Skills and qualifications

Skilled and unskilled

A skill is a particular ability to do something well, especially because you have learned and practised it. Jobs, and the people who do them, can be described as: • highly skilled, e.g. car designer • semi-skilled, e.g. taxi driver • skilled, e.g. car production manager • unskilled, e.g. car cleaner You can say that someone is: • skilled at or skilled in + noun: customer care, electronics + -ing: communicating, using Excel • good with (computers, figures, people) The right person These words are often used in job advertisements. Companies look for people who are: • methodical, systematic and organized = working in a planned, orderly way • computer-literate = good with computers • numerate = good with numbers • motivated = very keen to do well in their job because they find it interesting • talented = very good at what they do • self-starters; they must be proactive, self-motivated, or self-driven = good at working on their own • team players = people who work well with other people Education and training Two company managers, Kasia Gutowska and Nils Olsen, are talking: KG: The trouble with graduates – people who’ve just left university – is that their paper qualifications are good. They might have qualifications in interesting subjects, but they have no work experience. They just don’t know how business works. NO: I disagree. Education should teach people how to think, not train them for a particular job. One of last year’s recruits graduated from Oxford University with a degree in philosophy and she’s doing very well! KG: Philosophy’s an interesting subject, but for our company, it’s more useful to do training in a practical subject: it’s better for us if you train as a scientist, and qualify as a biologist or a doctor, for example. NO: Yes, but we don’t just need scientists. We also need good managers, which we can achieve through in-house training – courses within the company. You know we put a lot of money into management development, where managers regularly go on specialized courses in leadership (see Unit 10), finance (see Unit 38), etc. You need to acquire experience – get knowledge through doing things – for that. It’s not the sort of thing you can learn when you’re 20! Note In AmE, you can also say that someone graduates from high school – the school that people usually leave when they are 18. A master’s degree is a qualification you can get after one or two years of graduate study. A Master’s of Business Administration (MBA) is a master’s degree in advanced business studies.