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Showing posts with the label A. (2012)

Are College Students Emphasizing the Right Employment Skills?

We hear a lot about what skills are needed within the workplace from the perspective of the employer but we do not often hear about student perspectives. Research helps highlight how undergraduate and graduate students view the necessary skills to be successful in the workplace. It is surprising to find that both undergraduate and graduate students have some similarities but also some differences in their skill perception.  Employers are regularly looking for a whole host of necessary skills from recent graduates. At 2006 survey entitled Are They Ready to Work found that employers valued work ethic, written and oral communication, teamwork / collaboration, critical thinking, problem solving, and ethics /social responsibility. With over 400 employer participants the survey can be seen as a strong benchmark for recruiter needs. A survey conducted by Ingbretsen (2009) helped to further lend support to the skills employers request from recent graduates. Such skills were comm

Do You Hire Self-Handicapping Employees?

Employees win and employees lose as a natural course of life events. At times, we notice exceptional employees who have all of the right skills but fail anyway. Pulling out our hair we wonder, “can’t they see what they are doing?” Unfortunately, they may not actually be able to see how their self-handicapping thoughts are influencing their outcomes. Such awareness may be a little too outside their conscious thought for critical evaluation. New research helps highlight why such phenomenon occurs and how to overcome it.  Many failures in life are caused by self-sabotage of one’s own abilities and skills. The concept of self-handicapping is a self-imposed strategy of avoiding evaluations of performance by developing strategies to implement barriers (Jones & Berglas, 1978). These barriers are created in order to protect short-term self-esteem but damages long-term proper evaluations of self. Who can blame themselves when there are millions of reasons to fail? Employees