As more colleges take steps to improve career education for their students, we wanted to find out what kinds of skills employers expect from college graduates. We asked current and former chief learning officers, who have led training efforts in the corporate and nonprofit worlds, the following question: “If you could persuade colleges to do one more thing to prepare students for the workplace, what would it be?” Here’s what they told us.
Mark Milliron
Co-founder, chief learning officer, and director of Civitas Learning, and founding chancellor of Western Governors University-Texas
Ready them to learn for a lifetime. “Lifetime learning” is such a facile phrase that we almost take it for granted—especially in education. However, it is absolutely a differentiator in today’s world of work. We need team members who are curious and capable of learning more and more often. In his book on elite athletes, Faster, Higher, Stronger: How Sports Science Is Creating a New Generation of Superathletes—and What We Can Learn from Them, Mark McClusky argues that “the ability to learn faster than your competitors may be the only sustainable competitive advantage.” In our work—which involves technology, data science, software development, and experimenting with policy and practice to tackle challenges around helping more students learn well and finish strong in higher education—team members who are power learners are a must. Like many emerging industries, there are few simple, repetitive elements to our daily work.
One key element of being a power lifetime learner is the ability to build and engage a broad personal learning network and draw from diverse disciplines to solve new and novel problems. This means our team members have to read broadly, be open to connecting seemingly unrelated contexts and people, and be willing to learn from the good work of others. Moreover, they need to be able to synthesize, analyze, and utilize insights from these diverse deep dives and bring them back to challenge our thinking, spark our interest, and solve problems. Then, they especially need to be able to move from learning to action in a disciplined and tenacious way, with a good dose of humility and humor. The admonition “take your work and learning seriously, and yourself lightly” is spot on in our company.
This kind of learning preparation is not simple stuff. While it has long been the heart of the liberal arts and essential in the best of science and technology education, it seems harder to find in recent graduates. So, to directly answer your question: Regardless of the discipline, an education journey that prepares students to learn well, learn often, learn broadly, learn with others, and bring purpose, tenacity, and grit to bear to use the learning to solve big problems—usually on diverse and often globally connected teams—would be ideal.
James O’Hern
Executive director for member engagement, the Conference Board, and formerly vice president for worldwide learning at Marriott International
Colleges should spend a lot more time discussing with students the differences in organizational culture that separate campus life from the corporate world. It takes two years to fully acclimate a new graduate to the corporate environment. Topics like demonstrating proper etiquette (especially in interactions with senior executives), managing conflicting priorities, and being conscious of how your behavior can impact your career are all important for newly hired graduates.
I am often struck when I speak with first-time job candidates by how uncomfortable some of them are having a “career conversation.” They seem unprepared to discuss, much less present, major projects they have worked on in college, their motivations behind the projects, their career aspirations, and key learnings they have had from their experiences.
Some even struggle to tell you about a favorite professor, or why a particular person or subject was important to them.
Colleges need to have more capstone experiences that require students to make conceptual connections among aspirations, experiences, key learnings, and future interests. They need to simulate the corporate environment in the classroom, and help students prepare for the new world they will be entering.
Gus Schmedlen
Vice president for worldwide education, Hewlett-Packard
For over 75 years, Hewlett-Packard has championed science, technology, and engineering. From the audio oscillators our company developed for use in Walt Disney’s Fantasia in 1940 to the HP Sprout by HP, our new immersive-computing platform, we have always placed a high value on innovation and creativity. In fact, STEM fields still dominate among the forces driving HP. However, we recognize that innovation happens beyond the barriers of technological marvels: Innovation happens everywhere.
Colleges and universities are expert incubators of technical talent, and domain expertise still rules in these research-intensive environments. It is sometimes said that higher education is “an inch wide and a mile deep.” Unfortunately, this focus on singular technical skills from marketing to mechanical engineering, logic to logistics, can have a negative impact. The very strength of such focus sometimes produces graduates who do not have vital skills needed for a 21st-century workplace. The one thing that higher education can do to prepare graduates for the new style of work is this: Endow students with the skills needed to collaborate, deal with ambiguity, and embrace change.
Our economic and academic pursuits have never been more connected. On the premises or online, collaboration happens everywhere, and at any time. Graduates must understand how to set tonal, topical, and stylistic boundaries among a variety of audiences. They must understand the context of communications and appreciate that recipients of communications—verbal, nonverbal, or digital—may not be digital natives. If there is any doubt about interactions with fellow employees or clients, recent graduates should adopt a more formal, respectful approach instead of a casual one.
Wherever there is disruption, there is ambiguity. With the rapid advancement of technology across virtually all industries, change is constant. Today’s graduates should expect and embrace change. The more flexible and adaptive graduates are, the better their chances for success in the workplace. It is during organizational or technological change that cogent, critical thinkers are separated from those dependent on the relative security of process-oriented tasks. And it is these innovative, creative “solvers” who add the most value to firms.
In industries nascent and traditional, graduates need to master communication, problem solving, adaptation, and flexibility to succeed in an immensely complex and diverse workplace. Higher education should contextualize its traditional domain-centric approach to educating students, while enabling graduates with the skills needed to succeed beyond their disciplines.
Steven Farr
Chief knowledge officer, Teach For America
I have had the privilege of learning from transformational K-12 classrooms in low-income communities across the country. If I could channel the wisdom from those classrooms, I think the answer to this question is clear: Colleges must help us become a society of critically conscious learners and leaders.
These incredible students and teachers show us that it is far more powerful to embrace the reality of change than to predict how the world will be different. Are colleges preparing us for a changing world, not just a different one?
To do so, colleges should focus as much on how we learn as on what we learn. Every track and major, from medicine to engineering to comparative literature to Chinese, should facilitate a student’s metacognitive exploration of how he or she best learns and grows. In my experience, that is what teachers who are most preparing their students for a changing future are doing: empowering them as adaptive learners.
This, I believe, is the best path to a more just and equitable future. Thinking critically about how we learn is one path to recognizing and challenging the ubiquitous systems and dynamics of power that shape our lives. Whether we have been unjustly lifted or dragged down by them, as self-aware learners we gain a clearer-eyed understanding of dynamics of privilege all around us and how they are shaping, limiting, or sharpening our own perspectives.
Only when we recognize the ways that each of us is part and product of those systemic injustices can we grow into leaders who can challenge them. Colleges need to produce leaders with the connections, conviction, clarity, and capability to align their own and mobilize others’ efforts to challenge and change the systemic injustices—pervasive racism, low expectations, inequitable policies, and inadequate resources—that conspire to limit the educational, employment, and life opportunities for so many children in this nation.
For the good of our nation and world, colleges would do well to follow the lead of the most transformational teachers and grow their students into critically conscious learners and leaders.
