Weekend Business Bulletin
IB Foundations: Emotional Intelligence
A college education is not the same as it was twenty years ago. Businesses expect graduates of today to be able to hit the ground running with a full toolbox to attack any project thrown at them. It’s true, there is a huge disconnect between college grad’s perception of themselves and the businesses’ expectations of them. Undergraduate college admissions in the US and unemployment rates for recent grads grew nearly in lockstep from 2000-2017. When asked whether they had work ethic nearly 90% of new grads said they did. Less than half of the businesses asked the same question agreed with them. Are students largely unprepared, or are businesses asking too much too quickly?
According to Brenda Leadley, senior vice president and head of HR Americas at Allianz Global Corporate & Specialty in New York City, she’ll tell you the issue is grads lack of soft skills. In the IB department, we have all heard this term before. We learned in IB foundations that soft skills are essentially our emotional quotient or EQ. They are the interpersonal skills that can make you stand above other candidates with the same hard or technical skills.
Over the next few weeks, we will uncover exactly what businesses are truly asking for, where the gaps are in student’s training, and what’s being done to fix it. Francis Bacon is credited with saying, “knowledge is power”. There is indeed power in knowledge. However, it needs to be the right knowledge. Businesses are constantly saying grads are not knowledgeable about EQ. I encourage you to follow the article link below. Gain knowledge of what businesses need from new grads to power your future.
“What Happened to the Promise of a 4 Year College Degree”
://www.shrm.org/ResourcesAndTools/hr-topics/employee-relations/Pages/What-Happened-to-the-Promise-of-a-4-Year-College-Degree.aspx
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