Why your College degree won’t buy you skills
For several years now, there has been this global concern in the business world that College graduates don’t meet the set of skills that companies and the actual workplace needs. Business is changing faster than ever and it can be difficult sometimes to keep pace. This is an issue regarding universities, students, and companies. This gap has led to the creation of the “gig economy” but it also has affected big companies because they don’t find the talent they need to develop their programs, products, and services.
So, there are two ways to see this: as an educational problem, or as skillset or generational issue. Most adults focus on the latter because it’s easier to blame “the millennials” than to develop changes and embrace new generations with their different ideas. Of course it can also get a little help from the educational system, mostly through universities. Most of them still offer educational programs and subjects designed around 50 years ago. This model will only help student to a certain extent because it focuses more on knowing and remembering than in thinking and problem solving. As far as this issue goes, students can more easily be left behind if they don’t have an advanced College education that prepares them to XXI Century problems.
On the other hand, a lot of the younger workers (ages between 16 to 25) have a more natural and organic bias towards technology and usually are dependent of it. This can affect their cognitive skills because it seems as if everything was done for them instead of making them think. If you combine this problem with the one presented above in this article, you get a whole generation of people who are not prepared to join in the modern business world. Some of the most important skills needed aren’t even technical, but more of soft skills such as emotional inteligence, critical thinking, and effective communication to name a few. The constant individual world led by techonology in phones and social media has left these people stranded from developing these critical skills from an early age.
In this ever changing world, how can new generations step up to expectations? Regardless if they are thinking of joining a huge company (Apple, Walmart, etc.) or a startup, the skill set they need is basically the same. Many of these people think that by joining a smaller company, they will be “demanded” less responsibilities or performance. That’s not the case. These skills are learned through emotional maturity and personal growth. There is no hack for that. I think that on some level, the word “success” has been changed for “life experiences” as in as long as you’re enjoying the moment, it must be soul-food.
We live in an era of knowledge, communication, and incredible technological advances. Despite this, people tend to look for more and more individual experiences rather that increase their networking skills. A College degree in any major won’t guarantee success if the person isn’t ready to work in a team and create value. The path to success is in builiding a personal brand and working as a team.
