Earlier this year a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend’s daughter, who we’ll call
Jane, emailed me out of the blue. She had just graduated from a top
university with a first, and asked for help finding a job in journalism. I
was taken aback by her blunt approach, not least since we’d never actually
met, but replied with some names and suggested she approach them for work
experience.
A magazine offered Jane a three-week internship. I know this not because Jane
told me, or thanked me, but because the friend who works there informed me
of her progress. “She was late nearly every morning and kept complaining
about how it was all the fault of the Tube,” she reported. “She answered the
phone by saying ‘Yo!’ – which didn’t go down well with the managing
director. She left every day at 5pm on the dot, regardless of whether she’d
finished her work, and then she complained on her public Facebook feed that
we’d given her boring jobs, so she couldn’t ‘fulfil her potential’.”
Needless to say, Jane wasn’t offered a job. But around the same time another
friend who runs a small but successful and growing business told me about
her latest recruit. “We advertised for a junior and had hundreds of
applications, often misspelled or obviously cut-and-pasted, from graduates
who all claimed to have firsts, to have rowed single-handedly across the
Atlantic and volunteered in a hospice.
"We were struggling to make a shortlist. So we asked our cleaner’s
17-year-old daughter, Sara, to help out for a couple of days. She had come
to this country from Zimbabwe 10 years ago speaking bad English and had just
left school with a handful of GCSEs. She was so charming with clients and
easy to be around and showed so much initiative that we gave her the job.
The fact that people liked her was much more important than a knowledge of
German medieval history or grade-eight viola.”
What Sara possessed and Jane notably lacked were “soft
skills”: the talents that business gurus have pinpointed as the
modern workplace’s most sought-after qualities. Including intangible
attributes such as punctuality, flexibility, good communication and
cooperativeness, soft skills are impossible to quantify but are, according
to increasingly exasperated bosses, potentially far more valuable than exam
results.
The absence of these skills is the reason why, despite huge youth unemployment
(737,000 people, nearly 17 per cent of 16- to 24-year-olds, are currently
jobless), 54 per cent of employers, while agreeing recruits are more highly
qualified than ever, still
complain that they can’t fill vacancies.
“What we see in survey after survey is employers saying qualifications are
important,” Nick Hurd, the
former Minister for Civil Society said recently, “but that just as
important to us are so-called soft skills, character skills, the ability to
get on with different people, to articulate yourself clearly, confidence,
grit, self-control. They are saying we are not seeing enough of this in kids
coming out of school.”
But surely such skills are fluffy extras, far less important than an ability
to speak a dozen languages and perform advanced calculus in your head? Well,
not necessarily, when machines can now do all those things – and more. As
the urban studies theorist Richard Florida put it in his book The
Rise of the Creative Class, “What powers economic growth? It’s not
technology – technology is a raw material. What makes human beings unique is
one thing – creativity. All else are subsets.” And he’s not the only one: in
its report on modern workplaces, Working
Progress, the think-tank Demos pointed out that Britain long ago
moved from manufacturing to a service-led economy; to prosper globally,
British employers need to focus on soft skills.
Business forecasters are predicting that, very soon, workforces will be split
between those highly skilled individuals able to carry out
technology-related jobs and charismatic, innovative individuals, whose charm
will make others want to do business with them. And that is something that
can’t be outsourced to a computer. If you can’t do one of the two, then it’s
time to brush up on your shelf-stacking.
Soft skills are the reason why women such as Sheryl
Sandberg, the COO of Facebook, have soared to the very top,
overtaking her Harvard contemporaries. “She was young, brilliant,
good-looking, and you might easily bridle at that, but she is so good at
working with people, you couldn’t help but like her,” recalled Sandberg’s
first boss, the economist Lant Pritchett.
They’re why, despite our patriotism, many of my friends end up employing
eastern-European builders, nannies and assistants, because – unlike many of
their British counterparts – they show up on time, smile and aren’t forever
distracted by Facebook.
The Tatler editor Kate Reardon champions so-called 'soft skills' (DAN
BURN-FORTI)
Last year Kate
Reardon, the editor of Tatler, was lambasted for being anti-feminist
after she told students at the all-girls Westonbirt School, “It doesn’t
matter how many A-levels you have, what kind of a degree you have, if you
have good manners people will like you.” After critics said she was
effectively telling girls not to get an education, Reardon (who showed a
brilliant mastery of soft skills in the recent BBC documentary Posh
People by self-deprecatingly describing herself as a “honking
Sloane”) vehemently defended herself.
“While I didn’t for a moment say [manners] are more important than good exam
results, if I’m interviewing somebody, she walks in, she looks me in the
eye, she sits down, she knows how to engage me conversationally and she
doesn’t bore me rigid, I’m going to be far more impressed than with somebody
who walks in with some kick-ass CV but hasn’t bothered to wash her hair, is
picking at her nails, can’t look me in the eye, and is frankly boring me
rigid. It’s human nature.”
Well, quite. First impressions are all. Countless studies have shown that we
take just three seconds to evaluate someone by their appearance, body
language, mannerisms and dress. I’ve never forgotten my surprise on meeting
an eight-year-old schoolgirl who shook my hand and looked me in the eye with
a beaming smile.
I was not remotely surprised, however, when a decade later she started hitting
headlines as the supermodel Cara
Delevingne. In an environment full of gorgeous creatures, that
charm, just as much as her bushy eyebrows, surely helped propel her to the
top.
The supermodel Cara Delevingne (GETTY)
But Delevingne is a shining beacon of politeness in a generation generally
deplored for its boorishness. Of course, the younger generation has always
been viewed as beyond the pale. “Our youth […] have bad manners, contempt
for authority; they show disrespect for their elders […] contradict their
parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannise their
teachers,” complained Socrates in about 400BC.
Yet when it comes to Generation Y (those born after 1980), it seems our
perceptions are informed by more than just middle-aged dyspepsia. The
Government’s recent state-of-the-nation survey showed two out of three of us
believe manners have notably deteriorated in the past decade – a time,
interestingly, when schools have boasted record exam results. Could academic
excellence have come at the expense of emphasising good manners? As the
Demos report concluded, “Despite rising academic attainment, somehow the
traditional 21-year cycle of learning and preparation for the world of work
is not quite preparing people for the reality of life in modern
organisations – resulting in lower productivity for business and frustrating
false starts for young people.”
According to Jimmy Beale, the director of the etiquette training and
consultancy firm The
English Manner, this is far from a uniquely British problem. “In
growing economies like India and China, our training is in huge demand,” he
says. “These are young people who revere education and results, but to
compete in the global world they need a bit more help with people skills.”
Such skills used to be passed on down the generations. “But we’re not
spending enough time in family units. Children have to be reminded to say
‘please’ and ‘thank you’. If you keep at them they will do it but we’re on
to the second or third generation of this not having happened and folk not
thinking it’s important.”
As so often, however, the greatest threat to our civility comes from
technology. Tales abound of graduates checking their Instagram feed in the
middle of job interviews (yes, really). And last year I was astonished when
interviewing an up-and-coming film star to see that he was absent-mindedly
answering my questions while simultaneously reading messages on his phone,
tucked in his jacket sleeve.
A recent article in Harvard Business Review bemoaned the trend for younger
workers to wear headphones at their desks, to communicate all day with
friends via social media, while ignoring office life around them. When they
have to communicate with the person at the next desk, they prefer email to
talk. “The more I participated in the ambient, informal life of the office,
the more committed I became to the work of the company,” wrote
the article’s author Anne Kreamer, comparing her time working
on big television shows with current workplaces. “A company spirit formed
and evolved, and I shared in it unconsciously and consciously.”
Today, in contrast, “an employee is glued to her desk with headphones on,
immersed in music and G-chatting with her buddy, [but] she is missing the
opportunity to create relationships with people on the job who might be
launching a project for which she’d be perfect.”
The social-media generation simply isn’t brilliant at oral communication. “We
take on some very highly qualified graduates as interns, but no matter how
many A*s they have, they are uncomfortable in face-to-face meetings and
making calls,” affirms the director of a large recruitment company. “But our
business is all about building relationships and those relationships just
don’t develop via email – you need to go out there and talk to people.”
Sheryl Sandberg: 'You couldn’t help but like her' (REUTERS)
“On social media, many of us are very disinhibited, which means our approaches
can ricochet from one extreme to another,” says Julia
Hobsbawm, the only professor of networking in the world, at Cass
Business School. “In person, we make much better judgment calls. Fifty to 70
per cent of communication comes through body language. But people need to be
persuaded that this is the case, then be given the confidence to go out and
meet people.”
It’s easy to deride these clueless, smartphone-besotted graduates, but –
having once been a clueless intern myself, fortunately in less competitive
times – I can’t help feeling sorry for them, plunged into organisations
whose mores they are expected to master by osmosis. “It’s not easy,” says
Becky, a 27-year-old Cambridge history graduate, who did five internships
before landing a job at a television production company.
“On my first internship, my boss was annoyed when I knocked on her office door
with some ideas, saying I should email her. So at the next internship, I did
that but the email was obviously never read and at the end of my stint I was
told I lacked confidence.”
The next generation may need help mastering soft skills, but Generation-Xers
like me still need to meet them halfway. As Jimmy Beale explains, “It’s not
that the young are bad. There’s a lack of understanding from middle and
senior managers about how different life is for twentysomethings. One value
set isn’t superior to another – they’re just different. And both sides need
to make an effort to meet in the middle.”
Fair enough. In the meantime, I can’t suppress an unkind smile at the news
that surly Jane is now working in a camping shop and complaining to all on
Facebook about how undervalued she is, while sunny Sara has been promoted.