Ryan Stephens Marketing

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53% of Recent College Grads Are Jobless or Underemployed reports the Atlantic.

FIFTY-THREE PERCENT!?

I genuinely wish I could say I was surprised. But it’s about as surprising as the promiscuous girl’s relapse less than a month after she returns from church camp.

… “college for all” is the wrong mantra. We need to be talking about “skills for all” instead.

The article is primarily talking about more tangible skills like writing code or administering an IV, but being successful goes beyond those things as well. A programmer who can’t communicate with his team and a nurse with no empathy for her patients won’t get hired.

Which begs the question…

What are some other skills young professionals should’ve learned in school?

I asked seven wicked-smart under 30 professionals. What follows are their responses:

1.) What it Means to Work
Diana Antholis discusses the fact that we are taught the skills necessary for certain jobs in college, but we are not prepared for what happens when we actually enter into those jobs.

2.) Life Skills 101
Jake Cripe explains that we need to learn life skills like networking, public speaking, how to change a tire and how to do our taxes. He also explains why teachers are soldiers going to war without weapons.

3.) Entrepreneurship
Sam Davidson insists it’s time to make the connection between education and entrepreneurship. “Perhaps the reason we don’t have more people starting more companies that could jump start our economy is because our country spent the last 20 years educating them to do anything but,” he laments.

4.) Emotional Intelligence
Tom O’Keefe urges students (and educators) to stop playing the memorization/regurgitation game and to focus on increasing emotional intelligence by enhancing the soft skills such as effective communication via body language.

5.) Personal Finance
Rich Pulvino understands that debt and unemployment are two things that have a stranglehold on recent graduates. Teaching students how to find the right credit card deals, manage debt, save money, and invest properly will help combat the confusion they often encounter upon graduation.

6.) It’s Okay to Fail
Patrick Johnson would’ve tried a lot more things, both academically and with respect to his future, had he known it was okay to take risks and to fail.

7.) Leadership
Michelle Bizon starts by admitting that leading isn’t easy. She goes on to explain why neither authority nor expertise make you a good leader, and that we don’t learn leadership in school despite the fact that it’s imperative to establishing a bridge between theory and performance.

What are we missing? What do you wish you would’ve learned in school?

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