Test Finds College Graduates Lack Skills for White-Collar Jobs

[Martinus]

But seriously, this is fucking bullshit. Colleges should teach science or (in case of humanities) broaden horizons of students, not teach shitty corpo skills that can be learned by reading a self help book. These skills may be necessary but they are not something that should be taught at a college degree.

And "employers" should go fuck themselves. They may very well need a steady influx of drones who still believe in pre-Lehman's propaganda, but that's not colleges' job to give them that.

[garbon]

Shouldn't those skills be picked up in an internship?

[CountDeMoney]

Shouldn't those skills be picked up in an internship?

Marti, maybe colleges wouldn't be such degree factories if employers stopped demanding them for even the most mundane positions.   

[Martinus]

Shouldn't those skills be picked up in an internship?

Marti, maybe colleges wouldn't be such degree factories if employers stopped demanding them for even the most mundane positions.

Oh I fully agree. It's insane. A friend of mine applied for a job as an office worker in a HR department. He knows English fluently, is very well versed in office software, and is presentable etc., but has only a high school diploma. He was told they need him to have a degree. ANY degree.

[crazy canuck]

"Deliverable" is one of the most overused, misused and quickly becoming meaningless words used in business today.  Everything is being labeled as a "deliverable".  Soon Ed will be giving his daily bowel deliverable reports.

I take it to mean "the thing(s) you are supposed to provide at a certain point in time". Do you have a preferred alternate word or phrase?

Yes, eliminate it entirely.  Just say what needs to be done.  Better precision in language cuts out a lot of need to have to clarify later.  For example, when someone says "our deliverables need to be achieved by y date" it is assumed everyone knows what "deliverables" the speaker is talking about.  But what is meant by that word may not be entirely clear and so time is wasted by people doing things that may not related to the "deliverable" and further meetings to clarify the "deliverable".  Much better if the direction was simply "We need to do x by y date".

Also, I have noticed that people at the top of a decision making hierarchy tend to use the word "deliverable" so that they can speak of wide operational goals in a broad manner without the need to deal with the details.  That isn't really a "deliverable".  Nothing is actually being delivered.  They are really talking about broad organizational objectives.  In that sense "deliverables" has morphed from a specific set of project related tasks that need to be completed to also including aspirational objectives which are essentially impossible to measure or to determine whether they have actually been "delivered".

[KRonn]

It's been a well-known fact for centuries that our current generation is not quite measuring up.

   Well now, in my day....!

[alfred russel]

Skills needed in the modern white-collar workplace:

• Basic project management - knowing what a deliverable or a depedency is
• E-mail etiquette
• Diary management
• Brevity in PowerPoint
• Familiarity with track changes
• Use of MS Word styles
• SPREADSHEETS

Most degrees teach none of these things, which is why I'm always amused when we are told that we Need More Graduates to Be Competitive in a Modern Economy. Education is not the same thing training in skills. (Obviously does not apply for sciences/engineering/languages.)

How can colleges teach those things? Anyone who knows them will leave teaching to make mad bank in the private sector?

[Jacob]

Yes, eliminate it entirely.  Just say what needs to be done.  Better precision in language cuts out a lot of need to have to clarify later.  For example, when someone says "our deliverables need to be achieved by y date" it is assumed everyone knows what "deliverables" the speaker is talking about.  But what is meant by that word may not be entirely clear and so time is wasted by people doing things that may not related to the "deliverable" and further meetings to clarify the "deliverable".  Much better if the direction was simply "We need to do x by y date".

Also, I have noticed that people at the top of a decision making hierarchy tend to use the word "deliverable" so that they can speak of wide operational goals in a broad manner without the need to deal with the details.  That isn't really a "deliverable".  Nothing is actually being delivered.  They are really talking about broad organizational objectives.  In that sense "deliverables" has morphed from a specific set of project related tasks that need to be completed to also including aspirational objectives which are essentially impossible to measure or to determine whether they have actually been "delivered".

Yeah, the morphing to generic abstract jargon is regrettable.

Where I've usually encountered "deliverables" it's been part of specific ongoing contractual obligations. F. ex. (to simplify) a developer may have a contract to develop a game, with a number of specific deliverables set out at specific intervals along the way.

Deliverables may include things like: AI roughed in, all levels in game at alpha-quality, voice audio implemented, front end flow documented, presentation slide deck for marketing, multi-player functionality polished, all features implemented, no crash bugs, etc.

Usually contractual payments are dependent on specific deliverables being... well... delivered, but a whole bunch of necessary work is also being done that is not necessarily a deliverable by itself. Thus, the term deliverable is useful both in communicating between publisher and developer, and internally on the dev team.

Obviously sometimes - many times - more details are needed to have an intelligent conversation about something, but at other times that additional detail is extraneous. Sometimes precision is needed, and sometimes aggregators are more useful.

And sometimes, turning the conversation to deliverables is a good way to cut through hemming and hawing, unfocused creative blabbering, and unwillingness to commit to a direction.

[Berkut]

Maybe it is a term that makes sense and has useful appliacability in the technical world getting used in a more sloppy manner elsewhere?

We use the word all the time, and it is well understood to mean some tangible "thing" that has to be delivered - the outcome of some project, task, or effort. The deliverable. The thing to be delivered.

Perfectly useful word.

[garbon]

Maybe it is a term that makes sense and has useful appliacability in the technical world getting used in a more sloppy manner elsewhere?

We use the word all the time, and it is well understood to mean some tangible "thing" that has to be delivered - the outcome of some project, task, or effort. The deliverable. The thing to be delivered.

Perfectly useful word.

We use it to. Upfront everyone knows what the deliverables are on a project so after that it just serves as a useful shorthand.

[The Brain]

What's the problem with deliverables? Listing every item in every sentence would get real old real fast.

[CountDeMoney]

Nobody has a problem with deliverables except CC, who's just being obnoxious about it.

[Berkut]

It's also a useful term when you want to narrow down and nail someone down on what the point of some project or task is - "What is the deliverable?" is a good question to force out the bullshit, blahblahblah rhetoric crap that middle management stuffs into everything.

"Yeah, yeah, whatever - what is it that you expect to come out of this effort - what is the deliverable?"

[Martinus]

I agree with CC - we should ban every word that has ever been misused by someone.

[Eddie Teach]

Nobody has a problem with deliverables except CC, who's just being obnoxious about it.

I dunno, it seems to me like it may have been coined so management types can talk about their process in the abstract without knowing what's really going on.