A recent study revealed that four in 10 corporations and almost half of academic institutions believe that recent graduates lack certain so-called “soft skills” needed in the workforce to be successful, including emotional intelligence, complex reasoning and negotiation and persuasion.
While hard skills are “easily measured,” soft skills “are more of the intangibles that are hard to access and measure,” according to Dr. Marcheta Evans, provost and vice president for academic affairs at Our Lady of the Lake University.
The just-released 2018 Bloomberg Next study sponsored by Workday – “Building Tomorrow’s Talent: Collaboration Can Close Emerging Skills Gap” – included responses from 200 senior-level individuals from both academia and business.
Employers are now more focused on interpersonal skills rather than GPA, according to the study. In response, some universities are releasing extracurricular transcripts that demonstrate a student’s individual skills in addition to grades.
Such activities can provide a window into soft skills that employers increasingly are demanding in the workplace, from teamwork and self-regulation to multicultural competency and perseverance.
“Businesses are learning that [GPA] was an artificial measure of how successful the student could be on the job,” said Dr. Cheryl Talley, an associate professor of neuroscience at Virginia State University. “It is an easy measure to have, to assess and to look at on the resume. But if this wasn’t correlating with how successful you’d be on the job, then it’s an artificial measure.”
In recent years, technology has changed the workforce and how people communicate with one another.
