The topic for this month’s newsletter articles is the reestablishment of the connection between businesses and educational institutions.
Businesses are loudly complaining today that university graduates aren’t qualified for employment. As businesspeople, we don’t just complain, though, do we? We go ahead and come up with solutions. Every entrepreneur will tell you that—none will concede that something cannot be solved. That approach must also be applied to connect and reconnect with the educational field.
“Hoping For The Best”
In our last article, we discussed the educational systems’ lack of solutions for preparing students for the working world. Instead, they’ve been hoping for the best and continuing what they’ve always done.
The same could be said for businesspeople. We’ve complained about the problem without dealing with it for so long that there’s now an agreed-upon expectation that high school and college graduates generally won’t make the grade as company recruits. According to an Intelligent Survey from 2023, 40 percent of business leaders believe that recent college grads aren’t ready for the workforce. Here at SELLability, we’ve polled thousands of business leaders and owners at seminars and classes, and nearly all agreed, high school and college graduates, as a whole, are not prepared to succeed in the business world.
If you do a simple Google search, you will find many articles on this subject, with plentiful statistics that substantiate this concept.
Hanging Out for the Low-Hanging Fruit
Elon Musk famously said that a college degree doesn’t matter; only an achievement record matters. He cited Bill Gates, Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs as examples of business titans who never finished college, and the average company recruiter would certainly hire one of them or someone of their caliber.
Musk himself is, then, simply waiting for the (rare) low-hanging fruit to come along so he can pluck it. There is a hefty waiting list for hiring at his companies. The problem, though, is that the education work-ready problem, if it isn’t solved, will only get worse. That low-hanging fruit Musk is waiting for will become increasingly infrequent and eventually dry up altogether.
What difference might it make for Musk and everyone else if that issue was solved? We wouldn’t have to wait so long, would we? We might even get to the point where the educated were truly qualified people and were knocking the doors down to join the workforce.
Making the Time
In this world, nothing stays the same for long. In truth, something is either getting better or getting worse. If we continue to do nothing about the under-qualified graduate situation, it won’t improve by itself. We must take an active hand in making it better.
If we’re going to turn this scene around, businesspeople and leaders need to make time in their already overcrowded schedules to reach out and begin working with schools, colleges and universities. We’re now faced with a choice of actually solving the problem or letting it continue and further deteriorate.
Letting problems go unsolved is not something we, the entrepreneurs and businesspeople, engage in, is it? So let’s roll up our sleeves and get to work.
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