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Lumifer comments on Open thread, Jan. 12 - Jan. 18, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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By a "marketable skill" I mean the capability to do something that other people are willing to pay you money for. Not a virtue, not a degree, not even a qualification (what matters is not whether you are qualified to do it, but whether you can do it).
In crude terms, if you want other people to pay you money, what they would pay money for?
I don't think I currently have any skills I could be paid money to do? I expect in most entry-level positions or graduate programs I could apply, I would be doing things that I don't yet know how to do that I would either be given on-the-job training for or just have to figure out as I go along. What sort of marketable skills might one have, as an undergraduate student without previous work experience, that I should be trying to think of?
That seems to be a problem. I think you should fix it.
If you can't come up with a convincing answer as to why an employer should hire you, chances are the employer won't bother to think one up for you.
That's basically the question of which job should you get post-college :-) There is a large variety of possible skills -- from accounting to website creation.
This graduate scheme at Aldi, which I would be way out of my depth with and I mostly remember because it's absurdly well-paid for an entry level graduate position, $62,000 in 'murican-money, doesn't ask for anything that I would actually think of as a skill that you could be paid money to do. You need a 2:1 degree, a driver's license, and a certain package of personal virtues and personality traits. There are a lot of things like that for graduates, and it's mostly those things that I'm looking at, with the issue being a lot of choice and difficulty identifying which ones are better than others.
Managing people and logistics is a very desirable and highly-paid skill.
That's a skill you learn while you're on the scheme, the applicants don't need to have the skill already, they need to have the personality traits and qualities that would enable them to quickly learn how to be managers. A qualified, experienced manager, someone who could list "managing people and logistics" among the things they can do that people might pay them to do, would not be an appropriate applicant for the scheme and could probably find better management positions that weren't entry-level.