In August the Chegg Textbook Company conducted a survey of 2,000 students between the ages of 18-24 at both two and four year colleges, asking them to rate their preparedness for potential tasks at various workplaces. Additionally, they asked students what aspects of their application would be most useful in actually getting hired.
At the same time, Chegg sent out a parallel survey to 1,000 hiring managers at a broad variety of companies, all who had hired recent college graduates in the past couple months. The hiring managers were asked to evauate their new employees according to the same scale that current college students self-rated on.
The results are not entirely surprising (to me at least), but are certainly eye opening. It begs the question: why are college tuition rates increasing so much when the return on a pricey degree is decreasing?
The misconceptions start right away pertaining to how recent grads get hired: 45% of students thought school prestige had a significant influence on getting hired, compared to only 28% of hiring managers saying it had an impact, which implies that potentially 17% of future graduates will not apply for a competitive position because they feel under-qualified.
Optimistically, less than half of students believe that going to a “better” school will help on an application. ...wait, why did I just spend 50,000 a year for my Vassar degree?
The common phrase “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know,” is believed by 77% of college students. That is significantly over the 52% of hiring managers who admit to the correlation of networking and hiring.
All you college kids stressing about your GPA, breathe. What you should be stressing about is getting that internship. Only 48% of hiring managers said that GPA is a significant factor in hiring, compared to 68% of students who trusted in their cumulative hard work (or excellent course selection skills).
According to the survey, the three most common things for hiring managers are: 93% look for a demonstrated initiative and potential towards leadership, 91% look for extracurricular activities related to the students degree, and 82% strongly believe that college students should complete a formal internship before graduation.
Here are the basics of the survey, showing the beliefs in relevant skills gap:
General Job Readiness:
50% of Students 39% of Hiring Managers
Grads can develop compelling/concise slide presentations:
75% of Students 60% of Hiring Managers
Organization:
70% of Students 54% of Hiring Managers
Writing to summarize/convey information:
70% of Students 51% of Hiring Managers
Prioritizing work:
77% Students 50% of Hiring Managers
Writing to communicate/explain:
71% of Students 49% of Hiring Managers
Incorporating information to develop strategy:
63% of Students 46% of Hiring Managers
Managing project with key steps resources timeline:
67% of Students 46% of Hiring Managers
Public Speaking:
54% of Students 43% of Hiring Managers
Decision-making with incomplete information:
47% of Students 37% of Hiring Managers
Managing a meeting:
49% of Students 34% of Hiring Managers
Budgeting:
52% of Students 30% of Hiring Managers
On the bright side, the survey shared that 66% of students and 63% of hiring managers both believe that students are very-to-completely prepared to use their technical skills at the organization that hired them.
Additionally, the study suggests that STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) majors have a slight advantage in the work place in some aspects (which I found poorly defined, probably because I wasn’t STEM).
Small note! Chegg is a textbook company, so it is worth considering their motive and what role it may have had in this survey. I think that Chegg is doing some interesting and valuable research here, but the reason is so that they can justify designing new textbooks and selling them to college students for exorbitant prices.
Photo credit: Getty Images
