Business can be a fickle friend to higher education, though the symbiotic nature of the two entities is irrefutable. Colleges entice students with the prospect of finding a good job. Business leaders need colleges to prepare a well-trained work force.
Whether colleges are holding up their end of the bargain, however, is a source of contention. A common refrain from employers is that colleges must do a better job of preparing students to be ready for “Day 1" on their jobs. In other words, businesses want students to be prepared to succeed with little or no additional training. Given the stunning variety of jobs and careers in our modern age, this is no small feat. However, it is an expectation that higher-education professionals have tried to meet through campus programs and resources, many within campus-career centers.
The efforts seem to be having some success. A recent survey of employers conducted by the Association of American Colleges & Universities found that business executives appeared to be more bullish on higher education than in the recent past, with 82 percent saying that a college degree is essential and 88 percent saying it is worth the time and money to earn. What’s more, 60 percent of hiring managers and executives believed that recent graduates had the skills and abilities to be successful in entry-level positions.
While this was heartening news, it was coupled with an additional assessment: Colleges and universities were not doing enough to prepare students for success beyond their first jobs. For many of us in academe, it is exasperating to realize, perhaps for the first time, that business leaders expect us to prepare students to be ready not only on Day 1 but also for jobs well into the future — in a world that is changing every day. We are expected, in the words of the educator Karl Fisch and others, to prepare students “for jobs that don’t yet exist, using technologies that haven’t been invented, in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet.” When the challenges are stated in such blunt terms, it seems outrageous to critique higher education for its inability to do that.
My colleague Michael Preston and I recently released a leadership model, published in the Journal of the National Association of Colleges and Employers, that provides a structure for meeting this seemingly impossible expectation. We propose that, to be successful in preparing students for leadership and success throughout their careers, higher education and business leaders must seek alignment.
Leadership programs on college campuses are often designed to provide practical guidance to students, but they can end up confirming some of the very stereotypes about leadership that they are designed to dispel. Among these are the myths that leadership is a personal quality possessed by some and not all, or that leadership is simply a set of tools that one can acquire and then use to “become a leader.” These cotton-candy notions of leadership melt quickly in the heat of one’s first professional experiences, in which outcomes often gain priority over style or even process.
Additionally, business leaders often invest in management training rather than leadership. While the two share many similarities, management is focused on employing existing strategies and technologies to solve problems that can be predicted, while leadership focuses on developing strategies for problems and opportunities as they emerge. It seems reasonable to conclude that as individuals advance in their careers, the latter ability becomes increasingly instrumental in their success. It also seems logical that leadership programs in college will have only limited power to affect that outcome. Business leaders, too, must adapt what they do to bridge the gap.
Our model proposes that cocurricular experiences on campus — planned learning activities, like structured leadership-development programs, and more-emergent learning experiences, such as participation in a student organization, fraternity or sorority, campus publication, or job — be used to draw students into deeper levels of involvement and leadership. From this engagement, we can create learning outcomes in which students accomplish higher-order learning. This can replace a common method of developing learning outcomes in which broad skills such as “teamwork” or “communication” are encouraged without regard for how students might advance within the skills we identify. That is the rough equivalent of asking a student to take introductory composition in all four years of college.
Skill development is certainly important, but as others have pointed out, what employers often see as a skills gap might actually be an awareness gap. There is ample evidence to suggest that students do develop desirable skills from their experiences both inside and outside the classroom.
The proposed antidote to the awareness gap has been to focus on teaching students to articulate the skills they are gaining. But data from the most recent “Job Outlook” survey, produced annually by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, suggest that this approach may have limited utility. In nearly every competency studied, a considerably higher percentage of students rated themselves proficient than did employers. This suggests that the students’ problem may run deeper than simply learning to recognize their skills.
That is why we advance the “Five A’s” of skill development: awareness, acquiring, applying, advancing, and, finally, articulating. Students must first be aware of a skill they want to develop. They then begin the process of learning about it, finding opportunities to apply what they learn, and making a plan to get better. Eventually they can gain the ability to articulate their skill to others.
That dovetails well with the central theme of the model, which is that cocurricular experiences can help students bridge both the skills gap and the awareness gap. These experiences provide learning environments in which students can gain essential skills, which are focused on application, and, even more important, are compelling and fun. Cocurricular experiences are, after all, mostly just group projects that students enjoy doing.
For all of their differences, employers and higher-education professionals have similar goals. Colleges want to prepare students to be knowledgeable in their fields, excel in their careers, and be lifelong learners who can adapt to changes over time. To reach those worthy ideals, however, colleges and industries will need to work together.
Adam Peck is assistant vice president and dean of student affairs at Stephen F. Austin State University.
