Employment

Employers in the business community are getting into the education business. From companies like Cisco Systems and Manpower to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, American businesses and business leaders are spending millions of dollars to address what they perceive to be a deficiency in the ability of the American education system to adequately prepare students to meet the demands of the workplace of the early twenty-first century. From funding for inner city computer centers to school-to-work participation, their interest is driven by the belief that high school and college graduates are not ready to adequately contribute in the workplace. This article addresses employer perceptions of employee readiness by outlining what employers need from employees, followed by their perceptions of the readiness of new employees to contribute to the organization's ability to meet these challenges.

Concern about readiness for work is not new. There is a history of government initiatives on this topic, perhaps most notably the Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS) in 1991. Readiness for work entails preparedness to learn and perform on the job, the ability to continue to learn, and the personal characteristics that contribute to successful accomplishment of work. According to Harold F. O'Neil Jr., Keith Allred, and Eva L. Baker, general categories of readiness skills consist of basic academic skills, higher order thinking or problem solving skills, interpersonal and teamwork skills, and attitudes or other characteristics such as the willingness and ability to take initiative and responsibility.

Organizational Needs and the Employment Environment

Perceptions of readiness are based on a framework of organizational needs that have been influenced significantly in recent years by changes in the competitive environment, in technology, and in theories of managerial best practices. Intense competition has forced organizations to become more customerfocused, with greater emphasis on understanding and quickly satisfying customer needs and on responding rapidly to changing customer preferences. Whereas Harry Braverman argued in 1974 that the technologies of the future would reduce workers to button-pushing automatons, the opposite has been the case. Workers at low levels of the organization are often expected to perform across a range of roles and responsibilities and must take initiative and use judgment in determining how to best satisfy customer needs and keep their team running smoothly. Whether responding to customer needs, competitor activities, or rapidly changing technology, the organizational imperatives are clear: speed, agility, and adaptability are crucial. Traditional command-and-control hierarchies with narrow, highly structured, routine jobs and tightly supervised workers are poorly suited to this kind of environment. Instead, organizations today are often more flexible, utilizing team-oriented, decentralized structures that empower lower-level workers to make decisions and take initiative.

Employer perceptions of employee readiness are influenced by a dynamic interplay among evolving organizational needs, educational institutions' practices, and the preparation of the students who enroll in educational institutions. These factors have changed the employers' needs and expectations of employees on all fronts. First, to function effectively in the twenty-first century workplace, employees need greater ability in the basics such as reading, writing, and arithmetic. Thus, employers desire workers with more formal education. In fact, whereas jobs requiring at least a bachelor's degree constituted 21 percent of jobs in 2000, they are forecast to comprise 29 percent of jobs by 2010. Employers expect employees to have the interpersonal skills necessary to communicate, solve problems, coordinate activities, and resolve conflict. Employees also need to possess the ability to self-manage, take initiative, and engage in self-directed learning. Moreover, employers want employees who are ethical and flexible. Research by Kristy Lauver and Huy Le shows a relationship between higher levels of emotional stability, agreeableness, and conscientiousness and lower numbers of workplace accidents.

Perceptions of Readiness

Employers tend to expect schools to build general skills such as basic knowledge, discipline, professionalism, good work habits, the ability to communicate, openness, perseverance, problem-solving ability, and well roundedness. Employers have not seen schools as being effective in producing specific, jobrelated skills, and employers do not view schooling as the sole or even primary source for developing such skills. For example, Madelyn Schulman's 1999 study of high school interns in school-to-work transition across various occupations revealed that, once at work, interns found themselves in an environment of which they had little or no understanding. Furthermore, 73 percent of managers in one survey described in The Lessons of Experience (1988) indicated that they used the skills taught in their master's of business administration (MBA) programs either "marginally or not at all" in their initial managerial assignments. Lynne Leveson reports that despite the efforts invested in building general competencies, the essential differences in the educational environment and the work environment create the inevitability of certain discontinuities between the two. Thus, many employers believe that job-related skills are company-specific and best acquired on the job and see the schools' role as making people trainable.

Daniela Gabric and Kathleen L. McFadden reported in 2001 that both employers' and students' judgment of the value of general skills such as working in teams, problem solving, and effective communication was significantly higher than the value of technical skills (which were still important but to a lesser degree). This approach is consistent with an ability to address the ever-changing demands from the competitive environment. However, despite the fact that both students and employers see great value in these general skills, employers still see schools as falling short. As noted above, this can be inferred from the actions taken and expenses incurred by employers to increase the readiness of individuals before, and as, they reach the workplace. In addition, anecdotal comments from employers suggest that many people in the early twenty-first century are coming out of school with a genuine lack of basic skills. Such comments are supported by empirical data from a variety of organizations. For example, Donald F. Treadwell and Jill B. Treadwell studied employers of communications graduates from multiple business sectors. They found that only 18.5 percent of the employers reported that new hires could perform the duties for which they were hired without additional time investment in training. The most critical weaknesses cited were the ability to write effectively for multiple audiences, to write persuasively, to engage in logical or critical thinking, and to work responsibly without supervision. In this area alone, problems resulting from poor written communication have been estimated to cost U.S. businesses more than $1 billion annually.

Employer and Employee Agreement

In order to address employee readiness, it is important for employers, employees, and educational institutions to recognize that there is, in fact, a problem. Are the perceptions of employers and new employees similar regarding employees' readiness for work?

John Arnold and Kate Mackenzie Davey examined whether new employees rated themselves comparably with their new managers on various work place competencies, including company know-how, interpersonal skills, product and service knowledge, specialist skills and knowledge, and achieving results; their findings indicated that perceptions varied between the two groups. Overall new employees rated themselves higher in skill level than did their managers. However, both new employees and their managers were least confident about the new employees' knowledge of the products and services of their organization and its competitors.

Similarly, differences have been found in the skills or traits deemed to be most important by employers and students about to enter the workforce. Gabric and McFadden noted that one of the major differences between employers' and students' ratings was in how highly they ranked the skill of conscientiousness. In a ranking of 34 personality traits, "being conscientious" was ranked sixth most important by employers but eighteenth by students, suggesting that students may not realize how important employers consider conscientiousness to be in employees.

Reducing the gap between new employee abilities and employer expectations may be facilitated by providing students with a better understanding of what qualities and characteristics employers value most and an accurate assessment of where students currently rank on these competencies and traits. Both schools and employers can assist in this process. Teachers may need to learn more about what employers want, do a better job of conveying this information to students, give students feedback, and encourage students to learn in applied settings as well as in the classroom. Employers may assist by providing internships and summer jobs that expose students to employer expectations, and by providing feedback to the students.

Conclusion

In sum, employers see schools as responsible for preparing students for productive work. Changes in technology, managerial practices, and the competitive environment have raised the level and breadth of knowledge, skills, and abilities that employers require from employees. This has further widened the already significant gap between employer needs and the actual skill levels and abilities of the graduates who enter the labor pool. Employers recognize that some forms of training are best conducted on the job and do not expect schools to produce students with specific job skills. However, employers expect schools to produce students with the ability to use general knowledge and with traditional academic skills such as reading, mathematics, writing, oral communication, and problem solving. Employers would also like schools to prepare students with general characteristics that enhance work performance, such as the ability to work productively with others and demonstrate initiative and responsibility.