York College professionalism survey shows students don’t realize how important employers think communication skills are

Back on October 21, 2010 the Center for Professional Excellence (CPE) at York College posted a press release with a link to some preliminary results from their 2010 survey on Professionalism in the Workplace. More recently the York College CPE posted the detailed results from their 2010 survey on Professionalism in the Workplace as a 130 page Acrobat .pdf document at the bottom of a web page describing the previous 2009 survey.

In their 2010 survey they asked both 430 employers and 404 students about qualities that best describe a professional, qualities that describe being unprofessional, important qualities in professionalism, and the extent to which those qualities were found in employees. In this post I’m going to highlight some of their results.

Qualities that best describe a professional (page 41) are shown above, ranked in the order of importance chosen by employers (dark green bars). (Click on the chart for a larger, clearer version). Communication skills were most important to them, but only were ranked fifth by students (light green bars). Students thought that interpersonal skills, time management, appearance, and work ethic were more important than communication.
 

Qualities that describe being  unprofessional (page 43) are shown above, again ranked in the order of importance chosen by employers (red bars). Poor work ethic was most important to both them, and by students (pink bars). 17.4% of student mentioned poor grammar/communications skills, while 36.2% of employers did. It was ranked third by employers, but fifth by students.

Nineteen important qualities in professionalism were ranked on a scale from one to five by both employers and students, where 1 means not important and 5 means very important. Results (starting on page 47) are shown above. Employers and students generally provided similar rankings.
 

The  extent to which those same 19 qualities were found in employees also were ranked on a scale from one to five by both employers and students, where 1 means very rare and 5 means very common. Results for employers (starting on page 51) are shown above in dark orange, and compared with the qualities ranked as important, shown in dark blue.  With the lone exception of concern for opportunities for advancement, there was a significant gap between important qualities and the extent to which they were found.   

Results for extent to which qualities were found by students are shown above in light orange, and compared with the qualities ranked as important, shown in light blue. Again, with the lone exception of concern for opportunities for advancement, there was a significant gap between important qualities and the extent to which they were found.  

The York College survey is more complete than the NACE Job Outlook Survey I blogged about almost three months ago, since it includes perceptions by both employers and students.