Students are the General Contractors of Their Own Employability
University Organization and the Skills Gap
In this series on the skills gap between what employers want and what college graduates bring, we have looked at the role information issues, misguided incentives, and generational differences in students play in creating the gap. In this final post in the series, we explore how university organizational structures contribute to the skills gap.
To cut to the chase, who at the university is the ‘designated worrier’ – who is accountable for the employability of a student? If you can’t name a ‘designated worrier’ the answer is clear: no one.
Universities are complex beasts, comprised of a myriad of departments, colleges, centers, institutes, offices, and other units which exist because of discipline, tradition, budget, influence, opportunity,… Why they are so complex, and how that structure drives strategy (instead of the more preferred other way around) is something we will tackle in future posts, but here our focus is student employability.
Given this maze of academic departments, centralized student support services, co-curricular units, and placement offices, who is accountable for ensuring students are prepared for and secure the jobs/careers they want?
Career Services Offices are Not the Answer
No problem you say, we have a career services office – placement is their responsibility – problem solved! Not so fast…these centers play a crucial role in helping identify jobs available to students and working with students in a variety of ways to both choose wisely and put their best selves forward. However, many students don’t use these centers or use them sparingly: half the students in a recent IHE survey had never used career services or had visited them only once.
Source: Students Sound off on Career Centers, Inside Higher Ed.
Whether or not a student is employable is much bigger than the career services office. Employability – that combination of what students learn in the curriculum, their professional skills, and their personal attributes – is built over the entirety of a student’s campus experience, engaging many campus professionals.
Faculty worry about curriculum, ensuring high quality course content, and whether or not a student has mastered the material in their course. Academic advisors worry about whether or not a student has met the requirements to earn a degree/other credential. Academic affairs offices worry about providing experiential learning opportunities, tutoring services, writing support, and keeping students on a path to graduation. Student life offices support a plethora of professional development and leadership options for students, provide mental health services, and opportunities to engage in physical activities.
Multicultural programs offices build supportive communities across a variety of demographic lines. And, career offices do worry about making students aware of career opportunities they have identified and preparing students to interview for those opportunities. But, where do all of these offices, programs, and advisors come together for the support of any individual student?
Students: General Contractors for Their Own Employability
Given the siloed nature of all this support, the only true ‘designated worrier’ is the student themself. With no single office/person accountable for the student’s employability, students in essence are their own general contractors – trying to orchestrate all of the universities sub-contractors in a way that enables them land the job/career they want.
Think about a general contractor’s role in building a house or doing a major remodel: you know (or you will eventually discover!) you need a carpenter, a plumber, an electrician, a roofer, a painter, someone to pour your foundation, someone to install your flooring, someone to build your cabinets, a landscaper for plantings, … And, all of this requires some level of planning so an architect comes in handy!
The questions for a general contractor are endless: who can you trust to do the work, who do you hire, when do you hire them, which of the literally thousand options for every single choice (from cabinet hardware to paint) do you select? Then there is the business of seeking all the approvals, permits, and certifications required before you are ever allowed to move in…
Being a student at a large university is kind of like that – they are trying to orchestrate a very complex set of experiences that will help them land the job/career they seek. And, there are PLENTY of subcontractors to organize/sequence and PLENTY of approvals required to make that happen.
Supporting Students as General Contractors
Some students, especially those of means and/or those with parents and/or siblings who went to college are at least partially equipped to play this general contractor role. Most other students, we would argue, are simply not and so do not take full advantage of the resources available to them. This makes them less employable than they could have been.
Don’t get us wrong: All of these programs, offices, and individuals mean well – they want to see students succeed and in all likelihood are passionate about student success. But students can be literally overwhelmed with ‘help’, don’t know where to start, and often get bounced all over campus in the process. The disconnected (and overwhelming) nature of ‘employability resources’ helps explain a fundamental issue: students are simply not aware of these resources.
Source: Driving Toward a Degree 2023, Tyton Partners.
A key problem here is organizational – too many resources coming at students from too many directions with not nearly enough guidance on how to put them to work. We have seen this especially true for underserved students who may be the beneficiary of so many programs that their (well-meaning) advisors are tripping over themselves to be helpful. This has always been difficult for students, but with the explosion of double majors, certificates, badges, and other cross-university programs, the challenges are even greater. Students get bombarded – and confused – by 10 flavors of the same ‘employability subcontractor’, each with different names, offered by a different unit on campus.
Some Ideas
If a goal is to produce and place more employable students, current organizational structures and coordination mechanisms deserve a careful look. Some ideas:
Clarify your goals/strategy. Lots of universities organize around student success – typically defined as retention/completion. What does student employability mean at for your institution? How will you measure it? Suppose as a thought experiment you asked this question: how would we structure the student’s journey through the university if the principal goal was employability and progression through an outstanding career? What would we do differently? Responses to these questions will provide guidance as develop/revise your strategy for supporting student employability.
Map student contact points. Building on the thought experiment above, take a typical student and identify all of the offices that are engaging with/could engage that student - beginning when you are recruiting the student. If you haven’t done this before, you will be amazed (or maybe shocked) at the number of offices, units, people who do or could engage with any particular student. What does this mapping exercise tell you about overlaps, blurred lines of authority, competing priorities, and just plain old confusion on the part of your students?
Simplify where you can. Based on your mapping, are there obvious issues that can be addressed easily? Using common language, streamlining communications, combining duplicate efforts, improving coordination across units – anything that makes life easier for our student general contractor. While not a new idea, looking hard at co-locating ‘sub-contractors’ in a physical hub/one-stop shop can make life simpler for students. Likewise, a virtual hub/app that pulls access to such services together digitally can accomplish the same.
Share information. Getting sub-contractors onto a common information platform can be highly impactful. Academic advisors know things about a student that leadership development professionals could use. Career counselors can do their jobs better the more they understand a student’s engagement in co-curricular activities. Our institution has been working on this issue for a while. Boiler Connect is an information system that gives those working with students access to all the information we can make available about that student. From giving student life professionals a much more complete picture of the student and their Purdue experience, to lowering student frustration levels by providing access to information they have already shared, this student-centered information system helps to deliver a far more personalized – and streamlined - student experience. Short of (and complementary too) such data systems, ‘councils’ or ‘boards’ that convene groups responsible for student employability can share information and coordinate efforts to deliver more streamlined approaches.
Reorganize where needed. Are there offices/units/resources that should be centralized? Combined? Dropped? Less is more in many cases. Some reorganization may go a long way in clarifying responsibility/accountability and simplifying the lives of students. As one example, our University rolled a number of offices up under a Division of World Readiness including the Center for Career Opportunities, Office of Experiential Learning, Office of Undergraduate Research, Service Learning, and Pre-Professional Advising to drive much tighter alignment across these high impact learning practices and career services. The University of Tennessee-Knoxville Division of Student Success provides another illustrative example.
Integrate employability competencies into the curricula. This deserves a separate post, but building partnerships between the academic departments and support units to ultimately embed career and professional competency development into the curricula and individual courses can play a major role in boosting employability. NACE provides many resources for a university working on this issue.
Structural Problems with University-Employer Relationships
Our focus here is the student side of the skills gap, but universities have the same challenge with respect to employer engagement. University development offices, research offices, careers offices, deans, faculty, … , all connect with employers. And, folks guard these connections fiercely (that incentive issue we discussed earlier). Given the fragmented nature of these relationships, it is unlikely that insights which might help the university turn out more employable students will find their way to someone who is focused on employability. Many of the ideas we provided for addressing the student general contractor issue could be used to streamline university-employer relationships.
Concluding Comments and What’s Next
Any efforts to remedy information, incentive, and structural issues won’t matter if there is no accountability. If students are employable who gets the credit? If they aren’t who takes the blame – and is responsible for making the needed changes to ensure they are? This of course takes leadership and it means making an outcome such as more employable students an institutional priority.
We hope you have enjoyed this series on the skills gap and what we can do to close it. We will likely return to the topic at some point, but there are plenty of other issues facing higher education that will get our attention this spring – starting next week. Thanks for reading Finding Equilibrium!
Research Assistance Provided by Marley Heritier
“Finding Equilibrium” is coauthored by Jay Akridge, Professor of Agricultural Economics, Trustee Chair in Teaching and Learning Excellence, and Provost Emeritus at Purdue University and David Hummels, Distinguished Professor of Economics and Dean Emeritus at the Daniels School of Business at Purdue.