The list of marketable skills (aka: market ready skills or career readiness skills) has been around for at least a decade. The list is not surprising:
- critical thinking/problem solving
- oral/written communication
- teamwork/collaboration
- information technology application
- leadership, professionalism/work ethic
- career management.
It’s also no surprise that higher ed is doing a pretty poor job of teaching these skills to our graduates. NACE has been in the forefront of this research. For example, in 2018, only 43% of seniors felt prepared for their future careers. 46% of employers reported that they had to provide remedial training to recent graduates, which accounted for 20% of their entire training budget.
And it’s not a mystery that employers are looking for these skills. In a recent survey, 72% of C-level executives cited critical thinking/problem solving as most important in their workplace. 63% cited collaboration/teamwork. Technical skills followed these in the number three spot. Interestingly, these same executives indicated that career readiness skills were more important to entry-level employees because job-specific technical skills can be more easily trained.
It’s clear that employers want these skills and graduates lack them. WHY?
I believe the reason is because we’re simply not teaching them intentionally. We talk about how our current traditional curricula “inherently” teach these skills, but we’re not addressing them openly and explicitly. We’re not building them into our curricula. Being more intentional then becomes a goal of our future curricula.
Here are six things we can do as instructors to enhance our students’ career readiness skills:
- Talk about career readiness skills – Simply listing and discussing career readiness skills in our courses, their importance, and how much employers value them is the first and most basic step.
- Create more project-based learning experiences – We use PBL for our capstone which creates a wonderful opportunity for students to operationalize most of the career readiness skills. But why do we wait for capstone?
- Add a “careers/resumes/interviewing” module to your class – ‘Nuff said.
- Create opportunities for peer evaluations – Opportunities for peer evaluations are invaluable. It’s one thing for me to tell a student they have poor team skills. It’s quite another for one of their peers to do it.
- Invite industry recruiters to your class – Guest lecturers help students learn what to expect in the interview process. If the recruiter can (be prompted to) talk about career readiness skills, all the better.
- Encourage internships – nothing prepares students to work like working.
In summary, preparing students to be career-ready will go a long way in helping them acquire gainful employment before or soon after they graduate.