Clara,
I understand your dismay, but the message from employers (and you’re right – it’s the same message from a broad range of employers, possibly including the aforesaid shoe salespersons) is that project management and team management skills and communications skills are not showing up in university graduates and as a result, the things you call “actual skills” cannot be brought to bear effectively. Employers can look at a well/accurately-crafted resume and cover letter and determine whether someone has modeling skills, or conservation genetics skills. Most of us stress the need for students to highlight these tools when they have them, and our programs include courses with relevant names. But project management isn’t built in to most conservation biology/environmental science currricula I’m familiar with, and most programs neither emphasize it nor teach students to highlight it if they happen to have gotten experience via summer jobs, internships, lab management, grant management, etc. Our students may start out as technicians, managers, or researchers for agencies or post-docs within others’ labs, but if they’re good, then in a few years, they will be running the kinds of projects they once worked on, and needing an additional skill set they may not have in order to succeed. Increasingly, environmental management programs _are_ stressing project and team management. Our distinguished alumni council, when asked to address the issue, was emphatic to the point of vehemence that project and team management should not just be taught, but should be integrated throughout our programs, including our environmental science program. They were scathing on the subject of how terribly worthless it is to have tons of advanced training without any idea of how to bring it to bear on a particular problem – how to develop a statement of the problem, plan strategically to address it, develop timelines and contingency plans, develop a budget, build and manage a team, assess progress, finalize the solution, and close the project. Certainly, project management training without “legs” in other areas is not desirable in scientists. But the emphasis on collaborative and interdisciplinary problem solving raises project management from something one can get by reading a website to a skill set of considerable depth and nuance – a different kind of ‘legs’ if you will. Respectfully, Vicky Meretsky Associate Professor School of Public and Environmental Affairs Indiana University 1. ...assuming that your summary is an accurate reflection of the *CB*article... 2. ...i am shocked that there is no mention of actual skills...most of the traits you mention might be categorized as "intangible"...you need these skills to be a car salesman...not to impugn car sales-persons... 3. ...IMO, an applicant has a better edge if s/he brings something transferrable [marketable!] to the table that no-one else brings to the table... 4. ...often this "something" is one or more quantitative skill... 5. ...or, skill in a fundamental or "hot" area of research w long-term potential... 6. ...or, a grant... 7. ...i am somewhat exercised by your post because, IMO, too many young, especially, female, applicants don't bring much to the table that others don't already know or that cannot be readily duplicated or that is mostly generalist-oriented... 8. ...early-career applicants need to bring something "with legs"...as my Grandmother Jackson used to say...in other words, bring something to the table that can go somewhere [that the department and the college/university and the field want to go]... 9. ...clara b. jones On Sat, Feb 16, 2013 at 1:38 PM, Helen Bothwell <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>wrote: > In a recent publication in Conservation Biology, Blickley et al. > (2012) analayzed what skills are necessary for graduate students to be > competitive in the job market. We discuss these in the Early Career > Ecologists blog and hope that many of you will find this useful: > > http://earlycareerecologists.wordpress.com/2013/02/12/a-graduate-stude > nts- > guide-to-necessary-skills-for-landing-a-job/<http://earlycareerecologi > sts.wordpress.com/2013/02/12/a-graduate-students-guide-to-necessary-sk > ills-for-landing-a-job/> > -- Clara B. Jones Director Mammals and Phenogroups (MaPs) Twitter: http://twitter.com/cbjones1943 Cell: -828-279-4429 Blog Profile: http://www.blogger.com/profile/09089578792549394529 Brief CV: http://vertebratesocialbehavior.blogspot.com/2012/10/clara-b-jones-brief-cv.html "Where no estimate of error of any kind can be made, generalizations about populations from sample data are worthless." Ferguson, 1959
