by Deborah Sian
April 21, 2010, Wednesday
LET’S sit and imagine this — you have just graduated and you’re in job-hunting mode. You applied for a job and then there you got it! But wait, you have no idea how your workplace is going to be and what awaits you.Suddenly you are lost and become clueless in a sea of work, your employer’s expectations, your colleagues’ expectations and your own as well.
The initial expectations were perhaps just a matter of getting experience. However, most graduates would be rather clueless on how competitive things are out there.
What most fresh graduates may be unaware of is that the workplace is beyond a certain job scope and the physical setting itself.
What they fail to know and realise in the first place are the hard facts on how to manage their time and their tasks, how to manage their employers and superiors, how to apply their skills accordingly, how to solve problems which are beyond their control and how to think out of the box.
Currently, most courses offered in our local colleges and varsities provide industrial training and internship stints with companies and organisations, but how effective are such trainings in developing our undergraduates towards real life demands?
How much have undergraduates who have gone through internships adopted from their training period?
It seems that many graduates have failed to perform as expected and some are still unemployed. What could have brought us to this scenario?
Looking at current trends, there are some agencies, companies or employers which have offered internship placements for undergraduates seemingly for nothing.
The interns or trainees were assigned to do clerical or mundane tasks such as serving coffee, photocopying papers, data entry, when they could have been assigned tasks relevant to their respective field or discipline.
Consequently, on whom shall we put the blame — the employers or the current graduates themselves?
Has our own society lost faith in our own ‘products’? Or has our society lost the capability of producing quality graduates?
Could it be that everyone is at fault?
All our lives, we have been delivering based on standards and expectations set by our parents, our teachers, the institutions and society at large.
Living up to others’ expectations is normal and we tend to set expectations ourselves as well.
When graduates are out there, they are expected to blend in — to adjust to the working environment.
In the working world, graduates need to be more discerning and analytical to meet society’s high expectations.
Therefore, ensuring that one is equipped and driven to face whatever challenges may come, should be instilled constantly.
For a start, having soft and hard skills would come in pretty handy because most employers today are looking for versatile individuals and good thinkers who ‘may likely think unalike’.
For graduates, remaining unemployed could be one of the lowest points of life.
They may feel they do not have what it takes to fit in the working world.
This should not be the only concern.
What needs to be emphasised more is ensuring that graduates set a high standard for themselves.
This is to ensure that they are sufficiently prepared mentally and emotionally for the real world — the working world, that is.
In the mean time, graduates should just keep on absorbing whatever they can, keep on learning whenever they can.
Perhaps it is not about the system or society.
It could just be about graduates continuing to grow and not to be ignorant about what happens around them.
There is not much time to linger on the same spot. Having said all this, as much as graduates should learn how to adjust and adapt to expectations quickly, society at large should also have some faith in them as well.
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