In past few years, interpersonal ability has become indispensable in workplaces. However, it is found by many companies that most of graduate employees lack such skills, particularly in teamwork and cross-cultural communication. This essay will explore the reason of this problem, and provide relevant solutions.
First of all, one major cause of poor teamwork skill is that education systems tend to focus heavily on individual academic performance. Students are often assessed by their daily tasks or exam, which triggers the competition rather than cooperation. Consequently, many graduates struggle to work with others as part of a team. To address this issue, school should set more curricula with collaborative learning such as group projects. These courses not only develop students’ team leadership, and responsibility, but also conflict-resolving skills.
Moreover, the lack of cross-cultural communication ability is also a sign of insufficient workplace social skills, and partially because the tertiary students do not receive opportunities to deal with others with different culture and background. Once they have enter workplaces, they are more likely to have a misperception or fundamental attribution errors of their colleagues according to a psychological study. If schools or educational institutions offered cross-cultural projects, or international study tour, the new employees would improve their interactions with their colleagues, better adapt the working environment, and even break the sense of ethnocentrism.
To sum up, new employees’ weak interpersonal abilities, especially in teamwork and cross-cultural communication, are mainly caused by limited educational content and method. From my perspective, by only paying more attention to the non-academic social skills of students, can they develop the interpersonal skills required in today’s society.