AMBITIOUS STUDENTS AIM HIGH FROM a surprisingly early age. Aspirational teenagers as young as 15-16 are already planning for careers with big name multinational corporations. Their targets predominantly are corporate organisations in the financial services, new media, and the creative sectors whose activities increasingly define our daily life. According to CNN Money’s 2013 survey ‘World’s Top Employers for New Grads’, firms such as Google, Ernst and Young, Goldman Sachs and PwC top students’ shortlists. In turn, multinational corporations are revising their personnel selection criteria as they draw new recruits no longer just from their base countries, but from the global talent pool.
Strong academic performance gets you to first base, but won’t result in an appointment letter. Conventional interest in the breadth of a student’s school experience continues to play a part — it tells an employer much about an applicant, not least the ability to balance priorities and manage time effectively. Goldman Sachs, for example, looks back to an applicant’s school record for evidence of extracurricular activities. “We look at the types of activities that candidates have been engaged in through school, such as team sports, events or group projects; or even outside school where they may have volunteered for a charitable organisation,” says the Goldman Sachs careers blog.
A trawl of the world’s top employers’ websites highlights a new emphasis on capabilities that have become known as 21st-century skills. These are skills which indicate new ways of working and thinking in the rapidly changing global economy. Traditional interest in an applicant’s problem-solving skills, for example, has moved to a new focus on her expertise in working collaboratively to solve problems.
Indeed, collaborative problem-solving skills are highly valued by multinational companies. They enable effective knowledge management and the ability to examine issues from multiple perspectives, skill-bases, and a global perspective. There’s widespread recognition that the ‘silo mentality’ — national, functional, or organisational — inevitably results in sub-optimal and wasteful solutions which are anathema to cost-conscious multinational corporations.
The well-known management consultancy firm Deloitte’s recruitment guidance for applicants emphasises this. “The ability to collaborate and solve problems is key to securing a job here.” Similarly, IBM stresses that “creativity, curiosity, and strong collaborative skills are valued in would-be recruits”. Stacy Savides Sullivan, Google’s chief culture officer and director of human resources, puts it another way: “I would characterise the (our) culture as one that is team-oriented, very collaborative and encouraging people to think non-traditionally,” she says.
In fact, collaborative problem-solving is now so widely valued as a key skill in the 21st century that from 2015, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) will conduct an international survey of the effectiveness of different educational systems in developing this skill.
The ability to communicate, co-operate, respect, and support colleagues in a team has long been sought by employers, big and small. But what’s different today is widespread awareness that teams tend to be culturally diverse, internationally focussed and often virtual in composition. Therefore it’s not enough for ambitious young professionals to be competent team-workers. In the new era of globalisation, team players are required to display intercultural sensitivity, respect, and appreciation of ethnic, cultural, and other differences among team members.
Shirley Jackson, global head of recruitment at Ernst and Young, comments that a global mindset is vital: “Recruiters look for team players who can... work effectively with people who have diverse backgrounds, skills and perspectives.”
Since the dawn of the millennium, international exchange programmes have become a well-established feature of higher education study programmes. But now even high school students, aware of the vital importance of acquiring transnational management skills, are increasingly looking for such experiences, and special skills development programmes designed to build capabilities likely to interest future employers.
Students who demonstrate the ability to think and act as global citizens are increasingly getting the red carpet treatment. What Google calls ‘being Googley’ — the capability to “innovate in a fast-paced environment, thrive in small teams, excel in flat organisations, and care about making the world a better place” — is valued by all progressive organisations in which aspirational students wish to carve out careers.
Therefore, a growing number of high school students are getting involved in study exchanges all over the world, and signing up for leadership and enterprise programmes which complement and enhance their core curriculums. These programmes are for the aspirational, expertly crafted to help young people develop inter-cultural sensitivity and a global outlook which will prepare them to work together with other ambitious individuals from all over the world to solve increasingly complex global problems.
(Ann Puntis is head of programme management at Global Study Pass and former CEO of Cambridge International Examinations; Melanie Hilton is programme director at Global Study Pass, UK)