Funny, i also find critical thinking in short supply.
Employers Find ‘Soft Skills’ Like Critical Thinking in Short Supply
51–60 of 135 posts
Re: Employers Find ‘Soft Skills’ Like Critical Thinking in Short Supply
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Disruptive behaviour in school is often caused by boredom. In a professional setting, I guess it could also be for ego/political reasons. But if somebody is thinking along and asks genuinely good questions, it isn't usually for ego reasons - they want to learn. I think it's worth pursuing: either a) you find somebody knows why it was done a certain way, and it's good to spread that knowledge (and get to know other pe…
Disruptive behaviour is caused by frustration, and frustration in school is often caused by boredom (it's not like there are many other sources compared to the workplace). The problem with workplace politics is that there are usually two kinds of critical thinking: thinking that boils down to "we are doing OK, but we could do better if we did X" which is the type of critical thinking everyone loves, and then there's…
The second type is generally better dealt with indirectly so it becomes the first type. Daily stand up taking 1 hour every day. If you say it's a waste of time let's cancel it then people look bad. If you say, we are wasting time let's get faster then management is rarely going to complain.
Do we really need 30 people in this meeting? What if we had someone send out the meeting notes? etc.
Granted, this assumes people want to get actual work done.
Re: Employers Find ‘Soft Skills’ Like Critical Thinking in Short Supply
#53I think it is great that this question is asked by the wsj. Unfortunately the article is behind a paywall. Can someone with access please summarize the article?
Google the headline, click link from Google results, see paywall disappear. At least worked for me ;)
It doesn't work for me on mobile. I'm not sure why pay walled links continue to be posted to HN. They should be banned.
Re: Employers Find ‘Soft Skills’ Like Critical Thinking in Short Supply
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
I work for a >10,000 employee health care system as a physician. What I have seen is that the front line workers are considered disposable, and should be grateful for a job. The superstars ( always nice, compassionate, and excellent at their jobs) are not recognized by management and so when raises are given, everyone gets them, including the lazy ones. This disappoints the worker bees, and leads to incredible turnov…
Is the issue unionisation? It sounds like the answer is no. The solution is probably to switch to a competitor that does set pay levels individually. In the event that there are none, perhaps take a leap and set up a competitor that does? If it's as big a problem as you say, presumably lots of talented physicians would beat a path to your door.
> This disappoints the worker bees, and leads to incredible turnover and more frustration for us physicians.
I think they are talking about treatment of non-physician employees.
Re: Employers Find ‘Soft Skills’ Like Critical Thinking in Short Supply
#55The article, especially some of the examples, seems abusive to low-wage employees. How many of us would give a job description that said 'this is not a preparation for a slow motion contest' a second glance? The meat and potatoes of the article is mostly just complaints to be honest. A lack of candidates is always the go-to excuse for managers and executives when explaining poor productivity or vacancies. Job seekers…
I work for a >10,000 employee health care system as a physician. What I have seen is that the front line workers are considered disposable, and should be grateful for a job. The superstars ( always nice, compassionate, and excellent at their jobs) are not recognized by management and so when raises are given, everyone gets them, including the lazy ones. This disappoints the worker bees, and leads to incredible turnov…
This is called the Peter Principle [0]. Unfortunately, the system is kinda unfixable. If we promote based on achievement in your last job, then at some point you can become unpromotable in your current job as you just aren't suited to it or some other reason. If we want to get rid of the Peter Principle, an inherent 'bug' in a merit based system, then you have to radically change how promotion is decided. Your front-line workers are victims of management that is affected by the sclerosis of the Peter Principle, and they themselves are as well as they are unpromotable and have 'failed' at the merit based system (namely, the internal politics of the Hospital).
Still, it sounds like management just wants to hire/fire at a whim, as it keeps wages down and there tends to be a glut of nurses out there that can be replaced. Again, this is a feature of supply/demand and the job market. Also, if you did raise wages based on 'merit', then you would get the front-line people trying to snipe each other over the money and promotion would become based on internal politics and 'he-said-she-said' stuff. It all comes down to the money.
Re: Employers Find ‘Soft Skills’ Like Critical Thinking in Short Supply
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't mistake being a contrarian with being a critical thinker.
We need contrairian people as a balance to people who think they are infallible. Both should be a small percentage of society with the remaining majority willing to change if needed.
Being a contrarian is no more valuable than being a yes man.
Neither has any societal value.
Re: Employers Find ‘Soft Skills’ Like Critical Thinking in Short Supply
#57Do the personality tests most companies rely on during the hiring process even account for critical thinking?
Intelligence testing is considered to be illegal. On the other hand, figuring out how to game a personality test is, in a sense, a test of critical thinking
Re: Employers Find ‘Soft Skills’ Like Critical Thinking in Short Supply
#58Thank god the Wall Street Journal is encouraging critical thinking, and more importantly fostering the discussion by putting articles like this out for everybody to read /s On a more serious note, I don't believe this is true. In every place I've been, school, university, corporate jobs, the "critical thinkers" always got marginalised. This was the case even if they were truly nice people who cared - i.e. not abrasiv…
> In every place I've been, school, university, corporate jobs, the "critical thinkers" always got marginalised. Because while they get things done, they challenge the status quo. When I've worked for large companies, the #1, #2, and #3 products of the company were management politics. Actually shipping anything was #4, maybe #5. Critical thinkers looked at that and went "we could do better", and got punished for it.
i think command and control management structures have a lot of benefits at scale. Maybe at scale a company's competitive edge is essentially about executing on information, and information asymmetry, which is why things like trust and politics are more important than shipping efficiently. Just an idea.
Re: Employers Find ‘Soft Skills’ Like Critical Thinking in Short Supply
#59I work for a fortune 100 and critical thinking is highly valued on my team. One thing that I've observed is that expressing critical thinking without communication skill comes across as being argumentative. If you find yourself frequently arguing a point but no one is convinced, assuming you are actually correct on the issue, then you probably just have weak communication skills.
Re: Employers Find ‘Soft Skills’ Like Critical Thinking in Short Supply
#60Strange - I usually associate "soft skills" more with leadership, people skills etc. And yeah they are in short supply because you can't teach them directly. The employees sorta need to pick them up from experience.
> And yeah they are in short supply because you can't teach them directly. If you can think critically are you going to get past the HR filters and convince them you are the recruit willing to take a deal that will descend into just a little worse than unemployment? (So your empty shell of a life after they spit you out is devoid of any unused benefits.) If you want to openly think critically in corporate employment,…
>>> If you want to openly think critically in corporate employment, step 1 is becoming irreplaceable so they can't replace you when you become inconvenient at step 2.
Hence all the worry about "bus factors"