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Good Grades = Good Job – Right?

by Stephen Cantine
Stephen Cantine, M.S., is the Director of the Career Services Office at Utica College in Utica, New York.  He can be reached at scantine@utica.edu.

The answer to this question is that good grades won’t hurt.  However, relying solely on academic achievement to get you your dream job upon graduation is not an effective job search strategy.  Achieving good grades will by no means hurt your chances for obtaining employment, but academic success should be considered as only one of many attributes you bring with you to the job search process.  For many of you, this will come as quite a shock; you have probably been told at some point during your life that, “getting good grades in high school will get you into a good college” and by once again accomplishing that feat in college you would be assured of a good job upon graduation.  It’s only fair, right?  You’ve studied hard, separated yourself academically from your peers and should be rewarded accordingly. 

Before you go marching into your college bookstore with your text books in tow, ready to sell them back because you just read that getting good grades won’t guarantee your success in getting a good job, let’s look at the employment process. You identify a job opening and send off your targeted and error-free resume and cover letter to the hiring manager, which hopefully have been critiqued by your Career Services office.  Whew!  You get the call; you have been invited to an interview.  You go to the interview and low and behold, you get a job offer.  You accept; you’ve done it.  Hooray!  You have a job!  Mom and Dad are proud and you are happy and relieved.  If this situation describes you or you are planning on this being your story, chances are that academic success was only one of several skills and qualities you brought to the job search process. 

So what are the skills and qualities employers are looking for, you ask?  In the National Association of Colleges and Employers “Job Outlook” for 2003, employers were asked to rate the most important qualities/skills they seek in candidates they wish to hire.  Rated on a scale of 1 (lowest score) to 5 (highest score), their answers were as follows:  tied atop the list with a value of 4.7 was Communication Skills and Honesty/Integrity; Teamwork was rated third with an average value of 4.6; and rounding out the top five were Interpersonal Skills and Motivation/Initiative.  A GPA (3.0 or better) was rated as the 14th most valued quality on the list of 17 qualities/skills identified. 
I once asked an employer to describe his company’s ideal candidate and he responded: “a person with ‘stop on a dime’ skills who I wouldn’t mind being stuck in an airport with during a snow storm”. Employers hire people, not just skills or good grades.

So what does this all mean?  Well, one way to look at the apparent devaluing of GPA by employers is that for many competitive positions, candidates with a GPA of less than 3.0 are automatically screened out, thereby making GPA a less important quality to be considered during the interview process.  In certain industries, such as Accounting and Engineering, especially with larger, high-profile employers, it is common practice that GPA requirements will be set at 3.3 or higher for more competitive opportunities.  So, in other words, all your hard work is really not being overlooked by employers but is seen as one of many desirable qualities.