Businesses want college graduates to be ready to
fulfill important functions upon hire. When graduates are not ready this can
raise the cost of training and slow down production. Criticism of higher
education revolves around the difficulties some schools are having preparing
students to take on challenges in the modern business world. A study of
perceptions of deans and prospective employers helps show where college
administration and business leaders see eye-to-eye and where they diverge.
Throughout the nation a debate rages about the value
of higher education, its costs, and employ-ability of students. We also know
that higher education is important to grow innovation and feed the needs of
employers so they can fill open positions. There is a natural split between higher
education as a vessel of cultural tradition and higher education as training
grounds for employment.
That debate isn’t likely to be decided anytime soon.
The study helps show that business school deans and employers are not that far
off when assessing the importance of certain required skills. Businesses, of
course, also had a few ideas but for the most part the two seem to be in the same
hemisphere.
Top
Seven Skills by Prospective Employers (In order of importance): responsibility
and accountability, interpersonal skills, oral communication, teamwork, ethical
values, decision-making and analytical skills, and creativity and critical
thinking.
Top
Seven Skills by Business School Deans (In order of importance): critical
skills/abilities to the organization are oral
communication, written communication, interpersonal skills, decision-making, responsibility
and accountability, ability to work in teams, and creativity and critical
thinking skills.
As you can tell oral communication,
responsibility and accountability, interpersonal skills, decision-making, creativity
and critical thinking skills were common to both deans and prospective
employers. Where they differed was ethical values, analytical skills and
critical skills/abilities.
The differences seem to be based in
the soft and hard skills. Hard skills are akin to specific job functions that
you may find on a job description while soft skills are related more to
personality and the ability to work with others. Understanding how to make a
chart is an easily measurable skill while having the social abilities to influence
stakeholders to accept the meaning of that chart is a little more difficult. Employers
lean a little heavier on soft skills while deans focus more on hard skills.
This isn’t particularly odd
considering that hard skills are easier to implement into curriculum and easier
to assess for successful achievement. For example, someone can either explain
compound interest or they can’t. It is more difficult to assess soft skills
such as politeness or ethical behavior because these are more situational. Employers
will still need to interview and assess needed soft skills themselves. Sometimes
they are going to get a great employee and sometimes they won’t. It will be
difficult for education to fix this problem but could consider methods of
encouraging these behaviors in students.
Shuayto, N. (2013). Management
skills desired by business school deans and employers: an empirical
investigation. Business Education &
Accreditation, 5 (2).
