[Willie Green]

Gotta get back to teaching the basics.

[stylin19a]

wait til they get hired and find out it's the "dilbert" bosses that can't communicate.

[independentmind]

They have cell phones, BlackBerries and Palm Pilots and live by instant messaging and the Internet. Yet many graduating college students get bad grades from employers for their communications skills.

Two weeks ago, I had this very conversation with the head of the firm where I work. The problem in particular is writing skills.

[Edgewood Pilot]

Thank you for the post.

It's printed out and on the family bulletin board in an attempt to COMMUNICATE the importance employers place on skillful communication.

[durasell]

k;jhdfskjhfdk askjhdsfahjdfs a kjlkdjdf!!!!!!!

[atomicpossum]

A pertinent question might be why are they getting out of college without the basic skills they should have developed around seventh grade?

[nmh]

I take it Ebonics and slang aren't big hits?

LOL!

Liberals will do anything to make people unemployable when their done their liberal indoctrination program at the local public school.

[Polybius]

"They seem to be way better at using technology than older people. It's actually the content that is missing," said Vargulish, a training administrator at the Latrobe-based global tooling company. "A lot of them don't know what to say at all, and that's not good."

Why that's...that's....

I just don't know what to say.

[anniegetyourgun]

Don't get me started...

[LS]

When I ask students questions in class, I insist that they answer in a complete sentence, and if they say the word, "like," I give a big buzzer noise. After a while, they can actually speak!

[Osage Orange]

The Post-Gazette needs to interview the administrator where I work. She's a first class educated idiotic moron.....

How's that for commmunicating?

[Knitting A Conundrum]

Three things make a good writer: reading a lot (for both content and for style models), practice, and feedback.

They can do this in classes, or they can do this on their own.

But composition teachers and others who teach writing are often low-man on the status-of-teacher totem pole, both in pay and respect (with the vast majority of composition instructors never reaching tenure, and treated like the temps they are, with low pay, no chance for advancement, and few benefits, who get cut loose every three to five years to find another position. It's often a case of you get what you pay for. Many classes are taught by grad students, too.) Instructors, as opposed to professors, often have class loads of 100 - 150 students a semester, with paper grading loads of 200-300 papers that have to be read personally, and commented on in a way that ought to help the student. This work, unlike math and many other subjects, cannot be passed off to a TA. The instructor may still feel feel driven to try to do the "publish or perish" thing and be active in committee work in the often vain hope they might get put on the tenure track.

Because of the sweatshop mentality in composition classes, you frequently get training that is inadequate. The students don't want to do it, the faculty who aren't teaching it remember how they didn't want to do it, either, but they know there is a real need for students to be able to write with some competency, so they give in on some points and keep the programs alive, if not sufficiently funded, and try to get the high schools to do more prep work.

And then employers complain that their workers come in unable to write adequately.
You often get what you pay for. We don't want to put in the time and effort necessary, in things like reading and teaching reasoning, so we get what we get.

[RightWhale]

It's actually the content that is missing

Contents? Contents? We don' need no steenkin' contents.

[dljordan]

Word up Dawg!

[dirtboy]

Some of the best, most useful coursework I took in college was related to Technical Writing. And I would advise any college grad to learn to write - and, once you get out in the workforce, learn business skills - because both of those are the hardest to outsource.

[Ed_in_NJ]

Time to recruit based on track record, not degrees.

[WFTR]

There may be some very real problems with young people's ability to speak and write, but I think part of this result is just laziness in answering the question. If the boss is only vaguely familiar with what his new employees really do for the company and is asked what the new employees' shortcomings are, the boss isn't likely to admit that he doesn't know his employees' jobs well enough to describe performance weaknesses. Similarly, if each new employee is weak in different areas, the boss isn't going to give a survey a detailed breakdown of where those weaknesses are. It's easier for the boss to give the blanket answer "weaknesses in communication."

I was a teaching assistant at a engineering college in Tennessee from 1996 until 1999, and I graded lab reports for several classes of about 30 students. (I had gone back to school after being in industry, so I had some separation from the young people in class.) Overall, their ability to write wasn't bad. They needed to grow and become better, but I expect 20-year-olds to need development in that area. I could give specific examples of sentences, paragraphs, and statements that were amazingly stupid, but that anecdotal evidence would not be an honest representation of the papers that I saw.

I work with an engineer who graduated two or three years ago, and he writes fairly well. Admittedly, he's just one more piece of anecdotal evidence, but I'm encouraged to see his talent. I've read e-mails from other young engineers at work, and I can't remember any that were particularly bad.

I would love to teach a technical writing course at a community or junior college level when I retire someday. I think part of the course should include the differences between writing technical memos or reports for documentation and writing effective e-mails that answer quick questions that arise in the course of a regular work day.

Bill

[k2blader]

Is it possible for English majors to find good jobs outside of teaching??

[KfromMich]

I don't think you can blame this phenomenon entirely on schools. Part of what is described in aritcle- students who are inarticulate and shy during interviews- is probably mostly because they are young and inexperienced. It's natural to be nervous at a job interview, and it's natural to be especially nervous if it's the first one you've ever had. People who have been out in the business world for a while probably have a much better idea of what to expect in an interview than students do.

I would say that there is some hope that these students will improve their communication skills with practice.

[numberonepal]

It's actually the content that is missing

Content is King. It always has been, and it always will be. Kids pick up very very bad habits when using all this technology. A lot of them think the shorthand writing, lack of capitalization or punctuation, and smilies is communicating. I don't even want to talk about the extra-grammatical "likes" that drip from every sentence when they speak. One of my first tests when hiring is to solicit an email from a candidate. Just a note, mind you, but this can be very telling. I want it to seem informal like day to day email conversation with a customer. From here I can gather a plethora of information concerning the candidate.