Why Skills Are More Important Than School Grades In Today’s Hiring Aspects

Employers today are not so much concerned with grades like what you can do. This is not to say good grades are important. Getting good grades is important, but it is much better when coupled with the right skills in your specific industry. Students today have been warned that even if they get the best grades they want, they might lack what employers are looking for, which puts them at a disadvantage.

Starting from a young age, students mostly raised in the US public schooling system have been taught to see themselves in their grades. It has been a tradition that the student is reflected on their grades. Even classrooms are sometimes segregated based on their performance. The best and brightest are groomed selectively by classmates and teachers, pushing the others to the bottom.

The difference between a skilled student and a highly intelligent student is put well by Edward de Bono. He says that most highly intelligent people are poor thinkers. On the other hand, most of the average intelligent people are skilled thinkers. He adds that the power of the car is a separate entity from the way the specific car is being driven.

The Risk of Honing Grades

Teaching students to see themselves in their grades is risky. It baits students into overworking to get a higher GPA and drive some to cheating for better grades. It’s a practice that is slowly losing some students into thinking they aren’t worth anything in life which isn’t true. This culture is detrimental to the student’s wellbeing and it is most likely going to carry over into college. Today, we have a nuanced educational setting that is closer to the workforce, career benefits, and salaries which are nothing but a carrot on a stick.

In such a setting, it is easy for students to lose focus on the essence or importance of their education. The risk is that students focus so much on grades, even in colleges and universities, that they lose focus on skills. This reality hits them hard when you come out of school and into the workforce, where skills are the real treasure compared to grades. It’s one reason why graduates fail to understand why getting a good job is a tussle even after graduating with honors.

Striking a balance

In today’s hiring environment, skills are more important than grades, that is sure. However, if you strike a good balance between grades and skills, your value as employee hikes. The employer understands that in some aspects, you can provide them with the skills required to finish specific tasks and, on the other hand, the knowledge required to handle the other tasks.

Striking a balance between education and skills requires having the right teacher. The teacher who understands that it isn’t excellent knowledge of the subject that is only required. It is also the pedagogical subject knowledge that teaches the students how to engage deeply within the subject. The teacher is not simply a source of advanced knowledge. They also know how to use their expertise in these subjects to connect with his student’s level of understanding, helping foster genuine enthusiasm and resultant learning.

Getting the skills

While good grades make you feel amazing, they also give you an illusion of being proficient and highly intelligent in a subject. It is only through learning one can get the right skills and knowledge of a subject. Learning helps generate intelligence which helps measure your performance in life.

Today, organizations are in dire need of leaders, team players, and collaborators who can together help build the organization to last. So many talented young people are lost by defining intelligence through their exams that are inadequate and constricting. Did you know that your education can be outmoded within five to ten years while your learnings, connections, and your attitude are lifelong?

Careers today require more than graduate education. They are rapidly fluctuating, requiring those in the industry to continue learning new information and arming themselves with the skills to help them stay relevant in the industry.

In the past, employers made grades (advanced degrees, high GPA) the gateway to an interview. If you don’t have it, you can’t get in the door. However, times have changed. The emergence of rapidly advancing technologies such as AI, robotics, big data analytics, and quantum computing has created a work environment in which what you learn in universities and colleges becomes outdated in a few years. The soft skills of critical and creative thinking, leadership, and communication don’t get outdated and remain in demand by most employers. It is the only way to build a strong and fast-growing organization, and the combination of these skills and knowledge might not require a degree.