Why New Graduates Face Hiring Challenges

You’ve just finished an exciting (or tedious) graduation ceremony and are eager to take your shiny, new—hard-earned—degree into the workplace to begin a sterling career. Fast forward a few months as you’re staring at your computer e-mail screen or telephone wondering why none of your outstanding cover letters and CVs has generated not even one positive response from prospective employers.

Real World Hiring Perceptions

New graduates should understand some less-than-encouraging realities of the post-recession business, education, health care, research, and IT world. Many employers, only now emerging from an environment of survival, not aggressive growth or profit strategies, are, as a group, disappointed with recent new graduate hires. They are not displeased with the candidates but with their useful knowledge level.

These employers do not find fault with the people, but do find their educational training, which lacks the skills necessary for the immediate contribution employers desire. To better understand their concerns, consider a sports industry hypothetical example. The difference in baseball and football or basketball skills is more complex than simple athletic ability.

Major league baseball has a network of minor leagues that allow their top prospects to fine tune and improve their skills to warrant their eventual (in two to five years) promotion to the big league team. Professional football and basketball teams, however, seek those college players who can contribute to their teams from year one, after they draft and contract with them.

Business, education, government, and medical employers, like pro football and basketball teams, have no “minor leagues," nor the patience to wait for their new graduate hires to acquire the skills to contribute. They assume the college experience has provided the basic skills to permit new graduates to perform, however modestly, for the “big league team” immediately after hire.

Author Michael Cooney, in a recent article published in Network World, reports than, after a survey of 376 organizations, their IT department hiring managers found that only eight percent rated computer science graduates as “well-trained, ready-to-go” new employees. This result is significant, because, unlike art or history majors, IT grads should have the most cutting-edge knowledge, in the fast changing technology world, available to employers.

Further, almost four of ten survey participants state that new grad IT employees are “not sufficiently prepared to perform jobs” at their companies. In addition, around 44 percent noted “gaps in their skills.” After spending $50,000 to $200,000 on college degrees, new graduates have a sound basis for their employment unhappiness. These results may be more disturbing since most respondents indicate that they were “ready to hire.” These results seem to echo the employer complaints of earlier decades that U.S. high schools did not prepare their graduates for the real world by concentrating on world history at the expense of teaching the useful basics of balancing a checkbook or creating a grocery shopping list.

How to Overcome These Challenges

unfortunately, there is no magic potion to cure this problem for new graduates. However, here are a few suggestions to help reverse the employer perception that your college studies are lacking in the real world workplace.

•Find internships that offer the real world experience you lack. For example, if you are a communications major and want a career in the broadcast or hospitality industries, seek out internships with local TV or radio stations or hotels, offering little or no pay, but delivering valuable experience.

•Identify your target industry(s) and learn what skills employers want. Use the Internet to better target the industry you prefer, and learn of the specific skills they want for new, inexperienced hires. Once you learn, begin doing. Acquire those valuable skills to become more attractive to hiring managers. You must know the rules before you can play the game properly.

•Consider accepting entry level jobs at levels lower than you originally desired to gain some useful experience and understanding of the skills wanted by your chosen industry. As you polish your new degree, you may want to start as a fast track management employee in your chosen industry. However, you may be wiser to accept a career position lower than your original target to become a paid “observer” of the day-to-day skills the industry employers really want. Remember, knowledge is power—make it your, not their power.

•Do your homework. Learn what skills your desired career path demands of those succeeding in your field. Homework and professional improvement never ends, contrary to what you may believe. If you want to be a superstar in sports, education, government, or any pursuit it takes repetition and hard work. But, first, you must do your homework and learn what it takes to outdistance your competition.

Be proud of your new degree. Understand that employers reporting some displeasure with the skill level of new graduate hires are not making derogatory statements about you personally. They are merely commenting on the perceived lack of some useful skills that your institution felt unnecessary to teach you.

Hopefully, your professional career will be a long, successful, and monetarily or personally rewarding to you. Unless your family owns the company, you should be prepared to start your professional career at levels that are less than you originally hoped, but offer you a positive road map, offering opportunities to achieve.

The future is yours to construct in any way you choose. Acquire, through further education, perseverance, persistency, and commitment, the skills and expertise employers want. This IS personal. Set your goals high, commit to them, and do all that it takes to achieve them. If you take these three steps, you will succeed. Guaranteed.