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Skools dont teach how to own your own business, they train workers for factories (that don't exist anymore).

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Not exactly, CIOs say. More often than not, there are significant gaps between what even the smartest and most tech-savvy graduates learned in school and what CIOs need from new members of their IT staffs.

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What's more is that most companies have neither the time nor the money for on-the-job training. They'd prefer that universities incorporate more training for real-world IT roles into their curricula so that graduates are ready to start contributing their first day on the job.

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"The problem is that universities don't train people to take jobs," says Michael Gabriel, CIO at Home Box Office in New York. "If they were better prepared to hit the ground running, they would be a more effective and lower-cost resource that could compete with offshore talent. They wouldn't hit potential constraints imposed by the time and effort required to get them to be productive."

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Most of the college graduates that Cindy Warkentin talks to have what she considers "unrealistic expectations." "I had one young man tell me that unless I could offer him $75,000 or above, he's not interested. That's way above what's normal for a trainee," says the CIO at Maryland Automobile Insurance Fund in Annapolis.

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Warkentin says recent grads also seem to think that they'll be able to approach work the same way they approached their studies when they were in school.

A full-time job "is a 9-to-5 commitment, and that really does seem to throw them a bit," she says. "They have a sense that they should be accorded opportunities at work to take long breaks, like the time in between classes."

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As for IT skills, Warkentin gives university curricula high marks. "From a technical standpoint, the book learning and the experiences that technology students have is fairly sound. I don't see any huge gaps," she says. "But the university doesn't teach them what it's like to be in the workaday world."

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"Yes, they're missing business experience, but they can't get that from a textbook," says Temares, who is CIO and dean emeritus of the university's school of engineering in Coral Gables, Fla. The best way students can get that experience is for companies to hire them as interns sometime after their sophomore year. But internship opportunities are down, Temares says. "The reason I hear is that companies don't have the people to train the interns. A lot of companies have cut summer internships, but it's a stupid place to cut. If you hire interns upfront, you get the best people in the long run," he says.

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To effectively bridge that skills gap, businesses and universities must form partnerships that bolster the currency of IT education and prepare IT graduates with the "right" business and technology skills, says Ravi Nath, an IT professor and director of the Creighton University College of Business. "Without such university-industry dialogue and partnerships, the disconnect between what industry wants and what graduates offer will remain."

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Nath says these long-term internship opportunities are a win-win both for the employer and the student. Interns get IT work experience, and the businesses get an opportunity to assess the skills and dispositions of the interns as full-time employees.

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As a global real-estate brokerage and consulting firm, Cushman & Wakefield Inc. does business around the world. CIO Craig Cuyar needs and expects IT professionals to be aware of and knowledgeable about cultural differences.

That doesn't necessarily mean that staffers must have experience living or working in a foreign country, he says. "Not everyone can travel, but since we live and work in a global economy, we should expect undergraduate programs to prepare students with a fundamental understanding of the cultural differences, historical perspectives and common business practices employed by all the major countries within it."

Ideally, Cuyar says, "there should be a course in global business practices and cultures. At the very least, there should be a few classes taught on this subject.

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Rare is the new college hire who lacks skills involving Facebook, texting or any other form of electronic communication. But face to face, many of these same people have difficulty reading interpersonal signals and communicating, especially in the increasingly multigenerational workplace, says Warkentin. "Most of the gaps I see are on the social, soft skills side," she says.

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"The older generation tends to be more structured. They tend to have the expectation that anyone coming into the company will have the exact same experience that they did when they started their career," she says. "They expect a great respect for authority and a willingness to do as they're told." In contrast, "young people expect to receive respect for bringing new ideas."

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"What I've seen is that people coming in don't have the necessary skills or understand the fundamentals required to build relationships with senior people," adds Cuyar. "A newly minted college grad is not going to be able to forge relationships with senior people via Facebook or LinkedIn."

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To CIOs, it seems as though college grads don't get any advice about how to match their talents and interests with specific IT jobs.

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