The National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) released its "Job Outlook 2012 Spring Update" last month. The report included graphs showing hiring rates growing to pre-recession levels.
NACE provides resources for students, information for companies and training for career service offices. Its survey asked employers what kind of students it would like to hire. 160 employer members responded to the survey, a 16.9 percent response rate out of the batch of nearly a 1,000.
According to the data collected from employers, hiring will be up next year by 10.2 percent. This is the expectation, not a promise, and we shouldn't take their word or numbers for it. More concretely, the survey found job postings have increased 10.5 percent since last year. And people have responded - there was a 54.5 percent increase in the number of applications per job. This bodes well for the economy, but not for job applicants.
93.8 percent of the survey respondents will seek to hire students with their bachelor's degree. This number is comforting until we remember that employers affiliated with NACE are obviously interested in recruiting from colleges. The survey also asks employers which majors are most appealing. Engineering and business are the two most attractive majors, with 69 percent and 63 percent of employers looking to hire them, respectively. 49 percent of employers will recruit from the computer sciences, followed by 22 percent from economics. And in the teens - beneath even "misc. majors" - are the physical and social sciences, as well as the humanities.
This data does not call for panic among liberal arts majors - that should be saved until they graduate. The list was comprised of corporations primarily in retail and industry. It is unsurprising that these companies would want to hire engineers or businessmen.
There are some surprises, however. One part of the survey asked employers to rank which skills were most valuable in new hires. The most important skill was verbal communication, followed by decision-making, problem solving and gathering information. Planning came next. Only then came data analysis, technical expertise and an understanding of computer software. Then writing reports and lastly was influencing people.
The most sought-after skills are often associated with liberal arts education, but there is a disconnect between the kind of abilities companies want and the degrees they look for in hiring. Business and engineering schools should work to develop the sort of critical thinking and analytic skills the survey shows employers demand. The University's general requirements and the Science, Technology & Society courses in the Engineering School aim to do just this. But, inherently, a liberal arts education already provides these skills, and humanities departments need to hire more PR.
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