Want to keep your job? Show up and play well with others.

Do you want a good job? Would you like to keep that job after you get it?

This is going to sound like we’re talking to a child, but stick with us: Show up on time, behave respectfully, dress appropriately (no obscene T-shirts at work), take conflict resolution with colleagues seriously. And learn to speak so others can make sense of what you say.

That’s a lot of what they now teach students at Wichita Area Technical College. And if that sounds goofy – think again.

Local employers have told WATC president Sheree Utash that while they always want to hire WATC graduates (because they’ve got great technical skills), a significant number of those hires don’t last past 60 days of employment. They get fired.

“Many people don’t show up at work on time,” said Mark Angelini, who teaches IT repair and other courses at WATC.

Some stories he can tell about students are of the shake-your-head variety. Some students have lousy, disrespectful attitudes. They don’t engage with customers. And if they do engage, they can’t seem to use the English language effectively, even when English is the only language they know.

“They think that because they talk, people understand them. Or they don’t bother to get out of chairs and engage with customers – that’s a big one,” Angelini said.

The larger picture here is that there are about 12,500 unemployed people in the Wichita metropolitan area. And there are roughly 4,100 jobs open.

Some employers in the IT and cybersecurity fields, for example, are calling WATC nearly every week asking whether they have anyone. “They’re trying to beat down our door every week, asking if we have anybody,” Angelini said.

Most WATC graduates work well and play well with others, he said. But there are also “many, many super-skilled tech workers out there who just can’t cut it in the workplace anymore,” Angelini said. “They don’t know how to draw key information out of a customer. They don’t bother to talk to fellow employees.”

This concerned Utash so much that she hired Monica Stewart a year ago as WATC’s director of strategic innovations. Stewart had done her doctoral dissertation at Creighton University on workplace “soft skills.”

WATC’s entire staff now teaches “having a good attitude, being accountable, being prepared to resolve conflicts,” Stewart said. “Goal setting, navigating conflict, having communications skills necessary to the workplace. How to compose a respectful e-mail. How to take criticism.”

Most WATC students leave the school doing all of the above, Stewart said. But there are enough of the others that WATC addresses those employer concerns aggressively.

Angelini spent 11 years as a hacker for the Kansas Air National Guard. He was assigned to attack U.S. Air Force networks so the network people could practice defending themselves from the real bad guys.

But what he also teaches now, for a considerable portion of his classroom time, is respect, discipline, professional behavior – and speaking in clear, helpful language.

Some of this is generational change. Some of it, involving poor service to business customers, might be because of how many high school students years ago used to get summer jobs and got exposed to the workplace that way, said WATC campus director Jennifer Seymour.

But high school students now seem to concentrate more in the summer on athletic programs or summer camps. So they start out lacking those “soft skills” that employers tell WATC their workers need, Seymour said.

“If you have a person who all they do all day is pound on a keyboard, you’ve got an employee who can’t cut it in the workplace today,” Angelini said. “They need to get out of their chairs, seek people out. An IT person, for example, shouldn’t just sit and wait. Go out in the office and ask, ‘How is my IT equipment working for you?’ Get to know people.”

For example, Angelini said, a typical conversation where someone asks an IT repair person for help might start out like this.

IT person: “What’s wrong?”

Frustrated person: “It’s broken.”

“It’s broken” doesn’t convey any useful information to the IT person.

But it’s the IT person who can quickly become the problem if they don’t then effectively coax real information into the open.

Hard skills are not enough, Angelini said.

This story was originally published June 10, 2017 at 3:57 PM with the headline "Want to keep your job? Show up and play well with others.."