A treat today! More data from our CanEd Student Research Panel on employment. You know the drill: 1280 students from our regular monthly panel. We asked these students what skills or attributes they thought they “lacked but most wished they had” in terms of landing a job after graduation.

Here’s the interesting thing: very few students thought they were deficient in any technical skills. For the most part, it’s the soft skills students thought they lacked. Among the most common responses were variations (this was an open-ended question which we’ve re-coded just for our readers) on “interpersonal and social skills” (13%), “being more confident” (9%) and “having more motivation and drive” (7%). Overall, 47% respondents mentioned some sort of soft skill, 16% mentioned some sort of work-related technical skill, and 12% mentioned some sort of accomplishment or achievement (mostly having to do with having had more experience). Only 0.5% said the thing they thought they lacked were better grades.

Skills and Attributes Students Lack but most Wished they Had for Finding a Permanent Job

We then asked students what they thought their institution could be doing better to prepare them from the labour market. One quarter of students could not name anything institutions could do better, and 2.7% rejected the premise of the question entirely (universities shouldn’t care about the labour market). As for the rest, overwhelmingly they thought that the most obvious way institutions could improve was to make their programs “more applied and hands-on” (21%), or to improve or expand co-op offerings (10%). Only nine percent thought that better academic offerings were the solution.

What Else Could Your Institution Have Done to Prepare you for the Labour Market?

Six percent of students thought the solution lay through improvements to career support (better job fairs and career days or better career services). Four percent thought the answer lay in helping them network more directly with industry, and a similar number thought institutions should be much more actively involved in directly finding them a job (perhaps a bit like a placement service)

What’s interesting here was the breakdown by field of study. These results are not a case of humanities and social sciences students regretting their academic choices and asking for something more practical; in fact, it was the engineers and scientists who were most insistent on the need for more applied or co-op programs. Humanities and social science students were more or less like everyone else, albeit with a slightly more pronounced tendency to want more job market information and placement services.

There’s an interesting niche here for institutions that can revise curriculum to emphasize a combination of applied learning and soft skills. Or, if you’re a polytechnic or “University of Applied Science,” you’re probably already in a heck of a sweet spot.