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Skills missing from a college transcript
May 15, 2007
I questioned whether college is worth the money in an earlier post on the resignation of MIT admissions dean Marilee Jones. She resigned from a position that she was notably successful at after she acknowledge having fabricated her academic credentials. Today’s Wall Street Journal addresses the value of college with its "question of the day," which asks how well college prepared respondents for their jobs: “very well,” “moderately well,” “not very well,” or “not at all.” The leading choices are “moderately well” at 40% and “not very well” at 25%. “Very well” scored 22%, and only 11% responded “not at all.”
But more interesting than the results of this unscientific poll are some reader comments:
• “On-the-job company-specific training will be required…That doesn't mean college was worthless…it's amazing how we expect success to be handed to us on a platter just because mommy and daddy wrote the school a check.”
• “I went to a liberal arts college…they considered it a badge of honor how little they prepared you for the outside world.”
• “The primary purpose is not to teach one the precise details of a field or trade, it's to teach one the patterns of thought that underlie the areas of focus.”
A related article in the Journal discusses skills that college students develop that can't be inferred from their transcripts. The article quotes Brad Karsh, president of JobBound.com, a Chicago-based career-consulting group: “Students have the ability at 2 a.m. to write a paper while instant messaging their friends and watching a TiVoed version of ‘Grey's Anatomy.’”
What’s important is how to list such skills on a résumé. The article paraphrases Microsoft recruiting manager Warren Ashton as saying that “working on class projects might become ‘cross-team collaboration,’ proficiency in Facebook and MySpace would probably sound better as ‘connecting with customers through new technologies,’ and study abroad might be called ‘global exposure and cultural savvy.’"
Job applicants and hiring managers should keep in mind, though, that “cross-team collaboration” could be construed to mean “cheating.”
Posted by Rick Nelson on May 15, 2007 | Comments (1)
