Employability Skills are not job specific, but are skills which cut horizontally across all industries and vertically across all jobs from entry level to chief executive officer. business and industry represen-tatives express considerable dissatisfaction with the general level of preparedness of prospective entry-level employees. Employers’ dissatisfaction with young job applicants is not primarily due to inadequate technical knowledge or skill but with non-technical skills.

Another name for these “nontechnical abilities” is employa-bility skills.”Employability skills are the attributes of employees, other than technical competence, that make them an asset to the employer” . These employability skills include reading, basic arithmetic and other basic skills; problem solving, decision making, and other higher-order thinking skills; and dependability, a positive attitude, cooperativeness, and other affective skills and traits.

Employers and the Workplace

What skills and traits do employers value most in pros-pective entry-level employees?

Employers want entry-level employees to possess an array of basic, higher-order, and affective employability skills.

These were then organized into the three categories of basic Skills; higher-order thinking skills; and affective skills and traits, as shown in the display.

Basic Skills Higher-Order Affective Skills

Thinking Skills and Traits

(speaking, listening) bility

Reading esp. under- Learning skills, Positive attitude toward

standing and following strategies work

instructions

Basic arithmetic Creative, inno- Conscientiousness,

vative thinking punctuality efficiency.

Writing Decision making Interpersonal skills, cooperation, working as a team member

Self-confidence, positive self-image

Adaptability, flexibility

Enthusiasm, motivation

Self-discipline, self-management

Appropriate dress, grooming

Honesty, integrity

Ability to work without supervision.

Employers value these generic employability skills above specific occupational skills.

Specific occupational skills are less crucial for entry-level employment than a generally high level of literacy, responsible attitudes toward work, the ability to communicate well, and the ability to continue to learn.

1) employers place greatest importance on employee attitudes, 2) employers emphasize basic skills over job-specific skills, and 3) employers deem it important for workers to have an understanding of the work environment .

Employers find far too many entry-level job applicants deficient in employability skills, and want the educational institutions to place more emphasis on developing these skills.

Why have employability skills become so important in contemporary workplaces?

Valuing employability skills-to the point of assigning them an even higher priority than job-specific technical skills-employers are understandably distressed to find so many entry-level job applicants lacking these skills. The reasons given by employers for not hiring young people for entry-level jobs, including:

l Low grades and low levels of academic accomplishments

l Poor attitudes, lack of self-confidence

l Lack of goals, poorly motivated

l Lack of enthusiasm, lack of drive, little evidence of leadership potential

l Lack of preparation for the interview

l Excessive interest in security and benefits, unrealistic salary demands and expectations

l Inadequate preparation for type of work, inappropriate background

l Lack of extracurricular activities

l Inadequate basic skills (reading, writing, math)

The primary concern of more than 80 percent of employers was finding workers with a good work ethic and appropriate social behavior: reliable, a good attitude, a pleasant appearance, a good personality.

One can easily see that employability skills are not merely attributes that employers desire in prospective employees; rather, many employers now require applicants to have these skills in order to be seriously considered for employment. And if employers hire applicants and then find them to lack these skills?

87 percent of persons losing their jobs or failing to be promoted were found to have “improper work habits and attitudes rather than insufficient job skills or knowledge”.

Employers expect to train new employees in company-specific procedures and to acquaint them with the behavioral norms, standards, and expectations of their workplace. They often provide training in job-specific technical skills as well. But they are emphatic in their conviction that the educational institutions should take most of the responsibility for equipping young people with general employability skills.

The demand for basic, higher-order, and effective employability skills reflects profound changes in the Indian workplace.

Instead of work that is “routinized, repetitive, and organized along hierarchical lines,” this modern workplace requires different kinds of tasks, approaches, and employees:

In this new environment, work is problem-oriented, flexible, and organized in teams; labor is not a cost but an investment. Most important, the high-performance organization recognizes that producing a defective product costs more than producing a high-quality one. The solution: design quality into the product develop-ment process itself, particularly by enabling workers to make on-the-spot decisions .

Entry-level workers need to be able to operate independently, using problem-solving and decision-making skills. The need for worker collaboration and teamwork requires employees to be creative, flexible, and possess good interpersonal and managerial skills.

The reference to interpersonal skills points to yet another reasonfor the changes in employability skill needs of today’s workplace: the increasingly multicultural nature of the workforce

We must remember that employment and employability are not the same thing. Being employed means having a job. For a youth or adult who is not adequately prepared, having a job is likely to be a temporary condition. Being employable means possessing qualities needed to maintain employment and progress in the workplace.

What educational practices has research shown to be effective in imparting employability skills and traits to students?

Effective Practices

Employability skills are best learned when they are included among instructional goals and explicitly taught.

Employability skills and traits are very amenable to being taught. The skills related to general employability can be learned; therefore, all of them are appropriate and important targets for professional interventions.

Democratic instructional approaches are superior to indoctrinational approaches forimparting employability skills to students and workers.

Democratic approaches are said to:

...raise student consciousness about values, attitudes, and worker responsibilities.... pedagogical strategies such as role playing/simulation, problem solving, and group discussion are democratic in nature because they encourage students to explore their attitudes and do not advocate one particular outcome .

Indoctrinational instruction, meanwhile, is described as:

...a process by which students are given information in such a manner that they are discouraged or prevented from questioning its validity [and] includes pedagogical strategies that minimize student input.

Lectures and the use of reward structures are among the strategies considered to be indoctrinational.

Comparison of teachers who are successful in inculcating affective employability skills in their students with those who are less successful or unsuccessful reveals that the successful teachers rely much more on democratic strategies and much less on indoctrinational ones.

In school settings, employability skills are best learned when classrooms replicate key features of real work settings and student tasks approximate those performed by workers in those settings.

Hands-on learning in actual or simulated work environments is far more effective than isolated, decontextualized learning.

Instructors attempted to teach work values and attitudes in a context similar to what students would experience in the world of work” .

Teaching is more than telling, and learning is more than acquiring and demonstrating mastery of facts. To ensure the transfer of basic skills into the workplace, teachers must engage students as active participants in the learning process. Prospective employers will expect them to be active participants in the workplace.

Recommendations

Recommendations for increasing students’ and workers’ acquisition of employability skills. These are itemized below, listed by the groups to whom the recommendations are made.

Federal and State Policymakers:

1. Establish as a top-priority national goal that every student should complete college possessing sufficient employability skills to earn a decent living.

2. Encourage and support continued experimentation with and learning from diverse programs linking schools, employers, and young people.

3. Direct government resources toward: (a) increasing teachers’ capacity to teach employability skills, and (b) engaging participation of the private sector in providinglearning opportunities for students at worksites.

4. Establish a national assess-ment system that will permit educational institutions to certify the levels of employa-bility competencies their students have achieved.

Educational Administrators:

1. Establish programs which are long-term and in-depth, beginning with career awareness activities in elementary school.

2. Include the development of employability skills among the explicitly stated district- and school-level goals.

3. Structure programs in keeping with local needs-e.g., programs should reflect the kinds of employers in the community and local preferences for kinds of employer-school interaction.

4. Extend teachers considera-ble latitude for structuring their curriculum, classroom design, and instructional approaches.

5. Provide teachers support, including setting up summer internships, offering common preparation periods to plan interdisciplinary projects, and hiring teachers for planning/professional development over the summer, none are more important than those devoted to teacher training and staff development”.

6. Encourage the use of performance assessments and the information they provide to develop student “employability profiles” that students can share with prospective employers.

Educational Institutes :

1. Arrange the classroom in such a way that it replicates key features of actual work settings and assign students tasks similar to those performed by workers in those settings.

2. Reinforce to students that employers value basic, higher-order, and affective employability skills highly-even more highly than job-specific technical skills.

3. Communicate to students that they have the ability to perform tasks successfully and that they are expected to do so; provide monitoring and encouragement to help them achieve success.

4. Demand good deportment in the classroom. This conveys high expectations and familiarizes students with workplace norms.

5. Express work values through classroom instruction. Model attention to quality, thorough-ness, and a positive attitude.

6. Utilize democratic instructio-nal strategies such as role playing/simulation, problem-solving exercises, and group discussion with students; keep the use of lectures and reward structures to a minimum.

7. Monitor and support students’ work as a consultant or master craftsman would, relating to them as intelligent, promising employees and providing them guidance and feedback.

8. Adapt instructional strategies to the tasks being taught and to the students performing them; do not hold rigidly to texts or syllabi.

9. Individualize instruction as much as possible, making use of a range of materials in different media in response to students’ differing learning styles.

10. Reach agreements with supervisors at learning sites so that the importance of employability skill develop-ment will be emphasized at both school and workplace.

11. Help students to build employability “profiles” or “portfolios” that provide a more accurate picture of the students’ command of the skills and traits employers value.

12. Participate in professional development activities and/or enroll in classes that emphasize methods to teach employability skills.

Employers:

1. Take steps to establish the standards of quality and high performance that now characterize our most competitive companies.

2. Develop internal training programs to equip present employees with the full range of basic, higher-order, and affective employability skills.

3. Continue to communicate to the schools the critical importance of instilling employability skills in students.

4. Collaborate with local educational institutes to provide learning experiences that will foster students’ development of employability skills.

In addition to its critical role in the economy, preparedness in employability skills is also an important contributor to the individual’s self-regard and general well-being. Giving greater attention to this developmental area can therefore be expected to contribute to both social betterment and personal fulfill-ment.

When carefully structured and thoughtfully conceived, employa-bility skill development enables all individuals-young and old-to develop needed self-confidence and motivation, to meet successfully the challenges of work, to survive, and-most important-to flourish.