinking (93%), speaking (82%), and time management (79%), just to name a few.
While it is important for us to know all of these skills, Eisner makes it a point to discuss what qualities employers aren’t looking for; which could be argued is even more important than the qualities that sway them in the hiring process. Conducting a qualitative pilot study for the paper, Eisner found that the subjects who noticed that they didn’t hire students who lacked certain qualities that should be chalked up to common-sense. These qualities include a “lack of accepting direction, accountability, attention to detail, being on time, being thorough, dependability, diligence, dressing appropriately for business … willingness to do grunt work part of every job, willingness to go above and beyond, and willingness to take on trivial tasks and see each as a learning experience” (36).While this is an admittedly long list, most, if not all of these qualities are one’s that we should already know. Speaking for myself, if I was looking to hire someone who was a recent graduate and showed any of these qualities, I wouldn’t hire that person either, no matter how good of a student they were.
Conclusion
As I just outlined, there are so many different skills that employers look for when hiring for their companies. This is what makes “Grave New World? Workplace Skills For Today’s College Graduates” a must-read for college students. I barely scratched the surface in the information that she gathered, and all of what she writes is beneficial to us. What Eisner did when she was researching is that she threw a wide net when she was gathering sources, which leads to a wide variety of voices in the piece. She looks at so many different surveys and articles that have different views on a similar topic that all lead to the same conclusion: by giving us what employers are looking for when they are hiring for a position within their company. With the skills that Susan Eisner has laid out for us, our shared dream has a better chance to become a reality.