Navigating the Soft Skills Economy: What employers want in this era of work

Welcome to our monthly LinkedIn newsletter! We're thrilled to kick off this edition with a celebration of summer ?? and all of the happenings across the VI network.

• How Universities Can Equip Students with Soft Skills Employers Want??
• Preparing Students for The Top 8 Professions of 2050
• Alumni Spotlight: 3 global VI alumni talk about how their internships prepared them for careers in digital media, international policy, and project management.
• The Industry in Numbers: Key Employability & Higher Ed Insights

A Higher Perspective: Preparing Students for a Soft Skills Job Market

How can institutions foster work readiness and better equip learners for the real world of work? While tertiary education plays a pivotal role in carving career paths, many employers note a lack of work-ready skills among new graduates. In fact, a remarkable 83% of employers struggle to find suitable candidates due to a shortage of necessary skills (NACE, 2022).

The solution? Former President of Broward College, J. David Armstrong, believes that #workintegratedlearning , with an emphasis on #softskills development, is key.?

"Often we hear from employers that students have learned how to be really good accountants or engineers or whatever with the knowledge they have, but they don't always come with what we sometimes refer to as ‘soft skills’.”

Where can students develop soft skills?

Armstrong, a veteran educator, goes on to acknowledge that higher education stakeholders, such as students, parents, employers, and funders, have a general expectation that universities should foster #careerpreparation . He suggests that if institutions integrate practical internships alongside academic studies, students can apply their technical knowledge and develop critically needed non-technical skills, all while working on hands-on projects. This holistic approach enables educators to prioritize academia and simultaneously prepare learners for the real world.

Preparing Students for The Top 8 Professions of 2050

We are in a rapidly evolving economy! According to a 2022 Coursera report, by the middle of this decade, an estimated 85 million jobs may disappear, while another 97 million new ones will take their place.

While it might be difficult to accurately forecast which jobs would exist decades from now, monitoring today's trends in #business , #technology , #trade , and #policy will help you to at least formulate a realistic idea of what tomorrow's career paths might be.

Read about the eight leading emerging professions we identified:

The Power of Partnership: This Month's Global Partners

At Virtual Internships, we understand the immense value of #partnerships between universities and our platform. These collaborations enable us to empower students with transformative experiences that play a crucial role in enhancing their #employability prospects at scale.

This month proudly announce our partnerships with Case Western Reserve University , KIIT - Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology , upGrad KnowledgeHut , and the Australian National Institute of Management and Commerce.

Alumni Spotlight: How 3 Professionals Used Virtual Internships for Career Success

In a recent Virtual Internships webinar session, Equipping Your Students for the Future of Work, we had the privilege of hearing from a panel of three esteemed Virtual Internships alumni.

The conversation, led by Virtual Internships President and Co-founder, Ed Holroyd Pearce , included the perspectives of VI alumni Joshua McLaughlin FRSA , an in-house digital and social media expert at? TheTalentPeople , Jack Crawford , a current economic affairs intern at the United Nations , and Misaki Mitchell (Yamamichi) , a partnerships account manager at Virtual Internships .

Overall, the webinar proved to be an invaluable forum for educators, career services personnel, potential partners, and students alike as they shared valuable insights and perspectives on employability, #highereducation , #remotework , and how their past experiences as remote interns helped to create their current career outcomes.

• 49% of overall positions and 50% of entry-level positions are hybrid. (NACE,2023) ?
• Only 37% of employers consider GPA as a top priority when recruiting. (NACE,2022)
• 33% of employers?across all industries now offer location-agnostic pre-career experiences, and 70% of college students are open to those programs. (Investment News, 2023)
• 70% of first-year students intend to do an internship, but only about 48% intern by senior year. (Strada, 2023)

Want to secure an unbeatable advantage for your students?