Employers are still complaining about the lack of employment readiness of today’s college graduates, which allows them to justify the need for (unpaid / low wage) internships.
The reality is that there is an acclimation period for any worker in any new environment, not only college graduates. The difference is that college graduates may not always have had the opportunities to acquire:
- Interpersonal skills across a diversity of personalities and ideologies
- Depth of perspective about how decisions are made at higher levels of management that may appear counter-intuitive to rank and file personnel
- Diplomacy in communication in tough conversations and conflict.
Even when new graduates are familiar with technology more readily than “older” workers, unless you are working at a start-up staffed with 20-something employees, you are going to have to learn a lot of interpersonal skills that have the direct bearing on the effectiveness and efficiency of an organization. This means what’s worked for you when interacting with your peers, may not work for members of a project team you have to work with.
This isn’t like higher education where you can cut class or drop a course if you don’t like the professor and find the instructional staff obnoxious. You have to keep showing up for work and getting things done with people you may dislike, and sometimes the most obnoxious person in your group may be your boss.
Sometimes higher education graduates job applicants who act like amateur academics (don’t know that they don’t know, and don’t know but think they know) versus deep thinkers who bring a level of self-awareness (know that they don’t know) to the workplace. Some of these graduates are extremely intelligent: Ivy graduates in STEM fields for example, but subject-matter intelligence is different from interpersonal skills or process-oriented intelligence.
Part of the problem in higher education is the behaviors it conditions in students: to act with a lot of confidence/false bravado so you aren’t perceived as weak, or tear into people in jousts of debate because there is no mercy in intellectual arenas. Companies spend a lot of money managing human resource problems and your sustainability at a workplace is only as good as the risk:benefit ratio of managing you as an employee. You may be a genius, but if you cost a company too much money to put out HR fires, you will be quickly isolated to reduce the circumference of the damage you tend to cause while the company keeps your capacity to contribute, or the company may be smart to get rid of you and hire above average applicants who know how to work with people.