According to UCAS, recent studies of what organisations want from young people entering work are indicating, in general, a move to valuing “soft” skills or attitudes more and more. I would tend to agree with this.
It’s industry and role-dependent of course. For example, if you’re a commercial truck driver in our business, you need to be able to drive a truck without crashing it! However, that isn’t enough for us.
If I had been slaving away at school to get the exam results, or if I was going back to school this week, I think I would find this confusing. Particularly as the Youth Voice Census data shows that only a third of 11-18 year-olds understand what skills employers want them to have, or say that their school helps them to develop their ‘employability’.
This is quite a big problem but an area where SMEs could do some good.
So what do we want? Does doing well at school still matter?
Following the announcement of the summer exam results, the usual remedial class of ‘successful’ school-hating adults have congratulated themselves about how badly they did at school, ‘and just look at me now with my mansions, cars and helicopters…’ This bothers me. I don’t think it’s responsible to say exam results and qualifications don’t matter.
Time spent in those so-formative years at school still matters deeply. School should be where you start to understand and put in place the things you’ll need to succeed in your life. The exam results you come out with at the end are just one output from all this, but each result has its own story. So, the result you got from the extra effort you put in, the result you got with the fantastic support from a particular teacher, the result you got despite the lack of encouragement from a particular teacher and, of course, learning from your mistakes, like “why did I take art? I realise now it’s not one of my strengths and maybe I should have listened to my parents!”
Now that I’m in the position to influence who works here, I’m going to share our view of what team-led organisations like us are looking for:
- Firstly, your qualifications do still matter. They get you through the door.
- Arm yourselves with the appropriate skills, experience and competencies to perform your particular roles, whether you want to work in Logistics, Finance, Procurement, Marketing or Sales.
- Get things done, but in the right way. The way you go about getting things done is really important. It turns out “soft” skills are actually quite hard but they are really valued by your colleagues. But don’t worry, these things can be coached and nurtured, but it’s down to you.
- Take ownership, put your hand up and take the initiative. And if you aren’t the one putting your hand up on this particular occasion, support those that have.
- Lead and develop other people – we can all do this.
- Embrace the opportunities you are given – you still have a lot to learn.
At the beginning, I said that school should be where you start to understand and put in place the things you’ll need to succeed in your life, but I understand that not everyone gets to have the school experience they deserve. This is a tragedy. There are far too many sub-optimal outcomes achieved by schools. This surely cannot be simply down to funding. SMEs also face huge challenges in the area of costs and budgeting. Instead, imagine the huge amount of untapped potential that could be unlocked by thinking more about how schools are run, led and the performance of the people working in them.
