The two skills employers call most important, and how proficient they rate graduates in them

Which skills do employers say graduates lack?

The NACE Job Outlook 2025 asks employers two questions about the same eight competencies: how important is this for a graduate entering our workforce, and how proficient are the graduates we see. 96.1% of responding employers called communication very or extremely important, and 53.5% of them rated recent graduates very or extremely proficient in it. Critical thinking scored 96.1% important against 55.9% proficient.

Those are the two widest gaps in the survey, at roughly 43 and 40 percentage points. Professionalism runs close behind, at 89.4% important against 50.3% proficient. Teamwork, by contrast, is rated 93.9% important and 81.5% proficient, a gap of about 12 points.

Read as a set, the chart says something narrower than "graduates are unprepared". Employers think new graduates work well with others and struggle to explain their reasoning in writing and speech.

How large is the communication gap, exactly?

42.6 percentage points, the widest of the eight. The survey's other two tables show the same thing on a five-point scale. Employers rated communication 4.57 for importance, ahead of critical thinking at 4.49, teamwork at 4.43 and professionalism at 4.31. They rated graduates 3.62 on it, fifth of the eight, behind teamwork at 4.00, technology at 3.91, equity and inclusion at 3.78 and critical thinking at 3.67.

So communication is simultaneously the thing employers say they want most and one of the things they rate graduates lowest on. The percentage version of the same finding, 96.1% against 53.5%, is the number worth remembering.

Communication in this survey covers writing as much as speaking. On a separate question about resume attributes, written communication scored 77.1% and verbal communication 69.3%, which is a useful corrective for anyone who assumes the gap is about accent or fluency in English.

What does the critical thinking number mean in practice?

Critical thinking sits at 96.1% important and 55.9% proficient, the second widest gap of the eight. The survey does not publish employers' reasoning, so treat the number as a statement about a hiring impression rather than a diagnosis of any individual.

What the related data suggests is the shape of the impression. Problem-solving skills top the list of attributes employers want to see on a resume at 88.3%. Analytical and quantitative skills are at 67.0%. Strategic planning skills, further down at 33.0%, are not what is being asked of a fresher.

In ordinary language, the complaint is about deciding what to do when the instruction is incomplete: which of two options to take, what to check first, when to ask. It is a habit shown through examples, which makes it awkward for a resume and straightforward for an interview.

Is this an American survey, and does it apply in India?

It is American. NACE collected the data from 5 August to 16 September 2024, from 237 respondents, of whom 162 were NACE employer members, and it reports its respondents by United States regions. The report gives no indication that any Indian employer was surveyed.

Use it for the comparison it makes rather than the country it describes. The finding that survives translation is structural: employers rate the two hardest-to-certify competencies as their most important, and only about half of them call graduates proficient in either. That structure shows up in Indian reporting too, in different words.

What you should not do is quote "96.1% of recruiters" in an Indian context without saying whose recruiters. No equivalent chart for India appears in the reports opened for this guide.

What do Indian reports say about the same skills?

The India Skills Report 2024, the eleventh in Wheebox's series, was produced with AICTE, the Association of Indian Universities and the Confederation of Indian Industry, with a chapter contributed by Google. It scored 3.88 lakh candidates on its National Employability Test, of whom 51.25% reached the 60% mark it treats as employable, and it draws its employer side from 152 corporations spanning over 15 industries. Wheebox has published later editions since, so take these as the 2024 picture rather than today's.

On skills, a sponsor column on page 18 of the report, signed by ETS India's country manager, states that employers "expect much beyond technical expertise & work knowledge; they are increasingly seeking refined communication skills, ability to present, critical thinking, adaptability, and of course problem-solving capabilities". The same column notes wide variation in English proficiency among English speakers in India.

That is a sponsor's statement of expectation rather than a measured gap, so it sits alongside the American chart without confirming it. What it does show is that communication and critical thinking are named among the transferable skills a sponsor column in an Indian report puts ahead of technical knowledge.

Which competency do employers rate graduates highest on?

Teamwork, at 81.5% rated very or extremely proficient, with technology second at 72.0%. Technology is the one competency of the eight where the proficiency figure exceeds the importance figure, 72.0% against 71.7%. Teamwork is rated 93.9% important, so it still runs about 12 points short.

That single crossover is worth pausing on. Technology is the competency a course can certify, and it is the one where employers say the supply is already adequate. What the same employers rate as scarce is the ability to explain the work.

At the bottom of the importance table sits leadership, rated very or extremely important by 45.0% of employers and proficient in 31.0%. Career and self-development runs 65.6% against 43.2%. A fresher who cannot yet claim leadership is not missing the thing employers most want.

What skills do employers look for in freshers on a resume?

NACE ranks twenty attributes by the share of employers who look for them on a resume. Problem-solving leads at 88.3%. Written communication, at 77.1%, sits above verbal communication at 69.3%. Working in a team is wanted by 81.0%, initiative by 73.7%, and a strong work ethic and technical skills by 73.2% each, with flexibility and adaptability and analytical and quantitative skills tied at 67.0%.

Further down the same list: computer skills at 55.9%, leadership at 52.5%, organisational ability at 45.3%, creativity at 19.0% and fluency in a foreign language at 5.0%. The ordering is a reasonable guide to which line of your resume to rewrite first.

With the exception of technical skills, everything in the top half of that list is a behaviour rather than a possession. That is why the guide to how employers rank work experience against credentials keeps arriving at the same answer: the evidence has to come from something you did.

How does an internship produce evidence of communication?

Through artefacts with dates on them. A weekly written update to a supervisor is the cheapest communication evidence you can generate, because it is regular, it is read by someone who is not obliged to be kind, and it leaves a record you can quote from in an interview.

Four things worth doing deliberately during any internship, remote or otherwise:

1. Write the weekly update yourself, in your own words, and keep a copy.
2. Ask for one round of feedback on something you wrote, then send the revised version.
3. Present once, even for five minutes on a call, and note what you were asked afterwards.
4. Write one document meant for somebody outside the team, where you cannot assume shared context.

By the end you can say: "I wrote a weekly report for eight weeks, got it edited twice, and the last three went out unchanged." An interviewer can follow that up by asking what the edits were.

Can an internship show critical thinking too?

By recording decisions as well as tasks. The useful record is a moment where you had two options and picked one: which fifty contacts to call first, whether to fix the data or flag it, which of three headlines to run with, and what happened next.

Keep the reason as well as the choice. Interviewers probe the reason, because the reason is what transfers to their work. If you can say "I sorted the responses by district because the follow-up team worked district by district", you have shown more than the phrase "handled a large dataset" does.

Whether an online internship can give you that kind of decision at all depends on the field, and what a remote term teaches by subject goes through it stream by stream.

Where does this leave technical skills?

Needed, and insufficient by themselves. The Future of Jobs Report 2025, built by the World Economic Forum from a survey of more than 1,000 employers in 55 economies, puts analytical thinking top of its core skills list at 69%, then resilience, flexibility and agility at 67%, leadership and social influence at 61%, creative thinking at 57%, and motivation and self-awareness at 52%. Technological literacy is sixth at 51%.

The report also names AI and big data, networks and cybersecurity, and technological literacy as its three fastest-growing skills, so the technical side is rising even where it is not top-ranked today. Both things are true at once, and the ranking is about what is scarce rather than what is unnecessary.

The practical reading for you is a split. Learn the tool your field runs on, because entry is gated on it. Then spend the internship on the parts no course issues a badge for, which is also where remote work leaves its own mark.

Which of the two gaps should you close first?

Communication, for most students, because it is the one that gates the other. An interviewer only ever meets your thinking through your description of it, so a well-reasoned decision that comes out as "we did some analysis" is scored as neither.

There is a simple test for which gap is yours. Take the last piece of work you are proud of and write six sentences about it for someone outside your subject: what the problem was, what you chose, why, what you did, what happened, what you would change. If the sentences come out vague, the gap is in the describing. If you cannot fill the why, the gap is in the deciding.

Both gaps close the same way, through repetition with feedback from someone who is not your friend. Feedback is the part a course cannot supply and a supervised term can, so when you compare internships, ask what the review cycle is before you look at the sector on the letterhead.

What to do with these numbers this month

Pick the gap that is yours. If your last three assignments were group submissions where somebody else wrote the report, communication is your gap, and the fix is writing something with your name on it for a reader who will respond.

Then get the evidence dated. A claim about communication made in March about work done in June is weaker than a document from June. Save the update, the edited draft, the slide, the note of what you were asked.

If your degree is one the placement conversation treats as a disadvantage, this chart is the more useful argument, because the competencies at the top of it are not owned by any stream. The guide on what an arts graduate's internship should target takes that further.