We know how difficult the job market is at the moment, and many individuals are struggling to find work. The increased competition means that employers are looking for more than simply good grades at school or university. And if candidates don’t have the right personal attributes for the role, chances are they will not get the job, regardless of their educational history.
Interestingly, this issue was highlighted in the first episode of this year’s Young Apprentice, which aired last Thursday. Despite being an A* student at GCSE level, 16-year-old Max was fired by Lord Sugar for failing to get stuck into the task. He may have been the perfect candidate on paper, but often a CV can only tell half the story. And as Lord Sugar pointed out, he seems to be more of a thinker than a doer, and didn’t have the right traits to succeed in the show.
At a&dc, we really recognise the value of developing personal skills, and arguably the most important is resilience. Higher levels of resilience lead to positive consequences such as reduced stress, a constructive work attitude and improved job performance. We have also found that there’s a relationship between engagement and five of our resilience scales: self belief, optimism, purposeful direction, challenge orientation and support seeking. This suggests that resilience will benefit not just the individual, but the business as a whole, which is why it’s such a sought after quality for HR professionals and employers.
If we think back to the Young Apprentice, we have definitely seen aspects of resilience, such as challenge orientation when we saw Ashleigh and Patrick put themselves forward as project managers. However, it’s clear that many of the candidates would value from improving their resilience levels further. For instance, when it came to adaptability, this is where Patrick floundered. Despite having a background in fashion, he failed to adapt to the fact that the task was a commercial one, and not simply a design task, and the boys lost as a result.
Perhaps the biggest test of resilience is how candidates frame their experience once fired. Impressively, Max did demonstrate an ‘optimistic’ approach to his misfortune by claiming he was determined to carry on in business and use the lessons he’d learned from the experience. But only time will tell how the others react as one candidate leaves each week.
Given that today’s young people are our future leaders – and in the case of the young apprentices, in the not-so-distant future – their levels of resilience will affect the success of our economy in the long term. If we deal with the issue early on in their career, for example through workshops and mentoring programmes, they will have the skills needed to tackle the long term challenges. As Lord Sugar said, it’s young entrepreneurs like these candidates that will bring prosperity back to this country.
