Posted on 03/27/2018 7:02:16 AM PDT by Altura Ct.
Companies are realizing that they have to train new workers to learn job skills that they failed to learn in college, according to a new Wall Street Journal report. A new column published last week in the Wall Street Journal revealed that a four-year college degree might actually hinder an employee’s readiness to complete job-specific tasks after hiring.
The report revealed that AT&T is spending more than $1 billion to train their employees on how to perform various tasks at the evolving telecommunications company. Some attribute this to the amount of time new employees spend in college learning skills that they will never apply on the job.
According to employer surveys, only half of college graduates end up landing a job that allows them to utilize the skills they learned in their degree program.
Some employers have encouraged reliance on bachelor’s degrees as a proxy for skills by requiring a diploma for jobs that didn’t previously require one, Mr. Fuller said. But such degree requirements are limiting the number of applicants for a job and increasing costs for companies and employees. They also lead to frustration for workers, since fewer than half of people who enroll in college end up graduating and landing a job that utilizes their degree, he said.
Some, including Dr. Ed Schweitzer, a former electrical engineering professor, argues that the current educational system may prevent great minds from breaking into the field in which they could make a great impact.
“If Thomas Edison walked through the door today, would we turn him away because we don’t have a job opening for an inventor?” Dr. Schweitzer said.
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
College should provide a broad theory in the skills needed for a career.
What an employer should look for in a prospect is:
Presumably, the college grad picked a field of study they are passionate about. Does the prospect exhibit enthusiasm? Are they passionate about their chosen career?
Grades will show competence and commitment. You want someone with good grades but passion for the job can be more important than grades. Some folk don't do well at book-learning but they have passion. (This does not apply to most STEM jobs. Engineering depends are strong skill sets in math and physics so bridges don't fall down. In this case, passion won't cut it.).
Most businesses will have unique job skill requirements that can only be learned 'on the job' and will be tailored for the business.
Any employee who expects to hire someone directly out of college with the perfect set of jobs skills and requiring no training is naive.
If Thomas Edison walked into a college door today he would be taught his gender is up for grabs, the country that he loved was ' sexist, and that he was a toxic because he was a man.
Hand that man some opioids to blunt the pain and a gun to blow his brains out....
The most important thing to do in college is Network, Network, Network!!!!
References make all the difference.
...their HR manager who is inevitably an idiot and a hack - they all are.
Strongly agree.
Doctors don’t need leftist indoctrination either - start them at the ‘medical school’ level... same with engineers and lawyers... A prerequisite for being a doctor should NOT be 4 years of ‘toxic men’ lectures.
Mainly Reading, Writing and Arithmetic.
A few years back, I hired some dolt straight out of college for an electrical engineering job. His grades were good, and he appeared OK. A week later, I had to fire him, he didn’t know what diodes and transistors were and I wasn’t going to teach electronics while on the job, to someone with an electrical engineering degree.
Universities specialize in debt for the students and worthless degrees. No wonder the students are frustrated.
What? Psychology or queer studies don’t make someone employable?
My best man had a similar experience and made it a career. He retired at age 48 with full benefits and has a second “career” tying flies for a local company, which is his passion.
College at the most can teach you the fundamentals of your field and how to learn. It’s a major difference from trade and technical schools where you actually learn to work on stuff.
I took a year and a half of welding, I went to work the next week and after a couple of weeks of crap work as the new kid was laying down beads on the production line.
I also got my BA in Political Science, trained as a pollster, learned statistics and the history of the American political system, etc, and started working with a polling firm, quickly realizing that all my theoretical knowledge didn’t mean squat if we didn’t complete enough properly conducted (finished all questions, all demographic data, no contamination of answers) interviews each shift, which required a skill set I had in no way developed! It took over a year before I was doing more good than harm supervising the interviewers and training new ones..
Indeed.
That is certainly better than Ivanka’s idea that the federal government be involved!
She is very much like Hillary and the left as seeing it the government’s function to micromanage what vocational skills are taught to whom to match with what vocational jobs.
Skills like showing up for work on time, Not wearing yoga pants to work, writing a two page engineering report using paragraphs, proper sentence structure and correct spelling,
working of periods of 60 minutes or greater without using your personal Iphone or Ipad. etc.
Many college graduates show up to their first job unable to file properly.
Filing is very important.
If everything is filed properly the business runs much smoother.
If outside auditors are present the audit time can be dramatically reduced, enabling the work force to resume normal activities instead of wasting valuable time searching for misfiled items.
Also, the auditors are more apt to feel like everything is on the up and up if all papers requested can be pulled in seconds.
We're talking about businesses erroneously believing a college grad will or should have the skills needed for the job.
Businesses should understanding that while colleges provide broad theoretical background once hired the new employee will have to be trained.
Unless they interned or worked in a similar family business and have transferable skills that require little in-house training.
My daughter said the worst problem is no work ethic. Many have no clue it is important to get to work on time and actually work. Her company prefers to hire older people even if the younger ones are more “paper” qualified.
Just to be clear, are you stating a universal belief in the role of college, or the state of decay of college degrees today?
Wasn't there a time when industry would give grants to colleges for research into needed technologies for the dual purpose of developing next generation technologies for businesses and preparing a program for students to learn the funded field?
In other words, there was always a Humanities component to basic college curricula to teach critical thinking and the arts, but then there were the specific upper division disciplines that reflected the economic needs of the workforce.
Now, this may have been more distinguished when America was still an industrial manufacturing powerhouse, and colleges now are reflecting the social changes from the liberal "peace dividend" that transitioned away from industrial (read: wartime) economies to service economies to "social justice" economies (read: green, climate-change, privilege transfer) that we see today.
We are seeing the inevitable result that colleges today are no longer serving the economic needs of the nation, because the products of these schools are unprepared to take the place of their retiring counterparts.
-PJ
Really? How do you determine whether or not an 18 year-old has the ability to learn? I understand there are a lot of colleges and universities that seem to do more indoctrination than education; that's what we see in the news every day. But there are still a number of places of higher learning that maintain a level of academic rigor, and I don't think it's fair to sweep them all under the same mat.
More importantly, the student that can persevere for 4 years in a STEM or other rigorous major, manage their time and classes, and can still graduate with little or no debt (or can easily obtain a job with a high starting salary to quickly pay off that debt), deserves more recognition. These graduates HAVE the foundation that companies seek, and they've proven it.
There's nothing inherently wrong with the concept of a bachelor's degree program, even in some liberal arts' fields. The problem with many colleges and universities is that they've been hijacked by Leftists who have abused the open and largely democratic atmosphere of the university environment, and have made it their own.
I don't know what the solution to the above is, perhaps it's irreparable. But companies don't have the time or the resources to train a bunch of 18 year-olds to become the shining stars of tomorrow.
And I don't know where you work, but I have spent a majority of my career, in both cubicles and open office spaces. I can say without hesitation, that while I don't always use it, certainly not in a more advanced and tenured position, my college degree was very valuable and necessary.
To the left, this is no longer seen as symbiosis. They see it as parasitism.
An evil private company funding research at a university using state money and university resources?
Unless it's for a self-proclaimed 'green science' like man made global warming research this can get a school in trouble.
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