Employers favour graduates with communication skills

Nick Elvin

Employers consider a positive attitude to be a much more desirable quality among graduates than technical knowledge, a survey by professional services training company Kaplan has found.

The study, Graduate Recruitment, Learning and Development, found that technical knowledge ranked 24th in a list of 30 competencies required or desired by UK employers at the recruitment stage, while employability skills including “effective communication” (ranked 1st), “being a team player” (3rd), “confidence” (5th), and “being analytical” (6th) were all considered more important.

However, when asked about what competencies were most important two years after recruitment, employers’ priorities had changed. The four employability skills and attitudes originally ranked highly remained important and continued to rank in the top ten, with “effective communication” still first in importance out of the 30 competencies. “Team player” was 4th, “being analytical” 7th, and “confidence” 10th. However, “technical knowledge” had shot up to number two.

Kaplan’s head of learning in the UK and author of the study, Stuart Pedley-Smith, said: “On the whole, we found that the employers we surveyed do not recruit graduates for the subject-specific nature of what they learned at university. These employers generally view a university degree as a proxy for having reached a certain level of competence.

“There is a well-known saying within recruitment – ‘recruit for attitude and train for skill’. The employers we talked to and surveyed indicated they needed their graduate recruits to arrive ready with the softer skills of communications and team working – skills required to be an effective member of a team. And these same employers were happy to train their recruits in business-specific technical knowledge.”

The survey also found that 75% of employers polled found it either moderately or very difficult to find graduates with the right skills. This corresponds to results in the latest Association of Graduate Recruiters survey, which revealed that in spite of a significant increase in the number of graduate jobs in the UK (17% more graduate jobs available during 2013-14), nearly 25% of those polled had unfilled vacancies.