15 Skills College Grads Need To Be Successful
What skills do college grads need to be successful? I’ve had the privilege of doing a variety of different work around on-boarding recent college graduates into their first full-time, post-collegiate jobs. A lot of this work has been looking for mutually-beneficial solutions for meeting young professionals where they are to take them where employers need them to be. This has had me thinking... what are the specific gaps between what colleges provide students and what employers expect them to know? Certainly this differs across fields. But if we could come together and agree on some particular skills, we could save employers (and young professionals) a lot of time, energy, and heartache down the line.
15 Skills College Grads Need To Be Successful
Note: Some of these are significant, some trivial, and most are somewhere in between. However, these are coming up continuously in conversations I have been having both with recent grads and those supervising them in the workplace.Identifying a professional vision and mission statement
Balancing short-term objectives with long-term planning
Knowing when to brainstorm possibilities and when to take action
How to coach up, down, and across (and be coachable)
Dressing appropriately for the workplace
Interacting with colleagues of different generations
Choosing the right form of communication for one’s intended audience
Providing clear and concise answers to questions
Giving a presentation
Intuiting a company’s culture and making one’s self a fit with it
Negotiation (as a way to preempt and respond to conflict)
Creating and maintaining appropriate professional boundaries
Performing customer service irrespective of role
Giving and receiving behavior-oriented feedback
Maintaining a possibility-centered mindset