Education Commons^™

The Work Skills Mismatch: A Review Of Literature, Martin Reardon, Wendy E. Balliet

MERC Publications

For the purpose of this review, imagine the case of a firm which has job openings for recent high school graduates. In choosing new employees for these openings, the potential employer is trying to select the most suitable applicants from a pool of people about whom he or she has very little knowledge. It could be thought that an obvious predictor of future employee behavior is the performance of any particular applicant while he or she was in high school. However, “for the most part, employers never ask about high school achievement or performance on standards-based assessments. Moreover, states offer …