The real reason new graduates can't get hired
bbc.com
bbc.com
High expectations from employers for not enough pay. No willingness to train people to spec, instead expecting everyone to be ready to go out of the box. It's easy to forget that people are messy, and not machines.
EDIT: I beat this drum all of the time on HN... you will never have enough "technical skills" or "in demand skills" or "communications skills" to cheat your way out of the ability for someone to turn you down for the unicorn (who, ideally, will then be underemployed in the position) they're looking for.
They are either insanely broad or insanely specific, which I think is insanely short sighted since you will either get liars or narrow your search down to those with only the exact skills you are looking for while missing candidates with more generally applicable skills.
If/when I get around to hiring my job post is going to look something like (off the cuff),
"Web developer wanted, experience equal to a couple of years building production systems any of the following a plus SQL, JS (any framework), PHP (any framework), Python (any framework), broad understanding of how the internet/web works, Linux experience (any distro)"
I'm not going to exclude an incredible candidate because they don't have experience of FooJSFrameworkOfTheWeek.js v9.1.2.11.2, if I have to go through 5-10 times as many CV's so what, a little bit of my time now will save me a shitload of time down the line by hiring the wrong person.
I'm starting to think that the reason the available candidate pool is viewed as being so poor is that the only people making it though the resume screening stage are the true unicorns and the bald-faced liars.
Edit: forgot a word.
Job postings are either broad in the sense they want a unicorn (massive often unachievable in reality skillset).
Must be able to debug kernel drivers, write ruby, be CCNA certified and a qualified first aider.
The kind of posting where you know they actually need two sometimes three people and are trying to get one.
For someone to have this position, they have to explain what changed in the past few decades compared to the decades before those. What caused expectations of employers to become higher than the qualifications of the applicants? If anything, more applicants have more qualifications in terms of degrees than ever before, right?
Yep, and that's the problem. College has been dumbed down over the past few decades, to accommodate the push (at least here in the US) for everyone to go to college after high school. There are more people with degrees, but on average they're less capable than the fresh graduates of 30 years ago. People today are getting bachelors degrees in animation, FFS.
Absolutely 100% this. There has been an unsettling trend for employers not wanting to invest in their employees. This includes training as well as compensation. Now employers in general expect colleges / university to adapt their degrees into job preparation programs and do all the training for them.
In some ways I can understand that employers are much more reluctant to spend money on developing employees as programs such as pensions that used to create a long term relationship between the employee and employer no longer tend to exist.
1) Just provide tuition assistance with a payback period if an employee spends less than X years at the company.
2) Similarly, provide bonuses after X years for positions you need to train for.
Its not hard to get people to stick around 5+ years if you pay well and aren't toxic culturally with a 10% bonus every X years. My boss basically prices me out of the market every year so there isn't even a point in looking for a job.
I think the real problem is the CEO/CTO/etc in large companies are focused on what I can do this quarter/year that will make me look good. They aren't focused on X years down the road.
Can someone decode this euphemism? Even people that have been working at the same company as I am can't transfer to my project and start contributing on day one. Hell, they'll drag down my productivity for a while to get ramped up. So all I see is a desire to have the ramp shorter...
So you can see why I'm struggling to find any point in this article that doesn't boil down to "I want someone with industry workspace experience, at the cost of someone with zero experience."
> Can someone decode this euphemism?
Imagine that you sell Mercedes cars for 50 000 USD or more. Now imagine that a customer comes in one day and asks for the best model with all of the features, for only 10 000 USD.
Is it _wrong_ for the customer to ask? No. Will they be able to buy a Mercedes for 10 000 USD? No. What will happen is the customer will reset their expectations based on the current market. They may decide to not buy a car. They may decide to buy a cheaper car.
Same in the labor market. Employers can ask for anything they want. Whether they _get_ it is another matter entirely.
The story is, "Gosh, we can't seem to find anyone to fill the positions."
It's not, "Well, we had trouble, then realized we were offering too little, so we (worked around not filling it|budgeted more and found someone)."
> “I know I am a creative person who can do many of these jobs, but I think employers have these expectations that an applicant must bring a mid-level professional’s work experience and technical skills — even though it’s only an entry-level job,”
Well if they can find people who do have that experience and skill level, why would they hire you instead? It's simply a matter of supply and demand.
The issue is that when they can't, instead of compromising and training up someone with less applicable skills they simply crow about a "talent shortage".
I partially agree.. I think that one of the challenges is that lots of blue chip firms use a degree as a gating process to get an interview.
Faced with tens/hundreds of thousands of CV's, there probably has to be some kind of coarse filter to get past that and get them down to a meaningful number that a person can review. I know some companies in the UK still use UCAS points (A-Level results) as a gate to get from one stage in the process to another.
If you don't have a degree - even if you are a superstar/10x person, then it's going to be hard to get through the scripted screens that will block you from getting your CV in front of a hiring manager.
Generally after 7 or 8 years of experience, I guess a degree counts for less and its more about peoples experience.
I think it's time that we stopped seeing education as the means to get a job. Education != training and universities shouldn't exist just to get graduates employment. We used to have technical colleges for this sort of thing. I think it would be a shame if universities started adapting themselves to fit what employers want.
Having said that, if it is true that "they rate young applicants as deficient in such key workplace skills as written and oral communication, critical thinking and analytical reasoning", then this is a serious problem with the education system. Not because it doesn't train students to get a good job, but because their minds are clearly not being trained to think properly.
Not unlike many BBC articles, this one begins with a question presenting a false dichotomy. Why are you being rejected? Perhaps there are simply more people seeking work than there are jobs, and that however "well prepared" you are, the probability of being chosen for any particular job is therefore lower.
Perhaps it's a mixed blessing that our generation has faced such sobering difficulty in finding stable and meaningful employment. At some point as a result, our society might be prepared to recognize that the freer a market is, the less it guarantees a satisfactory way of life for its participants.
in a company there might be two narratives - we're all WORKING SO HARD ( you're probably not, really ) and WE CAN'T FIND ANY HELP ( because we're too special.)
This being said, I make a good living cleaning up after mishires/onboarding failures.
They economy is divided into Big Player high profile firms and firms milking some old cash cow into a middling slow Schumpeterian/thermodynamic death.
I think you're actually describing the other side of the same coin. If somebody has experience at one of these failing companies, they may not have gotten much of a shot at actually doing anything.
I shudder to think how anyone could clearly demonstrate a real lack of preparedness in two weeks. Again, I totally believe you but that's just incredible.
It's like we all live on asteroids that are drifting father and farther from each other.
We need publicly funded apprenticeships starting at 16 so anyone can get a job and real training at a reduced cost to the employer.
I'm not a big fan of Reagan but when he was right, he was right:
"The best social program is a good job."
I still think college isn't for everybody. My grandfather was a combat engineer in WWII but the GI Bill college track wasn't doing it for him so he started a successful restaurant instead.
That being said, co-ops are the only reasonable strategy for colleges to expect job placement upon graduation.
But most affordable state U's operate their low level math classes as weeders, not opportunities to educate students. So I don't think I would want to aggressively make policy to reduce college attendance without experimenting in improving their outcomes.
(And I agree with your last point.)
While I believe in high standards, I also am skeptical about how those standards are set and measured, and what the benefit truly becomes. If we teach the entire nation to be exactly one type of citizen, consumer, and worker, then we don't really benefit or diversify our job markets, do we?
What would that be? Classes in blame management? Email necromancy? How to beat your peers in stack ranking? How to obtain mandatory technical skills without training? How to live cheaply when your employer doesn't pay enough?
How about employers just admit that their problems are not unique (even though their software might be) and that training and retaining general-purpose employees is far more useful than hiring a bunch of (expensive) niche experts for every little project.
The article says that internships are where grads can get workplace experience but I've never handed real problems to any interns. Who would? Important stuff needs actual employees.
Frankly they'd learn more by watching me do my thing than solving their little intern assignments.
There's only one solution, give everyone free food/housing/healthcare/jobs. (Not just money, because that will just bid up the price of everything.)
If you're unemployed, vote for a stronger social safety net. That will not only yield free stuff for you, but also reduce the amount of hungry people competing with you for every job. Total no-brainer.
Take some of the skills cited like statistics. Most people in the workforce have atrocious practical stats skills, but enough to get by. For recent grads, it's abysmal to non-existent. A few years ago to back in the day, you wouldn't have been expected to apply such skills on day one. You'd have enough time to realize your skill gap and address it. Not anymore.
Anyone thinking about university is best served by choosing schools like University of Waterloo, where there is a strong culture of having kids do real work during the summer months at real companies (instead of summer school). Any school where kids are doing summer school or goofing around all summer are going to be left behind.