Congratulations 2026 college grads! Now, a reality check: you are entering the most constrained entry-level job market in five years.

The Cengage Group's 2025 Graduate Employability Report found that only 30% of 2025 graduates find jobs in their field, while 48% feel unprepared to even apply for entry-level positions. No need to panic. The skills you need to stand out can be built right now , and most have little to do with your GPA or major.

In the age of AI, the most competitive graduates are not the ones who know the most. They are the ones who can think, connect, adapt, and ask better questions than any algorithm.

What Employers Are Looking For Right Now

The skills gap is real, but may not be what graduates expect. It is the gap between what employers actually want and what higher education believes it has prepared students for. Cengage's 2025 report found that while nearly 9 in 10 educators believe their students are workforce-ready, almost half of graduates say they feel unprepared to even apply for entry-level jobs.

Technical skills get you in the door. Human skills keep you there and move you up.

Marty Grimminck, CEO of International Connector , has spent over 20 years in workforce development with young people across the U.S., Canada, and globally. What she consistently sees mirrors what hiring leaders across industries confirm: "What consistently stands out to employers are skills like communication, adaptability, confidence, professionalism, and the ability to engage with different kinds of people and situations."

From conversations with hiring and operational leaders across industries, including group discussions within executive communities like Samudra , skills such as emotional intelligence, resilience, and curiosity are in high demand.

Here is what organizations are actually looking for in college graduates:

  • People who are not afraid of change or ambiguity, and who are experimental in nature and comfortable running original research
  • Those with genuine curiosity who can fill in the gaps AI cannot close
  • Critical thinkers who can think on their feet and ask questions that drive toward impact
  • Candidates comfortable experimenting with AI tools while using them to augment, not replace, their human skills

As one senior talent leader at Verizon put it : "It's easier to teach someone a technical skill than how to be resilient and find creative solutions to problems. That's why candidates must highlight their appetite for continuous growth and intellectual curiosity."

The Skills That Actually Matter: Beyond the Resume

Let's stop calling them soft skills. Career development experts now call empathy, critical thinking, and collaboration "power skills" and say proficiency in all three is required to succeed in most jobs. And they are precisely the skills many graduates currently lack.

Elyse Klaidman, CEO and founder of Xperientia l, an experiential learning company preparing young people for the real world, shared via email, "Most students have fewer opportunities to practice these skills in meaningful ways, even though they're increasingly expected to demonstrate them. In the era of AI that we live in, these skills have to become core."

Empathy and Emotional Intelligence

From my own work and research , empathy is the ability to see, understand, and where appropriate, feel another person's perspective. By welcoming and synthesizing diverse perspectives, teams make smarter business decisions. In remote and hybrid environments especially, empathy bridges the gap when you cannot read body language or build relationships over lunch. It shows up in how you write an email, give feedback, stay emotionally regulated in crisis, and ask for help.

To demonstrate it: show examples of collaborating within diverse groups and navigating conflict. Take genuine interest in the interviewer and organization beyond what they can do for you. Share a time you received difficult feedback and how you moved forward.

Curiosity and a Research Mindset

Employers want graduates who ask better questions, not just ones who know more answers. Curiosity drives innovation, surfaces blind spots, and helps teams adapt when the playbook changes. Grimminck notes that the students who tend to stand out are not always the ones with perfect credentials — they are the ones who ask thoughtful questions, build confidence through experience, and adapt when things don't go perfectly.

Show up to interviews with informed questions. Propose ideas nobody asked for. Volunteer to investigate something nobody has figured out yet.

Critical Thinking and Ambiguity Tolerance

AI can generate answers. It cannot always tell you which answer matters, why it matters, or what to do when the situation does not fit any template. That is where critical thinkers win. Organizations need humans who can interrogate and discern AI output without blindly taking it as gospel.

NACE's Job Outlook 2025 survey found a roughly 25 percentage point gap between how proficient students believe they are in critical thinking and how employers actually rate them — making it one of the most significant readiness gaps in the workforce today.

Resilience and Adaptability

Resilience does not mean staying calm at all times. It is the ability to experience the highs and lows and return quickly to equilibrium. That ability to absorb setbacks, recalibrate, and keep going is built through experience, not just the classroom — and it is exactly what employers are watching for in early-career candidates.

"Students have become used to environments where work is evaluated once and graded, rather than repeated cycles of feedback and revision, as opposed to seeing feedback and iteration as how learning happens,” Klaidman further noted.,

This is also the skill most directly tied to self-awareness and empathy for yourself: recognizing your struggles, asking for support, and treating failures as data rather than judgments. Talk about times in work or life when you faced a curveball and how you responded - whether a layoff, an irate customer, or a personal challenge.

Grimminck puts it plainly: "What we often see firsthand is not laziness, but overwhelm and uncertainty caused by growing up in an environment of constant distraction, comparison, and rapidly changing expectations." The antidote is building real-world resilience before you need it.

Communication and Collaboration

In remote and hybrid work, communication is everything. The ability to write clearly, speak confidently, listen actively, and collaborate across difference is what helps a new graduate shine — and what too many are missing .

Grimminck sees this firsthand: "Many young people are growing up in environments where constant digital stimulation competes for their attention. They are digitally fluent but haven't always developed the interpersonal confidence and real-world navigation skills that come from in-person interaction."

Brush up with trusted mentors on workplace etiquette. Practice writing professional emails. Volunteer to run or recap a meeting. Follow up on conversations in writing to signal reliability and clarity.

Navigating the Transition: Empathy for Yourself and Others

The first job is hard. The gap between academic culture and workplace culture is real in the best of times, let alone right now. Leadership paradigms and organizational structures are changing faster than the reality-bending landscapes in Inception — and it catches most graduates off guard.

Expect ambiguity, feedback that stings, and moments where you feel like you do not belong. This is normal. It is not a signal to quit. It is a signal to get curious.

Empathy for yourself means giving yourself grace through the learning curve, asking questions without shame, and resisting the urge to perform competence you do not yet have. Empathy for others means recognizing that your manager is also navigating pressure, your colleagues have context you don't, and building trust takes time.

If you are entering a remote or hybrid role: connection does not happen automatically. Reach out, show up, follow up. That intentionality is what gets you noticed, mentored, and promoted.

Three Actions College Grads Can Take to Get Hired

1. Run an original research project. Ever wonder why some experience at work, school, or even your favorite store had to be so hard? Pick a question your intended industry has not fully answered. Use AI to gather data and create a prototype, but apply your own analysis and point of view. Write it up. Share it. It is less about being right and more about your exploration process. This signals curiosity, critical thinking, and comfort with ambiguity in one move — exactly what hiring managers say they cannot find enough of. Grimminck's CareerReady Connect program was built on this very insight: students who are actively engaged rather than just spoken to build confidence and begin thinking differently about what is possible.

2. Practice asking impact-driven questions — out loud, in every setting. Replace "What should I know?" with "What problem is this team trying to solve that nobody has cracked yet?" or "Where do you see the most untapped growth potential in this industry? What are competitors missing?" Questions that drive toward impact signal strategic thinking and make you memorable. Practice until it becomes instinct.

3. Build your empathy muscle deliberately. Seek out a role, project, or volunteer experience that puts you in relationship with people whose backgrounds, perspectives, or challenges differ from yours. Empathy is not a personality trait. It is a practiced skill. As Grimminck notes, some of the most valuable growth comes from experiences that simply teach you how to work with people, communicate effectively, and navigate environments outside your comfort zone. The graduates who can demonstrate empathy in interviews, in teamwork, and in how they communicate will stand out in a field of equally credentialed candidates.

The Future Belongs to the Curious and the Connected

AI is not your competition. Rigidity is. The graduates who will thrive are the ones who stay curious, keep connecting, embrace discomfort as a teacher, and lead with both empathy and accountability from day one.

Your degree got you to the starting line. What you do with your humanity is what will carry you forward.