College students wishful image of college experience

College students dream of their efforts at grades resulting in a work place in the real world where they are respected, wanted, and better treated than most find their college experience to be in real life. Unfortunately, a new poll from the Society of Human Resource Management reflects the perception in the hiring market that college students are NOT ready for work in the real world!

An article from the Kansas City Star and authored by Diane Stafford shows plenty of issues in the perception of the newly graduating college students. To be blunt, the numbers are really difficult and discouraging.

From the report we find English skills are not proficient in the eyes of the hiring managers. My first thought was are they talking in some sort of text lingo? The report did not go that deep, but no student should ever demonstrate their language skills in text talk around any business people who later may be in a position to network on their behalf.

“Forty-nine percent of human resource officials polled by the professional organization said this year’s college graduates lack basic English skills in grammar and spelling. Eighteen percent said the grads come up short in math and computation. Thirteen percent faulted the grads’ spoken English, and 10 percent cited a lack of reading comprehension.”

If that was not bad enough, the survey found that hiring professionals also expressed that their “biggest complaint by hirers was that the graduates lacked “professionalism” or “work ethic,” a deficiency listed by half of those surveyed. Nearly half detected a lack of “business acumen.” as well.

High School image of college experience

Further reading on the poll showed that 20% of hiring professionals see graduates as “under-qualified” for their job openings. This is really hard core real world data that should smack every college student and high school student thinking of college up the side of their heads!

College student on bike with backpack

College students often think they deal with real world reality when they hit campuses every year. The cost of a car may be too much, so a bike may be used to save on gas, if they even have a car for instance! Sitting on the grass singing camp fire songs is something that is rare too on real world campuses. College is competitive and it is a business, from both ends of the experience, the school end and the student end.

Students study in the library

Where is the average college student going to get the skills that the Society of Human Resource Management members see many of them lacking? Well, one place could be as an empowered volunteer if the student has positioned him or herself for that opportunity.

A student could conceivably pull off a spontaneous empowered volunteer crusade, particularly if their results were worthy and verifiable in their past. Usually this would require a past history of success. Hopefully your volunteer track record supports your requests for the opportunity!

The social skills needed to deliver on demand a set number of qualified candidates is something worthy of a resume note, particularly when accompanied with the data support for the effort and the return on investment you produced by taking on the project lead the new members were required for in the first place and seeing that project to a successful conclusion, all with proper data documentation.

The potential to take the summer (if you have it off from classes) to volunteer between your income supporting job requirements and perhaps run a committee with a special project that delivers measurable results would also be a great resume addition. For this kind of opportunity to work, most likely you would have to be already a member of the group and have previously proven to be able to lead the effort, as justified by past successes.

This means that being seen in volunteer circles as a person who can get things done is well worth cultivating. You can’t start too early in this regard, since emotional intelligence or social intelligence are characteristics which are very hard to demonstrate numerically.

Poll showed graduates are more likely to be “tech savvy” over older applicants.

From college applications to resumes, everything goes better with data on it. Data can be demonstrated in many ways, but failure to gather data is one potential deal killing detail that in the business world is unforgivable. Never fail to gather meaningful and pertinent data at every potential chance, you can always condense and edit the data later. Once the data is lost, it is usually not recoverable.

If you can show a trend in growth for building memberships, finishing projects, leading small groups or teams to completion of a special project, or take on a task that no one else wanted and succeed, then you can be one of the graduates who can demonstrate that you have business sense that they are looking according in this poll.

The key is to document things properly and to do so consistently early on in your student life. You can’t have too much data to draw on, and depending on how many different resumes you will have to produce, different data might be needed on different targeted resumes.

College student in lighter moment

A real life example of something the hiring managers might consider worthy would be taking your church group’s initiative to start a new youth camp at a new facility which previously had not existed, with no ready source of funding identified. You conceived the idea and sold the it to the church leaders, successfully promoted and funded it through your social capital sources built over your high school time as well as business sponsors you successfully pitched, and then implemented the structure for the camp to continue into the future, all on a budget. That is a very worthy project if your numbers reflect your story properly!

Business leaders positively favor those who can bring in a project on time which they had to seek donations to fund and then kept to a budget as well.

Make no mistake, leading volunteers is challenging for anyone, but for college students the challenges of leading others who are likely to be older than you are even greater. The social skills needed to stroke the right emotions on each and every member in order to get the desired results are vital to your success and they are very easily transferable to the real world when you interview with a hiring manager who wants demonstrated successes. They will want to know how you got your team motivated and how you kept them on track for an entire summer when most people have other things they would rather be doing.

Be ready to illustrate your success with good answers that reflect team building words, keeping the “I’s” to a minimum.

College student in suit on steps looking for a job

The same poll found that currently hiring managers described as “very difficult” jobs to fill were engineers, computer technicians, programmers, scientists, and skilled trades which are often more on the job training or technical school sourcing rather than requiring college.

STEM Majors 

If you are in a major which is not a STEM type (science, technology, engineering, or math) such as political science, humanities, languages, or perhaps philosophy and you find your resume short on business supporting data points reflected in this poll, consider using the empowered volunteer strategy for some resume muscle building.

Finding jobs today is better conducted when you have an active network that can support you. People who have already worked with you and found your work ethic worthy are much more likely to support your effort to find the underground network of unadvertised jobs too. Way too many of those who go into STEM majors find themselves without the ability to demonstrate their soft skill sets, their social intelligence, or their emotional intelligence data points too.

Everyone needs to improve their soft skills while properly recording and documenting their achievements which demonstrate these skills in abundance for the competitive job market graduates are finding themselves in today.

Empowered volunteers in college can be the cream that rises to the top if they plan accordingly for success by becoming an empowered volunteer, making themselves more ready for the real world.

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