Let’s, for a moment, forget Common Core and look at an educational shortcoming that is causing problems right now for our graduates and their employers.
According to a recent Siena survey, area business leaders — nearly 68 percent who responded to the survey — are concerned about finding qualified workers who have good communication skills and can work as a team.
So while schools are busy trying to teach students how to write and meet new standards in that area, they aren’t necessarily doing enough to teach students how to work together to solve problems.
Learning to work with others is a vital skill in any industry. Whether you work in a nanotech lab, an office, a coffee shop or an at-home business, you have to be able to interact with others to get your work done. Even one-on-one interaction can be challenging if you don’t have the proper interpersonal skills.
The trouble is, many schools and universities don’t make interpersonal skills part of their curriculum. The way they see it, students have to figure out how to interact with one another on their own, and the whole “plays well with others” thing should have been straightened out in the sandbox long ago.
This thinking might have been OK 15-20 years ago, but it’s not effective in today’s world. Young people have grown up communicating in entirely different ways than the generations before them, with texting, Facebook, Twitter and even newer platforms like Snapchat being the primary means to stay in touch.
This type of communication may seem effective to this generation, but, at the risk of sounding like a bunch of fist-shaking old-timers, it does nothing to help them with the face-to-face interaction needed to do business in the real world. It’s easy to say what you want to say when you type it on a screen, but saying it when the other person is standing in front of you can lead to consequences you’re not prepared for.
Also, the reliance on texting and Tweeting shorthand may explain the decline in writing skills seen by business owners. While English teachers are still doing their best to teach proper sentence structure and how to compose thoughts into a well-written presentation, students quickly throw those skills out the window when they are rushing to text their friends to meet them somewhere. People write the way they practice, not the way they are taught.
So, how can the tide be turned? For starters, more area schools can take a look at what Tech Valley High School is doing by teaching creative ways for students to interact with one another and business owners to solve problems. They can send students on group internships to local businesses, based on what their interests are. They can have students learn about the job application process by sending them on mock interviews. They can encourage teachers to come up with more group projects to get their students to work together. The same concepts can and should be applied at the collegiate level, too.
Business owners want to hire people who can work well together, and schools have to recognize that this is a skill today’s students are not picking up on their own. So when we talk about preparing kids for the 21st century workforce, the issues go far beyond the Common Core.