How to help students make the right career decisions and be job-ready

By Michael E. Bernard, PhD, Professor at the University of Melbourne, psychologist, and founder of You Can Do It! Education — a program for promoting student social-emotional well-being and achievement that is being used in thousands of schools in Australia and overseas.

Whether they’re working or studying at university, some of the brightest students struggle their first year away from home. The reduction in parental support and protection, requires students to call on their inner strengths – what I call mindset — to cope and prosper. Unfortunately, too many young people go out on their own without self-management, independence and confidence — some with such low resilience and low tolerance for discomfort and frustration —that they are ‘at risk’ of falling over. In the last blog, I listed 10 elements of a successful mind and why they are important for students both at school and when pursuing their career, to not only cope but to go from good to great.

Is the mindset or skillset of young people more important to employers?

Being ‘job-ready’ is more than simply completing a qualification.

Universities and training organisations are creating more graduates than ever before, which means finding someone with the qualifications to perform a role is getting easier. However, finding someone who has the ability to add actual value to a business and its culture, is as hard as it ever was.

Research continues to show that who you are as a person, what is termed psychological capital — the attitudes and behavioural strengths that highly successful employees bring with them like resilience, optimism and a growth mindset — is becoming more valued by employers.

According to a LinkedIn survey, the skills hiring managers most desire are communication, organisation, teamwork, punctuality and critical thinking. In an increasingly competitive employment market, skills that go beyond the mechanics of a role are becoming more highly-valued by employers in every industry. These skills aren’t taught as part of a university degree, instead they are the abilities that students and employees gain throughout their lives from their interactions with other people, their achievements and their set-backs.

Lists of ‘common interview questions’ are all over the internet and very rarely are they related to a candidate’s qualifications. Once a person reaches the interview stage, an employer is trying to find out whether or not a potential employee has the ‘right stuff’ to be a positive employee fitting into company culture

Questions, such as…

• Tell me about yourself?
• How do you react to mistakes?
• Tell me how you handled a difficult situation?
• What was your biggest failure?

… are all designed to get a read on a candidate’s psychological capital or mindset.. The question I raise is whether or not we are investing enough time in equipping students, whether they are off to work or further study, with the inner strengths of a successful mindset to help them not only cope with the new demands of being independent of family support, but also to meet the challenges of navigating the complex world of finding the right job or course, and surviving the first years – no easy task!

Find out more with a free preview of The Successful Mind at School and Work program. It is designed to equip high school students with the skills to succeed in their studies and their future jobs, while balancing it with their personal life.