What is the skill required by a graduate? Are you graduate-ready to face the challenges of the workplace?

These are some of the popular questions plaguing the soon-to-be graduates, worrying about the bleak, unpredictable future. Here I will share, in capacity as your senior based on some years of working experience in the field.

1. Language – The skill to communicate

To be able to express oneself, one’s thought and idea is one of the most important ability sought after by the employer. Imagine coming to an interview and found ourselves mind stuck by a series of questions we thought we can answer but just couldn’t express it in words.

University is perhaps the last platform for many of us to get ready prior to stepping to the cold, realistic workplace. To brush up one’s language skill, there are four areas:

• Reading
• Listening
• Writing
• Speaking

Of these four language mastery, the last one is the most important. It is the most dynamic one, instantly putting an image to another person how competent we are in our language skill. There is really no shortcut to mastery except the age-old advice: practice makes perfect. Grab opportunity to start speaking in English, and pay attention to the simple subject-verb agreement. I/you/we/they will always follow by am/are. Have a friend to check on your speech. Practice in front of the mirror. When committed error, quickly recognize it and correct it immediately. You will then instantly turn a failure to a success.

Reading and writing take the second form, and no doubt will prove its worth as days go by. It is our ability to read and write that makes us more intelligent than the animals. With reading, we can help ourselves with external input in the form of books, articles, magazines or the like, hence absorbing what is important to stay abreast in our field of expertise. Writing consumes mental juice as we force ourselves to put down our thoughts in words. In the initial stage, try to use simple sentence. Again, pay attention to the rules of the game, i.e., subject verb agreement. For vocabulary, you will get it expanded as you read more materials and are exposed to different sentence structure. For example, this is a direct tone. An indirect tone is exhibited in this post.

2. Teamwork – the skill to work interdependently

Great works are achieved by collective effort. Solo performance can only go that far.

Look at Microsoft, Apple, and Google today and we will know that the best technologies are made through collaboration. In fact, teamwork and collaboration are in themselves a broad subject to talk about due to the richness of human interactions. As far as workplace is concerned, we will normally be assigned to a small team, or a department with defined roles and goals to be achieved. We will often start off with a superior above us, or a supervisor, or head of department.

Now it is important that we work well with people. Teamwork is more than just compliance. It is engaging the rest of the team members with the best of ourselves, the giving of our talents and expertise in contributing to the project. Teamwork also means shared workload, shared visions, and sometimes even shared meals and lots of working time together. Hence, on and off the working hours we ought to maintain good relationship with our team members.

Teamwork means cooperation. But it doesn’t mean blind submission. It takes a balance between courage and consideration when we try to work with people, especially tough people with weird personality. It takes courage when we detect errors or rooms for improvement and then speak up, and it takes consideration to temporarily put down our own pride and listen to others from their point of view.

What I can say is over time teamwork is what really build the personality of each team member. Mess that up and we will have a distorted view of teamwork at its best and it may hamper our ability to work with people next time.

3. The Brilliant Mind- The skill to analyse and to do research

Lending the advice from the first point, we should engage ourselves in continuous learning so that we can keep ourselves updated in the field we’re working in. New knowledge input is necessary as part of our regular diet, and be particularly selective when it comes to what we should feed our mind throughout the week. An alert and clear mind is needed to execute task, and we cannot afford going to the office half dazed and slow down the whole team just because of our lack of sleep.

Skipping body preparation, analytical skill is built when we utilize our expanding base of knowledge to discern the patterns in our day-to-day problem solving. To be able to break down, assimilate, and simplify the issue, identify its basic principles, and to come out with effective solutions takes some practice. For example, Steve Jobs saw the link between the beautiful calligraphic art and the dull, unimpressed PC in the early days. Today we have beautiful Macbook, founded by Apple on the principles of both simplicity and aesthetic.

Of course we will not be like Steve Jobs instantly when we first apply analytical skill. A lot of prior reading or research needs to take place. Learn to organize our thoughts in a systematic way. Learn to detect the underlying root and principles governing the root cause of a problem, and….like the lawyer, referring to past cases to make today’s decision.

Also learn to ask the right questions. Though no questions is stupid really, but the right question will gear the team toward the correct path. Common questions asked will be like ‘is this project in line with company’s objective?’ ‘will this work add value to the customers?’. The former stresses on the importance of company’s goal as the anchor of each project, and the latter aimed at end-user because they are the ultimate judge as to whether our products or services do deliver result or not.

Though all roads lead to Rome, the Rome is not built in a day. Start with small steps and we will see the Rome one day. Hope it help =)