Few entrepreneurs would disagree that employees’ communication skills are vital for their business. This goes beyond the skills tool set that people employed in marketing need to convince customers to buy their products or services. It is about making oneself understood in plain simple language. For us fluency in the English language is essential. Sadly it seems that fewer of us are able to communicate sufficiently well in this language.
I am not referring to the gift of eloquence that only a few people possess, but the ability to express oneself in a coherent and clear way. Speaking articulately is an indispensable tool that almost anyone in employment needs to communicate with others. Tragically, few employers are prepared to speak out openly about the inability of many of our workers to be articulate despite their academic qualifications.
I recently came across a report by the British Chamber of Commerce about communication skills to prepare young people for the world for work. According to this study, “almost nine in 10 UK firms said they value communication skills most, compared to 69 per cent for literacy, 64 per cent for numeracy and 56 per cent who said IT skills”.
The same BCC report found that “69 per cent of employers do not think secondary schools prepare their pupils for work. Young people do not know how to make eye contact or speak politely preferring instead to play with their mobile phone”.
Those who work on the coalface of business know that our own problems in Malta are not dissimilar to what they are in the UK. The most recent European Commission report on education in the EU confirms that, while some progress has been done in the educational field in the lst few years, we are still far behind some of the more successful countries with whom we have to compete.
The report also confirmed what I have been suspecting for a very long time: we are not investing enough in our educators. It is all well and good to build new schools, give tablets to children, organise reading lessons, pay students to stay in education for longer, and grant sabbatical leave to teachers to acquire post-graduate qualifications.
Malta spends more than the EU average on education. But our priorities may be misguided
But what really will make a difference is to recruit the best graduates who have a passion for teaching, have a flexible attitude to learning new ways of teaching, and willing be held accountable for their performance. It needs hardly be stressed that, to attract such high fliers, we need to pay them the best salaries even higher than they would earn in private industry. The promise of long holidays and lax supervision is no incentive to those graduates who can really make a difference in our educational system.
John Longfellow, director General of the British Chamber of Commerce says: “Unless ministries allow schools to increase their focus on preparing students for the working world and business start-ups and do more to engage, inform and inspire, we could fail an entire generation of young people.”
Locally there are attempts to engage business in this venture. But these attempts are fragmented, often confusing and ineffective. Sending secondary student to work in a business environment for a week or two is just a way of deluding ourselves that we are exposing students to work experience.
A paradigm shift is needed in the way we look at cooperation between academia and the world of work. Educators need to spend time actually working in industry to understand the needs of employers. I am sure that many educators will be surprised at how some recently qualified graduates can hardly write a letter in articulate language that a customer can understand.
At the same time, businesses should make some of their staff available to spend time in our schools and colleges to explain to students what employers expect from their staff. Such business people will of course need some training to teaching methodologies to ensure that they too communicate with young people in a language they understand.
Malta spends more than the EU average on education. But our priorities may be misguided. As the European Commission rightly implied, the critical success factor in our educational reform must be the ability of our educators to focus on the students’ ability to learn and the different ways of learning.
I am sure there will be many who will jump to the conclusion that this is exactly what we are doing. But the educational achievement results prove otherwise.
johncassarwhite@yahoo.com