Advice for School leavers

A recent CBI report made interesting reading I thought. They polled 507 businesses on their attitudes to school leavers in the workplace and found that over half were dissatisfied with their literacy and numeracy skills. When I left school in the early 80’s this just didn’t seem to be an issue and I was wondering why that was.

I think we forget sometimes that the employment landscape has changed markedly in the last 30 years. Take the closest city near me for example – Manchester. In the 70’s and 80’s manufacturing still figured as a significant part of the total GDP. If you were going into a job in manufacturing or trade, literacy or numeracy skills were not so important. Now however, Manchester has been transformed into a city thriving on the service sector. Here these key skills are much more important as you start to communicate with people in internal teams and importantly customers, as well as office administrative tasks to do that will involve numbers. So although we have a steadily increasing pass standard from our schools, the number of jobs that require these skills has outstripped the systems ability to supply them.

So what should a school leaver do in the situation where their skills may not be quite up to scratch? Well to be honest learned skills are not the most important quality in a prospective employee. Increasingly in the workplace, interviews are centred around behaviours that employees are looking for. That is those parts of peoples’ personality that will be a good fit with the organisation and with the particular role that is being recruited for. For example, for a telesales role, although numeracy skills are important, what is more important is the ability to persuade. That’s what they’ll be looking for first. They’ll do that through specific questions in the interview and psychometric tests. These tests can give the recruiter or employer a wealth of information about your personality, your interaction with other people and ultimately your suitability for the position.

Literacy and numeracy skills can be improved upon. It’s harder to change someone’s personality and innate qualities. So if you want that job you need to find out what the employer is looking for in terms of the type of person. You need to be proactive and ask. In the interview stress what are your strengths that are in line with what you believe the employer is looking for. Find out as much as you can about the company you are looking to get a job with. Nothing impresses a prospective employer more than a candidate that has done their background research and seems to understand what they’re looking for.

Oh yes, and ditch the calculator and read more books…