The fundamental capabilities of new workers such as interpersonal skills are often below standards

IELTS WRITING TASK 2 - Business

Some businesses find that their new employees lack basic interpersonal skills, such as cooperative skills. What are the causes and suggest some possible solutions?

It is widely thought that the fundamental capabilities of new workers such as interpersonal skills in some companies are below required standards. There are several explanatory reasons as well as ways to tackle this problem.

There are many causes leading to this problem. Firstly, tertiary education does not really equip students with the variety of practical space to learn and sharpen vital soft skills such as communication and team work. This results in the poor level of interpersonal skills among graduates, leading to the fact that not many new employees reach to the prerequisite standard of soft skill capacity. Secondly, in today's world, the increasing use of social networking sites limits the ability of face-to-face interaction, which can be a cause of the deterioration in the ability to interact and communicate effectively in person.

Nevertheless, there can be some possible solutions to this seemingly emergent problem. Firstly, educational curriculum in university and college needs to be modified to include more teaching modules and assessment that help students to enhance their interpersonal skills. Moreover, students need to participate in more extra-curricular activities to immerse themselves in variety of projects that need a lot of teamwork activities so that they can gain much more experience after those events. Social networking sites, if used properly, can also be a vital tool for young people to expand their network and make use of this boundariless means of communication to develop their capacity to communicate effectively in diverse environment.

In short, the fact that new employees need to strengthen their skills in communication and cooperation is extremely important in workplace environment. With the awareness of some contributing factors leading to the shortcomings of interpersonal skills, various key action steps need to be implemented properly so as to tackle this problem.

It is incorrect to use the term "required standards" in your paraphrase of the phrase "lack basic interpersonal skills". There are no standards being mentioned so you have no basis for such a claim. Your paraphrase is therefore, inaccurate. You should have instead used the phrase "wanting in teamwork abilities", which would have been a closer rephrasing of the original phrase. Why couldn't you represent the causes and solutions that you were going to discuss in the reasoning paragraphs? You really would have scored better if you have provided direct responses to each question. It would have shown your English comprehension skills in a more relevant manner to the examiner.

Your paragraphs use too many word fillers. Since this is a time constraint task, you should always use a topic sentence instead of word fillers. Save the word count for a proper discussion of reasons instead of simply introductory statements. That does nothing for your overall score. There is a lack of coherence and cohesiveness in your reasoning paragraphs for 2 specific reasons:

- There is no clear connection between tertiary education and social media usage
- The solutions provided do not create a clear connection between the curriculum, extra curricular activities, and social media use

Your essay will suffer greatly in the cohesiveness and coherence scoring portion because of the improper development of your reasoning paragraphs.