A new report by the Association of Public & Land Grant Universities notes how universities today are under pressure to better prepare their students for the job market. I recall a decade ago that my university administration told faculty we needed to do better in this area. They were getting pressure from state government to pay attention to what happens to our students after graduation. We were told that our state universities should do better at preparing students for jobs.
The Traditional Role of Universities
Traditionally we have separated the idea of academic education from practical training. A university education focused on fundamentals and theory, spending little time on application. Students graduated with knowledge about their major, but not much skill in applying that knowledge. Over time universities have been incorporated practical training into the curriculum, although not evenly across majors. Business and engineering students likely get far more application training including internships than their classmates in the humanities.
Many faculty were trained in academic knowledge and have little personal experience in “the real world” outside of campus. One of my executive students told me that she went to an amazing presentation by a professor from an elite university. She was disappointed when after the talk she asked the professor for advice about how to apply his findings and he told her he had no idea. Application was not something he thought about, nor was he comfortable in providing advice.
Universities Should Do Better at Preparing Students for Jobs
Universities should do better at preparing students for jobs because the role of the university is not to impart knowledge for its own sake, but to prepare students for life after campus. There are many things that can be done, some across the board and some specific to majors. Students need tools to be successful in both seeking employment and on the job that they attain.
My field of I-O psychology provides tools for analyzing job requirements and how to match people to those jobs. For each major, an analysis can be conducted of the KSAOs (knowledge, skill, ability, and other characteristics) required for jobs that graduates are most likely to seek. Much of that information is available publicly in the U.S. Department of Labor’s online O*NET database. From that list of job requirments, those KSAOs that make sense to incorporate into the curriculum can be targeted. Likely, many are already addressed, but others might be added. For example, many jobs require spoken communication skills. This is easily incorporated by having assignments across several courses that require presentations. Not only should students be required to present, they should get instruction about how to design and deliver a talk, and they should get specific feedback. Instruction should include PowerPoint design and how to give a good talk.
Students also need instruction in how to match their skills to jobs. This does not have to be included in every class or by every professor, but they should be part of the curriculum. Topics to included are:
- Setting employment goals. Students should be encouraged to think about the kinds of jobs they would like. This not only helps in choosing majors, but it helps in choosing courses to take and extracurricular experiences to seek. Students need guidance about how to make a career choice, and how to eliminate possible careers that would not be a good fit. Vocational interest tests like Self-Directed Search can be helpful to students in choosing careers.
- Seeking employment. Students are often unprepared to go through the job search process. They need tools for seeking jobs. Students in my field often ask me for advice about how to find jobs. They know they should network, but are uncertain about how to do that. My usual answer is to start with LinkedIn.
- Navigating recruitment. An issue many students face is not knowing how to present themselves to prospective employers. College graduates all have valuable skill sets, but many do not know how their skills match potential jobs. They struggle to explain in an employment interview what they bring to the table. This can be addressed with training in the job selection process, and particularly in interviewing and in how to match their skills to jobs. One of my former students conducted a simulated interview study for her dissertation. She said that in post-interview debriefs, many students were surprised at the standard interview questions they were asked.
- Occupation-specific knowledge and skill. Academic disciplines all contain content that is relevant to the workplace. Faculty can do better in being sure that they cover important concepts that can be leveraged on the job. This does not have to be introduced into every class, but faculties should be sure that important topics are contained somewhere in the curriculum, or are available through extracurricular activities.
- Applying knowledge. It is vitally important that students can generalize the knowledge from classes to the world beyond campus. This can be done both inside and outside of class. An in-class activity could be an assignment where students are asked to illustrate how a concept could be applied to a real world problem. Outside of class activities can include a practicum or internship.
Universities vary in how well they cover these topics, with some doing a very good job on many of them. My experience on my own campus is that departments vary in how much emphasis they give. It is easy for faculty to get hyper-focused on the academic side of education as that is what attracted us to higher education in the first place. With a little effort, however, we can better serve our students by better equipping them for life after campus. During a time when universities are losing public respect and support, universities should do better at preparing students for jobs.
Image generated by DALL-E 4.0. Prompt: “picture of a traditional university in colorful steam punk style”
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