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Employer Quotes
The quotes below are from employers in this industry: Information Technology (IT)
They are talking about this topic: General Skills
The quotes below are about this issue:
The industry looks for employees with critical thinking and problem solving skills. Some report that these could be improved among new hires.
| "You might be able to sell yourself through an interview, but what's going to keep you in a company are those critical thinking skills." | Metro |
| "When somebody comes to me, my job is to take the two-by-four out and solve the problem. And some people come to me with a problem and I ask them: How many accounts does it affect? How far off are we? What are the options that we have? These are the questions I'm looking for answers for. And a lot of times they don't have the critical thinking piece to get to that. And it's not necessarily a high-level person, because even the entry-level jobs have to come together." | Metro |
| "We're expecting people to assimilate and understand incredibly complex operating environments and models, and to be able to make sense out of assignments that are—by and large—very gray. The days of Bill Wright and Accounting Package are not here anymore. We're solving very sophisticated but very subtle business problems that call for critical thinking skills, so those skills are incredibly important for framing problems and, therefore, getting to solutions. It's really not so much about the technology, although you have to be technology-savvy to understand it." | Metro |
| "There were days when you could have your technicians and they could sit in their little cubicle. Those days are gone. These people are constantly being put in front of the customer and sometimes the customer is even an external customer—not within the business. And so—this is going back to the critical thinking skills and communication skills—we can no longer be little technicians that just sit in the cubicles and do our jobs." | Metro |
| "To add to your point about the soft skills, we look for very highly-technical individuals, but we also have competencies that we look for like strategic agility, intellectual horsepower, and leadership. So, that's very important. That's something that we're seeing a lack of." | Metro |
| "One of the areas where we're doing a lot of hiring within my group right now is around business analysts, project managers, and architects. So, those are labels for individuals whose full-time job it is to really interact with the business and draw out their requirements and then create a solution design. I think, many times, in the schools, they do a lot of teamwork within teams. But I think students need to be asked to actually help define the problem set that they're trying to solve. Often, the business doesn't even really know what they want. They need someone to help them and collaborate with them to define what that need is—not just to create the solution but to design that solution." | Metro |