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.
(This is a reprint of an article I wrote in 2018).
I was reading an article (THECB, 2018) the other day on the 60x30TX Initiative. This initiative, by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, seeks to bring the percentage of adults with some form of higher education (defined as an associates degree or above) up to 60% by the year 2030. What caught my eye was goal number three, Marketable Skills;
Include interpersonal, cognitive, and applied skill areas that are valued by employers, and are primary or complementary to a major [in higher education programs]
Help students identify their marketable skills and communicate them to employers
The article went on to state, ” The plan requires institutions to formally identify those skills for each of its degree programs so that students are aware of and can communicate these skills to future employers.” Let’s unpack this a little bit.
Marketable skills (i.e., transferable skills, soft skills, employability skills) are already taught in virtually every course. I think faculty infrequently think about and document these soft skills in their courses. Rather, they think about their discipline, and what students need to know about it. Talking about identifying marketable skills sounds to faculty like “yet another thing you want me to do.” Herein lies the first problem to address:
Problem #1: How can we inform and persuade faculty that marketable skills complement rather than compete with their content?
Let’s take an example. Professor Smith teaches English literature. She is very good at teaching students how the great English writers express their thoughts and ideas. She encourages her students to learn from them and model the kinds of techniques they use to produce great writing. She has her students present their reports and thoughts orally to the class for discussion. So it’s probably not difficult for Professor Smith to demonstrate that she teaches some aspects of this marketable skill in her course. She just needs to know what those marketable skills are. Luckily, there are several resources that delineate them, including the NACE Career Readiness Competencies (National Association of Colleges and Employers, 2018), which serve as standards.
Let’s look at the NACE competency for Oral/Written Communications:
Articulate thoughts and ideas clearly and effectively in written and oral forms to persons inside and outside of the organization. The individual has public speaking skills; is able to express ideas to others; and can write/edit memos, letters, and complex technical reports clearly and effectively.
The NACE standards are organized into larger categories of marketable skills:
Critical Thinking/Problem Solving
Oral/Written Communications
Teamwork/Collaboration
Digital Technology
Leadership
Professionalism/Work Ethic
Career Management
Global/Intercultural Fluency
Back to the identification of marketable skills. Earlier, I pointed out that the initiative wants colleges to identify the marketable skills in their programs. I submit that this should NOT be our target. Let me illustrate. Suppose we did this. What would it look like? More than likely, each academic program/major would publish a document outlining the marketable skills taught in their programs. The skill descriptions would be at a high level, and based upon the major. It would be hard to measure these skills at a meaningful level because curricular content and techniques for any given course vary from semester to semester, even with the same instructor. Also, students don’t take 100% of their courses completely within their major. Rather students construct their course of study with electives and program options. This means that the best place to define marketable skills is at the course level, which leads to the next hurdle. Assuming we know what marketable skills we want to teach:
Problem 2: How do we provide a system for faculty to document the marketable skills taught in their courses?
The Higher Education Coordinating Board states that it will collect this information in future years, but what they are looking for is a list of supported skills per program that are “résumé ready.” While defining skills on the instructional side is part if this goal, the other half is a method for students to consume the information easily and be able to articulate it to a potential employer. In other words, we need a mechanism to give them a “marketable skills transcript.” This leads to the third issue:
Problem 3: How do we document and distribute marketable skills information to students in a way that puts them in control?
Here’s my fantasy.
CASE STUDY
Hannah is a student at LGU (i.e., Land Grant University) in Environmental Design. Her department led the charge several years ago to define marketable skills in all of their major courses. They also worked with other colleges such as Liberal Arts and Business to make sure marketable skills were documented in common courses necessary for their degrees. They went a step further in defining a quantitative measurement for each marketable skill that indicates the magnitude of teaching and engagement provided for each on a per-course basis. Skills and measurements are updated by course professors each semester. They know how to do this because they receive continuing education provided by the university’s Center for Instructional Excellence. For example, Professor Martin’s computer-aided design course offers 3 points of Communication, 4 points of Teamwork, and 2 points of Digital Technology.
After four years of hard work, Hannah receives her B.S. in Environmental Design. As she searches for a job, she shares her academic transcript with potential employers. This details her coursework and grades. But Hannah also has access to a marketable skills transcript. This details marketable skills by course with a description of each course’s specific experiences. Furthermore, since the skills have been quantified, Hannah also has a marketable skill “profile” that gives her a total picture of her strengths in the various skill areas. Hannah has 20 points of communication and 34 points of teamwork over the course of her degree, giving her an advantage in organizational environments requiring strong team skills. Her marketable skills transcript also notes the average skill profile for students coming out of her program, giving potential employers a comparison of Hannah to her peers.
Additionally, each course’s skill experiences are documented via blockchain. This gives Hannah access to her skill credentials conveniently. She is able to distribute her blockchain documented skills in an independently verifiable manner. Furthermore, Hannah can “tailor” what skills and experiences she shares with any given employer. She can shape the picture of what a potential employer sees about her.
