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Employer Quotes

The quotes below are from employers in this industry: Financial Services

They are talking about this topic: General Skills

 

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The quotes below are about this issue:
Employers are looking for hires with strong interpersonal communication (including teamwork) and writing skills.

Employer Quote Region
"Employer 1: That's what I hear in workforce development—that the younger people have spent so much of their lives texting that they don't know how to communicate verbally. That they can't express themselves and figure out what you want and understand what you're communicating. Do you think that's it?

Employer 2: And videogames...

Employer 3: Sure. They're sitting there with headsets on and they're killing the guys, they're sitting there doing Call of Duty 4—or whatever the heck it is—and sitting there doing that with no face-to-face interaction. The use of eye contact, all these things that we used to have to actually master to be able to communicate. They don't have those skills. Again, with texting...I mean, my son is dating a gal right now and they text back-and-forth. I say, 'Why don't you just give her a call?' 'Well, nobody does that.' They don't call. How do you ever learn to communicate if you never do that? I mean, I don't get it."		 Central
"Yes, you're right; they're having problems with the face-to-face interaction. An idea would be something like Toastmasters—at the level where they're getting put into situations where they're having to interact. Some of those speeches are thrown out. You don't know the topic until you start. It's within a peer group, so maybe they'd be more comfortable building that skill there." Central
"The other soft skill is teamwork. In our area, you've got to work effectively on a team. You're backing up other people, and you've got to have good interpersonal skills." Central
"The other thing I think would be helpful is a better understanding of intergenerational interaction and the differences between generations. Because I think the ability to communicate is a problem when people have only communicated with their contemporaries. That's not the world we live in. You've got to be able to relate to everyone. So, I think that's a basic skill that needs some work." Central
"I've been listening to everyone today with a lot of interest, and I can't summarize this in just a couple of minutes but I'll try. I'm really worried that my institution is going in the wrong direction as it meets some of the general workforce requirements that you've talked about. I mean, this was meant to be an industry-specific discussion. But we've talked about attitudes and confidence. We've talked about work ethics; we've talked about interpersonal skills. I'll go back to my office, and I'll have electronic communications with my students over an online course where they haven't had to make eye contact with me. I'm really worried. By the way, the growing share of our work is in that area, and we check it off in terms of efficiency. But I worry that we're producing widgets, too, and this is what you talked about.

By the way, I've resisted this trend. I make students come to my office. I make them make eye contact. They pick up their tests from me. I make them tell me where an answer came from. But I worry that I'm sort of the old-fashioned guy, whose younger colleagues don't see the value of face-to-face communication. I think we need to have from you folks—the business folks—I think we need to have your voices come out louder and in more than just an industry-specific way. I think you need to make a general case. The direction that we've gone in, that we've gone too far, or at least we're going in the wrong direction as it relates to some of the general workforce needs that you have going forward. Kids just don't necessarily have the sense of wanting to communicate with their professors. They come and they're scared to meet us. That's just sad. It doesn't have to be that way. Somehow, it needs to be communicated that this is unacceptable going forward."		 Central
"I had that experience last week. There was a support person I was working with out in Philadelphia. I had a quick conversation with him and he said, 'I'll follow-up with an email for documentation.' But he also said—and I don't know if it was a compliment or whether he was giving me a little jab—that 'I know you like to talk on the phone or have a conversation, but I just don't have time for that.'

There have been a lot of systems that are built for logging questions if you're in a solution center. All of that is good for documentation. But once you get to a certain point, a lot of questions need to be conversational. They aren't one-on-one, they're one-to-many kinds of responses. One quick answer leads to two more questions. That five-minute dialogue solves the problem, versus a day-and-a-half of emails."		 Central
"And everything's tweets or whatever. Let's see if I can get my point across in 64 characters or something like that. That's not what our world is. It's conversational. If you're uncomfortable doing that, you'll lose a lot." Central
"I think it's a combination of the two. We need to make these people really tech-savvy to do the research I'm talking about and all of that—it's kind of this high-tech, high-touch—it goes back to John Nesbit's book of the '70s. We live in a high-tech, high-touch world. Well, then we need to prepare people for a high-tech, high-touch world. High-touch for the really important things, high-tech for the mundane, routine things. I mean, that's from 1974 but that's the world we live in. He got it right, but I don't think we as a society have that figured out." Central
"We used to force introverts to converse and be more outgoing. Now, we're encouraging extroverts to use introverted communication." Central