Recently I was interviewing Cynthia Bigelow, president of Bigelow Tea, America’s leading specialty tea company, and I asked her opinion about the qualifications of today’s college graduates.
She started raving about a new employee just out of college. He was turning heads at her company because of his ideas, energy and enthusiasm. Bigelow said the young man was brilliant and she predicted he could be a difference-maker at her company.
But, I asked her, what about other college graduates who don’t quite have the same determination and intellect?
“They don’t get hired,” Bigelow said with a sarcastic laugh, as though the answer was self-evident.
I hope some college or university has asked Bigelow to deliver this year’s commencement address. The dose of reality might be a bummer on a day that’s supposed to be all about celebration, but for young people entering the job market, the sooner they hear the news, the better.
USA Today reported last month that “a weak labor market has left half of young college graduates either jobless or underemployed in positions that don’t fully use their skills and knowledge.”
The paper cited Michael Bledsoe, 23, as an example of a graduate who has yet to hit his stride.
“I don’t even know what I’m looking for,” said Michael Bledsoe, who works in a Seattle coffeehouse. He graduated with a degree in creative writing.
Bledsoe could try looking at it from the employer’s perspective. Sorry Michael, but here’s what most businesses are NOT looking for—an aspiring novelist.
Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens this week published an open letter to the Class of 2012. He included a stern warning: “Please spare us the self-pity about how tough it is to look for a job while you are living with your parents. They’re the ones who spent a fortune on your education only to get you back—return-to-sender, forwarding address unknown.”
Part of the problem these young graduates face is not completely of their own doing. Parents have coddled children in an attempt to protect them from bruised feelings, while the popular culture has replaced a healthy sense of modesty with overabundant self-assurance.
Education studies consistently show that while the United States is losing ground to other countries in math and science, our students consistently rank near the top in the category of self-confidence.
Stephens writes that in reviewing student resumes he is assaulted by what he calls “endless Advertisements for Myself. Here you are, 21 or 22 years old, claiming to have accomplished feats in past summer internships or at your school newspaper that would be hard to credit in the biography of Walter Lippmann or Ernie Pyle.”
“When did puffery become the American Way?” Stephens asks. Probably at about the same time reality TV, Facebook and Twitter created the notion that every thought and action, no matter how banal, is significant and interesting.
Despite the grim labor statistics, the knowledge economy is desperate for bright minds and hard workers. Unfortunately for those entering the labor market, employers have sharpened their hiring acumen during the downturn; they know what they are looking for in prospective workers and it’s not a “people person” with an embellished resume.