Academic researchers are increasingly recognizing the potential of graduates to influence management decisions in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). This paper focuses on a detailed qualitative study which looked at graduates who had obtained employment in SMEs in the East Anglia region of England. It examines the skills, competences and attributes that the graduates had to deploy in their jobs. A listing of 31 skills was used as the basis for ranking the main demands of the jobs and a short-list of ten was developed from this. Each of these ten skills is considered and discussed and comparisons are made with previous top-ten listings made by the graduates at the job search stage. The opinions of SME managers are also evaluated. The article concludes with the recommendation that educationalists, policy makers and government departments need to pay greater attention to generic skills and should focus less on transferable and core skills if the impact of graduates on SMEs is to be more effective.
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