Steve Kinney

Education Innovation turned me on to a post by Jonathan Rosenberg, a senior vice president at Google. The post is addressed to college students interested in working with students after graduation, but I think that the general message can be applied to all students from K-12 who want to compete in the 21st century job market. Rosenberg argues, “The challenge for the up-and-coming generation is how to acquire them. It’s easy to educate for the routine, and hard to educate for the novel.”

So what does Google look for in recent graduates?

… analytical reasoning. Google is a data-driven, analytic company. When an issue arises or a decision needs to be made, we start with data. That means we can talk about what we know, instead of what we think we know.

… communication skills. Marshalling and understanding the available evidence isn’t useful unless you can effectively communicate your conclusions.

… a willingness to experiment. Non-routine problems call for non-routine solutions and there is no formula for success. A well-designed experiment calls for a range of treatments, explicit control groups, and careful post-treatment analysis. Sometimes an experiment kills off a pet theory, so you need a willingness to accept the evidence even if you don’t like it.

… team players. Virtually every project at Google is run by a small team. People need to work well together and perform up to the team’s expectations.

… passion and leadership. This could be professional or in other life experiences: learning languages or saving forests, for example. The main thing, to paraphrase Mr. Drucker, is to be motivated by a sense of importance about what you do.

For more, please visit Education Innovation and the Official Google Blog.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.