One of my favorite blogs, 99u, recently called my attention to an excellent study conducted by Chegg and Harris Interactive. The study concluded, “there is a disconnect between students’ perceived proficiency of their soft skills like leadership, communication, and organization versus how hiring managers actually rate these critical workforce skills among recent college graduates.” Take a look at the figure, reproduced below, and measure how long it takes you to clearly see that finding.
(click figure to enlarge)
It took me a while to see the conclusion because there is so much information in the chart. Here, I’ll propose two alternatives that support the finding more clearly.
Alternative #1: Just Show the Gaps
Charts should prove the argument their creator is making, no more and no less, in a way that requires the minimum of mental effort by the reader. In the original chart, I struggled to realize how the soft skills were ordered until I figured out they are sorted in descending order of the confidence of hiring managers in college students’ readiness.
A way to make this easy for readers is to just show the gaps. As the following figure shows, the largest gap lies in “communicating with authority figures and clients.” If I were a newly hired college student, I would focus there to stand out. Also, note that I used a color for the bars in the red family since these gaps are problematic.
(click figure to enlarge)
Alternative #2: Apply Extreme Minimalism
Averaging all 10 gaps reveals that 71% of students and only 51% of hiring managers believe the students are very/completely prepared to use their soft skills at work. That gap of 20% is the conclusive, aggregate disconnect that led the chart creator to the conclusion. If I were presenting this data, I might simply put a large 20% on my slide or perhaps show a bar chart highlighting the gap between the 71% and the 51%.
Which approach would you take?