The New York Times recently called this the grimmest job market in years for new college graduates. Unemployment among recent graduates is approaching 6 percent, higher than the national average. Job openings have fallen to their lowest level since 2020. Entry-level roles are being thinned out by AI.

For higher education, the question isn't only how to help students get hired. It’s preparing them to succeed in workplaces where communication is more fragmented, collaboration is more complex, and the distinctly human parts of work matter more.

The skillset employers want hasn’t changed but the context is now more demanding

For more than two decades, surveys from SHRM, NACE, and AAC&U have pointed to the same priorities: communication, collaboration, and teamwork.

What's changed is the context.

Hybrid and digital work strip away the cues we use to read each other. Cross-functional teams require collaboration across discipline and background. AI is reshaping the work itself, raising the value of what only humans can do. And workplace friction is rising as broader polarization filters into daily interactions.

The skills haven't changed. The conditions have made them harder to put into practice.

AAC&U reports that 81 percent of employers value oral communication, but only 49 percent rate recent graduates as well prepared in it.

Part of the disconnect may be that institutions and employers often describe the same underlying capacities using different language. Employers talk about professionalism, teamwork, and collaboration. Educators may frame similar skills through dialogue, discussion, or civic engagement. But beneath the terminology is a shared set of behaviors: active listening, asking open-ended questions, regulating emotion under pressure, finding common ground, staying open to revising your view in light of new evidence.

Those are not secondary “soft skills.” In fact, SHRM prefers to call them “durable” or “power” skills, emphasizing how. increasingly, they shape how work itself gets done.

Employers are looking for very specific capabilities

Research from SHRM's Civility Index tracks the everyday incivilities that erode workplace function: interruptions, dismissiveness, gossip, avoidance of difficult conversations. US workers report hundreds of millions of these interactions per day, and the number's rising.

What employers actually want are graduates who can listen to understand rather than respond, ask clarifying questions before drawing conclusions, give and receive feedback in ways that maintain trust, stay engaged in moments of disagreement, and help a group move forward without full alignment.

AI is only exposing the vital need for these capacities. As more routine tasks become automated, the human work surrounding those tasks becomes more visible. Teams still need people who can interpret context, build trust, navigate ambiguity, and make decisions together.

Campuses don’t have to start from scratch

For colleges and universities, this creates an opportunity as much as a challenge.

A student employment initiative currently in the implementation phase at Ohio Wesleyan requires student workers (about a third of the student body) to take CDI's Perspectives program, with supervisors prepared to connect dialogue skills to their jobs. In the classroom, students repeat the previous speaker's point before adding their own. First-year students research the skills employers list and map them onto Ohio Wesleyan's general education competencies. Group work begins with explicit group agreements modeled on dialogue norms.

So where should campuses start? This could be the answer: Talk to the people on your campus already doing this work—HR, career services, faculty designing capstones. Build dialogue questions into existing employer panels and mock interviews. Help students see the connection between what they're already doing and what employers will ask of them.

It also means resisting the temptation to frame these skills too narrowly. The capacities that help students thrive professionally are also the ones that help them participate constructively in communities, relationships, and public life. Career readiness and constructive dialogue are not competing priorities. Increasingly, they are overlapping ones.

This is also a coordination problem, not just a skills problem

One of the clearest emerging challenges is that employers and educators often use different vocabularies to describe similar capacities. "Cross-functional teams" and "constructive dialogue" point to overlapping skills, but students don't always make the connection. Intergenerational differences, remote collaboration, and navigating disagreement across differences are increasingly central to professional life, yet many students have limited opportunities to practice them intentionally.

The opportunity for higher education is not necessarily to reinvent career readiness from scratch. It may be to make existing learning more visible, transferable, and legible to students and employers alike.

These themes shaped CDI’s recent conversation on dialogue and career readiness featuring Caroline Mehl, Sara Rahim of the SHRM Foundation, and Dr. Ashley Biser of Ohio Wesleyan University. But the larger takeaway extends beyond any single event: in a workplace increasingly shaped by AI, polarization, and constant collaboration, the ability to think with other people may become one of the most important career skills students leave college with.

The challenge for higher education may be less about creating entirely new programs than helping students practice and translate the skills they already need. If your campus is exploring this work, we’d love to hear what you’re seeing.