Posted on 02/06/2005 1:32:00 PM PST by Willie Green
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.
When Debra Vargulish recruits on college campuses for Kennametal Inc., for example, the students she meets are often inarticulate and shy.
"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."
(Excerpt) Read more at post-gazette.com ...
Almost afraid to ask. But what does that mean?
Contents? Contents? We don' need no steenkin' contents.
I don't think so. The bigger problem is that most young people today don't read--no newspapers, no magazines and no books.
Word up Dawg!
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.
That word should be banned from every class in every high school. It drives me nuts. I 've heard some teenagers modify every word in a sentence with "like". ARrrrrrggggh.
Mad Libs were a popular learning game in which inexpensive booklets contained a fifty or so pages of paragraphs with key words missing and the "players" would fill in the words with "pronouns," "verbs," etc. If you were really bored, something approximating hilarity would ensue. As you got older the temptation to fill in the blanks with "dirty words" became overpowering.
I've been making a living since 67. Bad communication doesn't begin or end with what's coming out of college.
Time to recruit based on track record, not degrees.
That would make me a little nervous when choosing a doctor.
Good reason for hiring older workers, and getting rid of "degree required."
My boss doesn't communicate well at at, but he's constantly after the rest of us on the subject. It can be pretty frustrating.
what r u talking about ?
Of course that's a nonsense statement, based on the way things are (at least in this country) -- but I would rather be operated on by someone that had done the procedure 1,000 times before (regardless of their education) than by someone with fifteen degrees who had never done the procedure at all.
ping
Well, I suppose that's true in some cases, but I don't think you can make a blanket statement to that effect.
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
Is it possible for English majors to find good jobs outside of teaching??
It was a joke.
But the fact of the matter is -- and left unstated -- is that communication skills are a marker for "class" and "value." So is the ability to speak in clear, non-slang laden sentences along with the ability to express abstract or complex thoughts concisely.
Following those abilities are a degree from a reputable college, the knowledge/skill set needed to buy a suit and other articles of clothing that fit and eating a meal with something approaching table manners. Less important, though related, are a passing knowledge of art, music, history and architecture.
Yes, these are shallow perceptions of people, but I have seen brilliant people languish in middle management for lack of them.
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