Education fails to meet demands of employers

ISTANBUL

DHA photo

The capacities of young candidates are failing to satisfy most employers, leaving many passed over in terms of job offers, a report released yesterday by a consultancy group has said.

Most employers underlined that a lack of skills caused “significant problems in terms of cost, quality, and time” or, worse, resulted in entry-level vacancies, McKinsey’s report showed.

Across the surveyed countries, nearly four in 10 employers who had vacancies reported that a driving reason continually unfilled openings was the lack of the right skills in new graduates. “This is particularly pronounced in Turkey with 56 percent, India with 53 percent and Brazil with 48 percent, although it remains surprisingly high in all countries apart from Morocco, where vacancies are lowest,” it said.

Seventy percent of educators surveyed in the study believe that graduates or new hires are adequately prepared for the job market. However, only 50 percent of employers answered in the affirmative to the same question.

Companies should involve themselves more with university courses to close a skills gap and ease graduates’ path to employment, the report said.

“Employers, education providers, and youth live in parallel universes,” it found.

“They have fundamentally different understandings of the same situation.”

Further problems are presented by the “NEET rate,” which refers to “not in education, employment, or training.”

The European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions issued a report in 2012 that estimated that the cost of supporting the NEET population in Europe was 153 billion euros, or 1.2 percent of European GDP. The NEET rates of the countries in the McKinsey study ranged from a low of 10 percent in Germany to 30 percent in Turkey.

Another negative finding about the Turkish youth was the lack of a desire to continue higher education.

“The reasons for failing to continue one’s education vary; for example, our survey shows that in Brazil, Mexico, and the United States, affordability is the most important factor, while in Germany, lack of capacity is paramount,” the report said.

However, Turkish youth question whether further education will provide an economic return.

“We were surprised by this because most research shows that further education makes economic sense,” the reporters said. “But if Turkish youth do not see the world this way, it is no wonder that they are more likely to turn off the highway at the first intersection.”

The report noted that youth are seeing signs that read “No additional value ahead.”

“Nor are Turkish youth entirely wrong: while paying for postsecondary education in Turkey does bring net incremental value, the present value of that return is one of the lowest in the OECD,” it said.

In addition, nearly half of the Turkish respondents said youth were not well-informed when making educational choices. The figure stands at 30 percent in Britain, which has the best record in the segment.

Some 60 percent of Turkish participants said academic paths were more valued by society than vocational paths.

The survey was conducted with 8,000 education providers in addition to 70 detailed interviews with youth from 25 countries and employers in Brazil, Germany, India, Mexico, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Britain and the United States.