15 Skills College Grads Need To Be Successful

Over the last few months, I've heard a lot of local and national political candidates talk about their version of America and how their opponent's America looked very different. And I agree. There have been some significant ideological differences between candidates, particularly here in Nevada. With that said, however, I'm always more interested in the areas where people agree… even if their approaches for getting to or sustaining a particular vision or result don't neatly align.

I've had the privilege of doing a variety of different work around on-boarding recent college graduates into their first full-time, post-collegiate jobs. A lot of this work has been looking for mutually-beneficial solutions for meeting young professionals where they are to take them where employers need them to be. Which of course has had me thinking… what are the specific gaps between what colleges provide students and what employers expect them to know? Certainly this differs across fields. But if we could come together and agree on some particular skills, we could save employers (and young professionals) a lot of time, energy, and heartache down the line.

15 Skills College Grads Need to Obtain to Build Successful and Sustainable Careers

(In no particular order.)

Note: Some of these are significant, some trivial, and most are somewhere in between. However, these are coming up continuously in conversations I have been having both with recent grads and those supervising them in the workplace.

1. Identifying a professional vision and mission statement
2. Balancing short-term objectives with long-term planning
3. Knowing when to brainstorm possibilities and when to take action
4. How to coach up, down, and across (and be coachable)
5. Dressing appropriately for the workplace
6. Interacting with colleagues of different generations
7. Choosing the right form of communication for one's intended audience
8. Providing clear and concise answers to questions
9. Giving a presentation
10. Intuiting a company's culture and making one's self a fit with it
11. Negotiation (as a way to preempt and respond to conflict)
12. Creating and maintaining appropriate professional boundaries
13. Performing customer service irrespective of role
14. Giving and receiving behavior-oriented feedback
15. Maintaining a possibility-centered mindset

This by no means constitutes an exhaustive list of what grads need to know to be great, so please join me in growing it. What are the skills you believe colleges need to engender in their students to shorten the workplace learning curve?

Alexia Vernon is a career and workplace author, speaker, coach, trainer and media personality who empowers people to build careers and companies that are successful, sustainable and full of soul.

Thanks to Alexia Vernon / Careerealism
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