Why is this surprising? Why should college degree imply ability to find a job? Alot of my classmates appear to do little more than drink + party. I know for a fact that I would not hire them. Why would others?
If anything this seems to show that the general market has finally started realizing how worthless a college degree is.
Umm, not sure about that ... I'm not saying college kids don't party too much or that degrees aren't worthless to some degree.
But I think it's clear that this statistic shows that there's more competition for fewer jobs.
At the very least, a college degree isn't worthless if it's required to enter the field you wish to work in. Browse Monster.com and see how many finance and/or engineering jobs don't require a college degree.
From your tone, I'm gathering you have problems with people who equate a college degree with skills/ability ... you're more than welcome to feel that way, but I don't think you're proving such a consensus has caused the drop in graduates w/ jobs.
A lot of advertisements claim to require a college degree even if the company is perfectly willing to hire qualified applicants without one. They do this to cut down the number of applications they have to wade through. The type of dropout that they're actually willing to hire will probably apply anyway, regardless of what the ad says, and it weeds out a lot of chaff that isn't qualified and is just looking for a job, any job.
Presumably, the point behind college is to do more than drink, party, and have a sheet of paper that shows some baseline amount was learned through the drunken haze. What that baseline is, and how much the person is toeing it, isn't really obvious with just a official sheet of paper.
I do hope, however, that the market is not overzealous in what it dismisses. The degree itself might be nearly worthless; however, the path to the degree can yield surprisingly different results depending on the person and whether they cared more about the journey or the destination, be that a degree or a job. For my part, I couldn't care less about the sheet of paper I was given. The knowledge I gained, and the interesting and insightful conversations I had, made the process of getting the degree far from worthless.
Not to mention that a lot of grads may never have worked a day in their lives. I knew a lot of people who had tons of extracurriculars but never actually worked at a real job. Having previous work experience, even if it's a part time menial job, is necessary in finding a job straight out of school.
Having previous work experience, even if it's a part time menial job, is necessary in finding a job straight out of school.
Most people ask for prior work experience because what that prior work experience teaches them something they can then apply to future jobs. That or they're just ageist, but that's not as interesting.
I do agree with you that it prior work experience, wherever it might be, is necessary.
However, I think it is wrongheaded that it is necessary; and, yes, I realize how defiant this sounds, but I’m going to try to back it up.
The first question I would like to ask is this person at a menial job learned that someone who didn't have a menial job failed to learn. Is this lesson the person who worked the menial job important? That largely depends on what the current position is all about. If it is a job that requires creativity, and a large amount of independent action, I don't see what the menial job provided them that would help them. If the job where there is no latitude, and requires following a strict process, the most you'll get out of that experience is that the person was able to learn some strict process in the past and stick with it enough to be productive. This is weak information.
You could argue that it instills in a person a strong work ethic, but they either have that or they don't. Even if they do, it may not be enough to overcome the doldrums of a menial, repetitive job, and they might become extremely bored and disenchanted. Given greater creative latitude, they might do quite well, and nothing about the menial job experience would tell you whether they will or won't.
You could also argue that it’s more about learning how to work with a team, and within an organization. These both can be learned from a variety of situations, from extracurriculars to whatever. The aspect of this you might learn specific to employment is how to accept an organization as it is, and work within the confines of that. I think the acceptance of this has to do more with personality than with experience. I’ve been working within hierarchical organizations off and on through my years, and they still annoy me. I don’t think more years will change that.
As for general work experience, it is a relatively weak indicator. I'm not saying people don't use it, but I am saying that it does not correlate well to skills and ability. Like a degree, it is just a pointer to years where the person was supposedly doing some particular task. They might not have been, or they might have been doing it just well enough to avoid termination. They might have been the star of the department. Who knows. Years do not translate into relative ability or talent, and there is data to back this up. As a quality test, it sucks; but it is easy, and is considered enough of a "best practice" that no one will get fired for hiring an employee on that basis at most large companies, especially the ones that care more about decorum than productivity.
Passion and talent are much better indicators. But neither of these are evident from years of working experience. Someone who is six months in to their first job may outperform someone who’s been doing the work for over twenty years. And someone who has twenty years may not care worth a damn about what they do. It is possible to test for these independent of years of experience, and I think a far more worthwhile way of finding someone capable.
And sorry for the rant, this bit of default hiring wisdom has always annoyed me.
Maybe my describing prior work experience as "necessary" was a bit of a hyperbole for all employment situations. I agree with everything you said and I also appreciate you talking about the counter-points to your arguments.
However, despite the feelings that prior experience is not always great criterion for selecting great employees, the reality remains that it's usually necessary for selecting adequate employees. For most grads an employer may be making an investment in the grad acquiring the skills they need on the job and if they have prior work experience that could help indicate that candidate is more likely to acquire said skills than another candidate with no work experience.
Since I am both a relatively recent grad (2007) and have also had a number of different types of jobs since I was about 14 I have a few observations:
* Many college students are grossly unprepared to face looking for a job. From resumes to professional courtesy it seems that many students just don't know where to start or what their prospective employers are looking for in candidates.
* Getting a job is basically a sales pitch. Your resume and interview has to convince the employer that you are right for the job. Those with poor presentation and preparation skills will suffer. Even if they are passionate and creative, if their resume doesn't convey this then they will probably be passed over for a position.
* Many recent grads are unwilling to accept a job in a different line of work than in their college concentrations.
* Some recent grads come across as pompous or condescending due to either too much exuberance or having a big fish in a small pond attitude. Like prior experience, academic success is not necessarily an indicator of being a great employee or easy to work with.
* Personally, many of the recent grads (and regular employees) I know who have a good work ethic have worked menial or unsatisfying jobs at some point. This may be a self-selection bias to do difficult or different things, but I still feel that those who have either humbled themselves working a hard job they didn't need financially or worked and excelled at an unsatisfying job to provide for themselves are usually more cooperative, more determined, and have all around better character. I do acknowledge that these qualities can certainly be found in those who have not worked jobs prior to graduating.
* Some people are just the clock-in clock-out types who simply are not passionate about their work and/or are unhappy with it, and for these types of people prior work experience is a good indicator of an acceptable but not necessarily a stellar employee. A passionate employee that loves their work is probably an outlier to whom the normal metrics of employee selection may not apply or who would far and above fulfill hiring criteria for prior experience.
eBay affiliate id, someone goes to the site clicks open a car ad, sees its an eBay listing, and closes it. But the cookie remains, so when they come back to eBay a few days later to buy a TV the guy gets the affiliate credit
What does it mean that Zuck has 3 seats -- one empty, one he holds, one by Andressen -- does Andressen get to vote as Andressen wishes, or does he have to vote Zuck wishes, or does Zuck effectively get to cast all three votes?
How do these board seats relate to the preferred boat seats?
You'd be a lot more impressed if you stood behind it when the fans spin up. And if you got to see all the lights in the house dim when it starts to draw power. Or if you had to carry ~140 pounds of the chassis and two blades.
Or if you had a shell account on the HS21 blade with two quad core Xeons and 16gb of ram :-)
