Trap Four: Employers Care about Only Your Major and Grade Point Average
We can each define ambition and progress for ourselves. The goal is to work toward a world where expectations are not set by the stereotypes that hold us back, but by our personal passion, talents and interests.
—Sheryl Sandberg
Several recent research reports illustrate that employers care very much about a wide spectrum of characteristics for recent graduates who have applied for employment. Unfortunately, the research also demonstrates that recent graduates feel as though they are well qualified. This “perception gap” appears in several research reports and strongly suggests that many employers do not believe that recent graduates, regardless of their GPA, are prepared for the workforce.132 The students indicated that they felt qualified in areas like written and oral communication, critical and analytical thinking, and applying knowledge and skills to the real world, but employers consistently rated students lower than they rated themselves. Fewer than two in five hiring managers (39%) say the recent college graduates they have interviewed in the past 2 years were completely or very prepared for a job in their field of study, in general. This is in sharp contrast to the 50 percent of college students who rate themselves in the same terms. Additionally, 59 percent of students said they were well prepared to analyze and solve complex problems, just 24 percent of employers said they had found that to be true of recent college graduates.133
Despite the apparent generation gap, the majority of both managers and HR respondents feel that the definition of what is professional should not be subject to change. The attitude appears to be that young employees should learn to conform to current standards of professionalism rather than the standards being modified in response to larger societal changes.134 “Today’s college graduates do not exhibit as much professionalism as their employers expect of them.” A survey of more than 500 human resources professionals and business leaders to gauge not only what they think “professionalism” means but also how well the recent college graduates they have hired exhibit it. The survey indicates that “there is a widely held sentiment that not all college graduates are displaying professionalism upon entering the workforce.” More than 37 percent of the respondents reported that “less than half of [the recent graduates they have hired] exhibit professionalism in their first year.”135 This lack of professionalism occurs during the interview, the most important part of the job search process as “human resource professionals say they’ve seen recent college grads text or take calls in interviews, dress inappropriately, use slang or overly casual language and exhibit other oddball behavior.”136 Believing that employers solely care about a major or GPA is the fourth trap and overlooks the value of internships and learning how to fit into the organizational culture, the need to development critical cognitive and noncognitive skills, and the importance of emotional intelligence (EI).
Internships and Cultural Fit
According to the NACE, an internship is defined as “a form of experiential learning that integrates knowledge and theory learned in the classroom with practical application and skills development in a professional setting.”137 By providing students with opportunities to gain experience and network an internship also gives the employer a chance to assess the interns as potential new hires. “In industries across the board, employers viewed an internship as the single more important credential for recent grads. More than where you went to school and what you majored in.”138 The results show that internships truly have become the “new interview” in the job search process for students and employers alike. Over 90 percent of employers think that all students, regardless of major, should intern before they graduate.139
Because of the hypercompetitiveness of today’s global marketplace, some observers believe that completing two to three internships is imperative for recent college graduates to maintain their competitive edge.140 “Internships are essential indicators that a student is not just a great reader and writer, but also capable of succeeding in a business environment and interacting with coworkers and clients.”141 Because of their ability to offer employers an opportunity to see how a student responds to real-world scenarios, internships “have become the new interview in the job search process for students and employers alike.”142 In 2015, one report concluded that “40 percent of all entry-level full-time hires in the United States are sourced through internship programs.”143 Thus, for a growing number of college seniors that want to land employment at one of the top organizations, internships are no longer a luxury but a necessity. Internships are also an excellent way for students to learn about organizational culture.
While there are many definitions of organizational culture, it is often described as the personality of an organization from the employee perspective that might include the company’s mission, expectations and work atmosphere. Whether it’s written down, symbolized in the business logo, or simply an unspoken but understood definition, culture determines a company’s environment. “Over 80 percent of organizations are more strict about who they hire today than in previous years because of the economy and the cost of hiring.”144 In one 2014 report, human resource professionals and job seekers reported that “cultural fit” carries the most weight when considering an applicant, while GPA mattered least.145 “Today, it’s not just about finding the person that can do the job, but finding someone who can fit into the corporate culture.”146 “Cultural fit can cover a variety of characteristics, but ultimately, the question hiring managers should be looking to answer is, does this candidate’s values align with those of the company, be they work–life balance, corporate mission or how to handle a customer phone call. Fitting into the organizational culture also requires a young professional to communicate effectively with the five different generations of people that make up the workforce:147
• Traditionalists: born prior to 1946 and approximately 5 percent of the workforce
• Baby Boomers: born between 1946 and 1964 and make up 45 percent of the workforce
• Gen X: born between 1965 and 1976 and make up 40 percent of the workforce
• Millennials: born between 1977 and 1997 and make up 10 percent of the workforce
• Gen 2020: born after 1997 and will soon join the workforce
While most businesses continue to scour résumés and lurk on LinkedIn for the person with the most experience and degrees from the best schools, hiring firms and researchers are beginning to realize that in many industries, the most qualified candidates often do damage to a firm when they fail to connect with the organization’s culture.148 Almost half of an employee’s success in the first 18 months on the job can be attributed to how the employee fits in with others in the organization while the rest of his success depends on whether he can do the job.”149
Cognitive Skills
Cognitive skills involve conscious intellectual efforts, such as thinking, reasoning, or remembering. Since business executives care more about their new hires’ ability to demonstrate cognitive and noncognitive skills then they do about their undergraduate major, it is both important and relevant for students to understand the difference between both skill sets.150 To promote higher forms of thinking in education such as analyzing and evaluating concepts, processes and principles educational psychologist Dr. Benjamin Bloom created a classification of cognitive skills in 1956. This classification, known as Bloom’s Taxonomy, consisted of six cognitive skills ranging from low to high in terms of degrees of difficulty. A student should master one prior to moving on to the next skill. In order, the cognitive skills Bloom identified were knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. Lorin Anderson, a former student of Bloom, revised the Taxonomy and changed the names of each skill from a noun to a verb. In the revised Bloom’s Taxonomy, the six cognitive skills are, from lowest to highest:
1. Remembering: Recall or retrieve information.
2. Understanding: Comprehending the meaning, translation, and interpretation of instructions and problems.
3. Applying: Use a concept in a new situation or applies what was learned in the classroom into the workplace.
4. Analyzing: Separates material into components in order to understand its organizational structure and distinguishes between facts and inferences.
5. Evaluating: Make judgments about the value of ideas.
6. Creating: Builds a structure or pattern from diverse elements. Put parts together to form a whole, with emphasis on creating a new meaning or structure.
The highest stage in the revised Bloom’s Taxonomy, creating, has been the subject of a great deal of research as organizations look to find solutions to new problems in today’s challenging global marketplace. To help individuals and organizations understand the dynamics involved with the highest cognitive skill, Daniel Pink published A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future and identified six areas of creating relevant for the 21st-century professional:
1. Design: Moving beyond function to engage the senses.
2. Story: Narrative added to products and services—not just argument.
3. Symphony: Adding invention and big picture thinking (not just detail focus).
4. Empathy: Going beyond logic and engaging emotion and intuition.
5. Play: Bringing humor and light-heartedness to business and products.
6. Meaning: The purpose is the journey, give meaning to life from inside yourself.
Proponents of the major only counts mental trap fail to understand that 95 percent of employers are looking for candidates whose skills translate into creativity, out-of-the-box thinking, and innovation. These are now prerequisite skills employers need to fill as many of today’s jobs come with challenges far more complex than in the past. This shift to focus on demonstrated creativity and problem-solving through innovation is just one reason why Silicon Valley companies have shifted to hiring employees who studied liberal arts, versus those who took the more “typical” tech path as software engineers.151 All undergraduates need to understand that soft skills are the skills of the future. Employers say that future workplaces need degree holders who can come up with novel solutions to problems and better sort through information to filter out the most critical pieces.152
Noncognitive Skills (Soft Skills)
Employers routinely discuss the harsh reality of how new college graduates who are entry-level candidates are simply “clueless about the fundamentals of office life.”153 In short, recent college graduates lack a comprehensive set of soft skills to navigate today’s workplace. Noncognitive or “soft skills” are related to motivation, integrity, and interpersonal interaction and are associated with an individual’s personality, temperament, and attitudes. For virtually all jobs, a worker needs the soft skills associated with working well with other people and functioning effectively in a work environment. The top 10 noncognitive (soft) skills employees need recent college graduates to demonstrate are:
1. Self-control
2. Approach to learning
4. Attentional focus
5. Eagerness to learn
6. Persists in completing tasks
7. Creative in work or play
8. Emotional intelligence
9. High level of energy
10. Positive personality
Unfortunately, research indicates that not all college students and recent graduates can demonstrate the necessary cognitive or noncognitive skills to succeed in today’s hypercompetitive economy. The Collegiate Learning Assessment Plus, which measures the intellectual gains made between freshman and senior year, concluded that 4 in 10 U.S. college students graduate without the complex reasoning skills to manage white-collar work. A survey by the Workforce Solutions Group at St. Louis Community College discovered that more than 60 percent of employers say applicants lack communication and interpersonal skills and “44 percent of respondents cited soft skills, such as communication, critical thinking, creativity, and collaboration, as the area with the biggest gap.”154
Proponents of the “employers only care about my major and GPA” flawed mental trap conveniently overlook the fact that the lack of soft skills is one of the reasons competent technical graduates fail to secure employment. Employers often place soft skills as a primary factor when considering a job candidate with technical and computer-related knowledge a secondary consideration. One in five employers worldwide are unable to fill positions because they can’t find people with appropriate soft skills. All too often candidates lack motivation, interpersonal skills, appearance, punctuality, and flexibility. If a candidate does get hired their inability to develop soft skills often hinders their professional development.155
No matter their major, college graduates need to make a lifelong commitment to further both their cognitive and noncognitive skills to stay competitive over the long term. Competitiveness for jobs is at an all-time high, and individuals “are under unprecedented pressure to develop their own abilities more highly than ever before.”156 Therefore, it is imperative that college graduates across all majors take the initiative to develop additional skills and enhance their abilities to think creatively and demonstrate the highest levels of professionalism. To help students better prepare for their future, higher education departments need to update their curricula each year in order to stay relevant. Failing to do so jeopardizes the student’s ability to compete against better prepared candidates. Today’s ever-changing global marketplace has put a premium on graduates who are multifaceted and can demonstrate a spectrum of cognitive and noncognitive skills valuable to employers. To help develop, further, and then communicate their skills, graduates should rely on their EI.
Emotional Intelligence
Proponents of the “employers only care about my major and GPA” flawed mental trap ignore the growing importance of Emotional Intelligence (EI). Doing so provides a huge disservice to undergraduates. In his widely recognized publication Emotional Intelligence, Rutgers University psychologist Daniel Goleman defines EI as emotional management and the ability to identify, appropriately express, and manage our emotions. For those students with “the right major and GPA” yet have trouble launching or navigating their career, it is often a lack of EI that prohibits them from moving forward. Over the last decade, there have been several studies illustrating the relationship between EI and career success. Ernest O’Boyle Jr. at Virginia Commonwealth University concluded that EI is the strongest predictor of job performance. The U.S. Air Force found that the most successful recruiters scored significantly higher on the EI competencies of empathy and self-awareness. A survey of 251 executives in six countries by Accenture identified three key indicators of EI that predicted who will succeed and who won’t: interpersonal competence, self-awareness, and social awareness.157
With growing evidence that EI is a strong indicator of career success, it behooves students to recognize its growing importance and commit to furthering their EI. Cognitive ability alone will not ensure career success. Students need to combine sophisticated levels of cognitive and noncognitive skills with EI in order to successfully launch and navigate a career in today’s hypercompetitive global economy. Since developing EI is important for personal, family, and business relationships, here are four of the many factors that are crucial for today’s college graduates need to acknowledge, develop, and monitor:
1. Self-awareness: You maintain a realistic sense of self-confidence and understand your feelings. These two elements to self-awareness is the foundation upon which your EI can grow.
a. Realistic self-confidence: You understand your own strengths and limitations; you operate from competence and know when to rely on someone else on the team.
b. Emotional insight: You understand your feelings. Being aware of what makes you angry, for instance, can help you manage that anger.
c. Resolving conflicts: You maintain self-control and awareness in order to resolve conflicts peacefully and without emotion.
2. Self-management: Your ability to manage yourself through resilience and emotional balance allows you to keep moving toward short- and long-term goals simultaneously.
a. Resilience: You stay calm under pressure and recover quickly from upsets. You don’t brood or panic. In a crisis, people look to the leader for reassurance; if the leader is calm, they can be, too.
b. Emotional balance: You keep any distressful feelings in check—instead of blowing up at people, you let them know what’s wrong and what the solution is. You can successfully manage your emotions during times of stress.
c. Self-motivation: You keep moving toward distant goals despite setbacks.
3. Empathy: Your understanding of other’s perspectives, grounded in good listening skills, demonstrates your high degree of empathy.
a. Cognitive and emotional empathy: Because you understand other perspectives, you can put things in ways colleagues comprehend. And you welcome their questions, just to be sure. Cognitive empathy, along with reading another person’s feelings accurately, makes for effective communication.
b. Good listening: You pay full attention to the other person and take time to understand what they are saying, without talking over them or hijacking the agenda.
c. Perspective: You understand and accept that the emotions of others are just as important as yours.
d. Acceptance of criticism: You leave emotion out of conversations regarding your performance and accept constructive criticism in order to improve your abilities.
4. Relationship skills: Your excellent communication skills allow you to develop strong team work among a diverse group of people who feel relaxed around you.
a. Compelling communication: You put your points in persuasive, clear ways, so that people are motivated as well as clear about expectations.
b. Team playing: People feel relaxed working with you. One sign: They laugh easily around you.
c. Acceptance of others: You get along with and work well with others, even if you do not like them. You do not allow you emotions to have a negative impact on others.