Every year, Bloomberg asks more than a thousand recruiters at hundreds of different companies across the US the same question: what skills do you want the most but find the least when recruiting MBA graduates?
The results of this survey are enlightening.
For the last two years, strategic thinking, creative problem solving, leadership skills and communication skills have been at the top of the list. They fall into the “Less Common, More Desired” category – something that Bloomberg neatly calls “the sweet spot”.
Certainly from my perspective, the communication skills issue does not come as a surprise at all. In the course of my training discussions for Writing Machine Academy, I’ve been told by client after client that the majority of employees really struggle with one aspect of communication in particular: their writing. (In fact, I’m being polite – many of our training clients are a lot more vocal about the problem than that.) While some universities may guide students on academic writing, it would seem that there is a greater challenge in equipping them to write well for business. Even the MBA schools, which are specifically designed to turn out students who are ready to hit the ground running in senior corporate management roles, appear not to be doing this well either.
To my mind (and clearly the minds of the recruiters, too) this is a huge oversight, because writing is in fact one of the most significant activities that an employee of any company can undertake. Every report, every proposal, every marketing document ever produced – indeed, every email that an employee of a company will ever send is a written document. Moreover, the whole purpose of these documents is to inform, to sell, to persuade, to change opinions – essentially, to carry out the day-to-day activity of the business. The year-on-year failure to address a lack of communication skills is therefore a worrying trend, and should be a concern to businesses (and universities and MBA schools) everywhere.
Of course, the issues highlighted by Bloomberg extend beyond communication skills – but this is where it gets even more interesting. I believe that good communication skills and structured writing are in fact linked to one other missing skill in Bloomberg’s ‘sweet spot’: strategic thinking.
Writing is in fact one of the most significant activities that an employee of any company can undertake. Every report, every proposal, every email that an employee of a company will ever send is a written document.
Fail to plan, plan to fail
Far too many people in business consistently fail to plan their writing before they start. Instead, they “think as they write”, writing with a vague idea of what they want to say and/or achieve with their words.
One of the biggest problems with this is that the writing process becomes a bit of a slog (how can you be efficient when you’ve no idea where you’re really headed with a piece of writing?), and the text produced is unclear at best. At worst, it’s completely garbled and has no apparent point to make, which, in turn, means it completely misses the business opportunity that it was intended to address.
If the document concerned is a proposal, this failure to plan can cost a company millions of pounds.
Working as a professional writer for thirty years has proven to me time and time again that business writing can only truly be deemed ‘good’ if it is built on a robust structure – a structure that requires some strategic thinking. And importantly, how to think in a strategic way can very much be taught. Indeed, the Structured Writing Method that we teach through our eLearning and classroom courses – and which our writers have used for decades to produce high quality bid documents and marketing materials for paying clients – provides a clear method for strategic thinking and structuring your ideas, long before you actually start the writing process. Write in a strategic, structured way, and you have a far better chance of producing writing that will help you achieve your strategic goals.
What’s more, when you have a whole team trained in this strategic writing method, the benefits start to be felt across the business – and I mean beyond writing activities.
Write in a strategic, structured way, and you have a far better chance of producing writing that will help you achieve your strategic goals.
The Structured Thinking Method?
For example, one senior Talent Manager who commissioned us to deliver structured writing training to his team said that our Structured Business Writing course “has not only improved the way we write our reports, it has also changed the way we think as a business.”
To me, this makes perfect sense. What’s your business objective? What is the message you are trying to get across, and to whom? What’s the best way to communicate that message? We teach delegates how to tackle issues like these in order to build the foundations for good writing. But in actual fact, these tools and techniques can enable people to look at all sorts of critical business issues in new and more strategic ways.
And that is very powerful indeed.
Read more about graduate writing skills, and the importance of structure:
Paul Ayling is the founder and CEO of Writing Machine.
We have years of experience in helping companies improve their writing with our Structured Business Writing courses and think that students and graduates could make great use of it too in improving their own skills.