:90 read | Chime in on LinkedIn here and Twitter here
My colleague Jin Bacheller saw a trend in investment banking and technical accounting hiring:
šPass/fail rates on technical assessment are going down.
Financial modeling and advanced Excel skills. The types of skills you need to be proficient in to do the job. Stuff you canāt BS your way though in interviews.
He has several contacts seeing this. What used to be 1 in 3 pass rates are trending towards 1 in 5. The tests havenāt changed. People arenāt doing as well.
Thereās some nuance here. These are skill sets that are associated with old school, work 80 hour days and grind type jobs. Which diminished greatly during the pandemic and remote work boom.
By no means am I saying working 80 hours a week is something anyone should do. But people in these industries are adults who make their own decisions. Those who grinded through that part of their career did it by their own free will.
Is lack of at-bats the reason why scores are failing? Itās our hypothesis, based on admittedly anecdotal evidence.
Then I came across this article in the Wall Street Journal: āāHow Do I Do That?ā The New Hires of 2023 Are Unprepared for Work.
The highlights (if youāre stuck behind the paywall):
āAmong the approximately 40,000 candidates taking the Fundamentals of Engineering exam for work as professional engineers, scores fell by about 10% during the pandemic.ā
āStudents taking entrance exams to study nursing are scoring an average of about 5 percentage points lower than before the pandemic, limiting the number of students eligible to enroll in nursing programs.ā
āOn the Criteria Basic Skills Test: Verbal scores for men under 25 declined by 11 percentage points over the three years of the pandemic.ā
Iām still a pro-remote homer. Self-motivated people get more done when theyāre not at the Distraction Factory.
But we need to admit thereās a lot of people who arenāt learning as much, for one reason or another.
You can follow me on LinkedIn here and Twitter here. Join the discussion on this LinkedIn post (or give it a š) here.