Plenty of workers say colleges have failed to prepare them for working life, survey finds

• Nearly half of the employees feel that college didn't adequately prepare them for working life.
• That's according to a survey of 3,000 adults across the US, UK, and Australia.

Almost half of employees feel like college didn't do enough to prepare them for working life and their current roles, according to a new survey published on Wednesday.

The survey was conducted by learning content platform Go1 and polled 3,000 adults between the ages of 18 to 75 across the US, UK, and Australia, who work full-time in an office or desk job.

The survey found that 46% of employees felt that colleges failed to teach them adequately about working life and their current jobs.

Instead, employees cited hands-on experience and working as a better education about the workplace than college. Around 61% of respondents said that work experience best prepared them for their jobs, 41% said formal on-the-job training, and 37% said life experience.

What respondents wanted from college was more information about actually climbing the career ladder. Exactly half of employees wished to learn how to approach career progression while almost a third said they wanted to learn about the fundamentals of the role and how to collaborate with people in other departments.

There have been growing concerns from companies and recruiters about whether recent college graduates have the social chops to make it in the workplace.

A survey of 1,243 business leaders earlier this year found that 40% thought Gen Z was unprepared to enter the workforce citing reasons like modern culture and the COVID-19 pandemic.

94% of that subset said they would avoid hiring recent college graduates and 88% said they needed "etiquette classes" to help them transition into the workplace.

Some companies like KPMG are offering extra classes to its Gen Z recruits to help them with soft skills like communication and collaborating with people. It's also scaling back on remote work for its younger recruits.