Selingo offers tips for helping students prepare for careers after college
Kim Chaudoin | 615.966.6494 |
A college degree opens many doors for those who have earned them. But today, a degree may not be enough to ensure that college graduates get the job they want.
A recent Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University study found that college graduates are taking longer and longer to become financially independent from their parents. In fact, the average age of financial independence for a college graduate is 30 according to the study.
So how can universities, parents and students better prepare for the job market? Nationally recognized higher education expert and New York Times best selling author Jeff Selingo recently shared his observations and research findings in a series of events hosted by the College of Professional Studies that gives a hopeful blueprint to change that statistic.
On Oct. 19-20, Selingo was the featured speaker for the college’s “Driving Innovation: Setting the Pace for the Next 125 Years” program, a signature event in the yearlong celebration of Lipscomb University’s 125th anniversary. “Driving Innovation” was designed to provide students, higher education leaders and employers a look at the evolving job market and how students can be better prepared to successfully enter it after graduation.
Selingo shared emerging trends and practical advice that he gleaned from research for his recently released book, “There is Life After College,” which dissects the challenges of entering the workforce after graduation.
“We put too much emphasis on getting into college and not enough emphasis on what somebody does while they’re there,” said Selingo. “Too many students are sitting on the sidelines waiting for college to happen to them. And the economy that students are entering today is wide open and not well marked.”
As prospective students are contemplating their next steps after high school, Selingo said that parents, students and counselors have placed a great deal of emphasis on the college search that focuses on what to major in and where to go.
“But the fact of the matter is that today how you go to college and what you do in those four years of undergraduate education are much more important to your success after college than where you go,” he said.
There are experiences that students need to integrate into their college experience to help prepare them to successfully enter the job market following graduation, said Selingo.
“The rule of work has changes, and we are living in a new normal in this economy where entire industries and occupations and expanding and contracting at an alarming pace,” he said. “Even areas like medicine and accounting, careers that seemed like they had a straight forward path are changing drastically.”
“What this is requiring us to do is to stop thinking of college as this box you enter at the age of 18, spend a magical four years there and get out four years later, but rather as a platform for lifelong learning. We really need to rethink the concept of what we need for education after high school. It’s absolutely critical for success.”
Selingo said he spent several years conducting research with a variety of employers and organizations, parents of students and professors as well high school and college graduates to gather information for his latest book.
“What I heard over and over again from employers is not that students are missing specific hard skills, but what they’re really missing is what is going to equal success in the future job market — the soft skills,” he said. “Soft skills, meaning the ability to communicate, work in teams and problem-solving. That is the skills gap that we hear so often and that we are faced with. The reason this is so important is that the soft skills are what complement technology and can’t be replaced by technology that can potentially automate jobs of the future.”
Throughout his research, Selingo said five skills emerged that “we need to instill in our young people to be lifelong learners.” Those skills are curiosity, creativity, digital awareness, contextual thinking and humility.
“We have to train today’s young people to exercise these skills throughout their lives just like we exercise to keep our bodies fit,” he said. “We have to train our brains to be constantly thinking about education throughout our lifetime, because for the most part students are coming out of college and somebody has directed learning for them throughout their lifetimes. It was a parent when they were young, a teacher in K-12 and then once they got to college it was a syllabus or a course catalog or a professor who directed learning for them. Now, they will be entering a world where learning won’t be directed for them any more. That’s why skills like creativity and curiosity are so critical for success.”
At the same time, Selingo noted, this is a generation who are digital natives, meaning they have grown up with technology and are very familiar with it. And everyone must understand technology to do their jobs, he said.
Contextual relationships is important because this is how students relate what they learn in the classroom to what they need to know on the job.
“Students have a really hard time transferring this learning,” he said. “Being able to transfer what you have learned in different contexts is key to being successful in the workplace. When you ask students what they learn in college, they can recite their resume — what classes they took. But many I talked to could not tell me what the markers of success in high school or college or in a particular internship would help them in their job. So, they didn’t have that contextual thinking to transfer that learning from one context to another. That’s what gets students hired, because it gives the employers a lot more information about that student than is listed on the resume.”
Selingo found in his research that employers are putting soft skills in their job ads because they found that a majority of job applicants lacked key skills they needed in employees. No longer was the college degree embedded with the soft skills that employers are looking for in future employees like is was 20-30 years ago, said Selingo.
“They couldn’t trust that students, just because they were coming with a college degree, would automatically have these soft skills — like customer service and communication,” he said. “Traditional education today — at nearly every level —barely emphasizes the social skills that are critical in developing these soft skills. In many ways the modern workforce looks a lot like a pre-school classroom where curiosity, sharing and negotiating are front-and-center.”
At the time Selingo was writing “There is Life After College” one of his two daughters was in kindergarten. Her school had just undergone a large construction project and purchased new furniture. At the end of the project, teachers at the school put the big boxes left over from the project in an empty classroom instead of sending them off to the recycling bin. The kindergarten students got to roam free in the classroom for a couple of hours.
“That was the highlight of the week or month for my daughter, getting to play with those boxes,” he recalled. “She couldn’t stop talking about all the things they did with those boxes. They built a town. They built a fort. They built a train. They built a school.”
Selingo said he thought about this story as he visited college campuses conducting research, and relayed it to several college professors.
“I asked them what they thought college students would do in a similar situation,” he said. “Most that I talked to said, ‘Oh, they’ll have plenty of questions about process. What’s the assignment? When do we need to finish? Do we need to work in teams? How do we pick teams? How will we be graded?’ It wasn’t about the curiosity and what to try to build as a team and problem-solve. They would be asking questions much more about the process. So people know how to take a college course, but they don’t know how to navigate the workforce and they don’t know how to navigate life. Many colleges today are graduating students who are not prepared to navigate the ambiguity of today’s workforce.”
As a result, a new approach to education is emerging to help develop these soft-skills. In summer 2013, Lipscomb University was one of the first institutions in the country to launch an innovative competency evaluation service to help employers identify proficient employees as well as strengthen the skills of current employees. Lipscomb is the only university in the nation to adapt the full competency assessment to higher education, both for incoming and graduating students.
Competency-based education combines an intentional and transparent approach to curricular design with an academic model in which the time it takes to demonstrate competencies varies and the expectations about learning are held constant. Students acquire and demonstrate their knowledge and skills by engaging in learning exercises, activities and experiences that align with clearly defined programmatic outcomes. Students receive proactive guidance and support from faculty and staff. Learners earn credentials by demonstrating mastery through multiple forms of assessment, often at a personalized pace.
At Lipscomb the program is offered through the College of Professional Study’s new CORE (Customized, Outcome-based, Relevant Evaluation) Competency Assessment and Development Center and is tied to the nationally recognized Polaris® competency assessment model which identifies and rates an individual’s key competencies. This information can be used effectively in hiring, in personnel management and in scoping out an effective program for individuals returning to finish undergraduate studies and earn graduate degrees.
Selingo’s research examined how students launched within ten years of graduating from high school, and he grouped them into three categories — sprinters, wanderers and stragglers. He noted three factors that define an individual’s time after high school — debt, internships and credentials.
He offered three solutions for thinking differently in the future about how young adults are reared and educated at the high school and college levels to help them successfully launch into the job market.
Failure. Allowing students to fail is key, said Selingo. “We can either teach our children to deny their mistakes or failures, pretending they never happen and they will never learn from them, or we can begin to model behavior for them that makes most of our failures open to them to see and learn from,” he said. “Rarely do students see failure modeled for them. We need to think about how to create opportunities for children to fail whether it’s at home or on the playground or in school or in college. Students who have failed likely can figure out how to solve problems on the fly. Employers look for that skill.”
Relevant work experience. Selingo said that students need to have some sort of experience with internships, apprenticeships, co-ops or other type of work. He said that just 20 percent of today’s teens have some work experience, which is one of the lowest level’s in history of the United States since labor statistics have been tracked. He said that colleges sometimes focus too exclusively on traditional education, and need to integrate opportunities for practical experience in the learning experience. “We need to encourage students to get the breadth of a college education but also the depth of work and developing practical skills,” he said.
Allow time to think. Students need to be allowed “time to think about their passions, their missions in life — not just what they’re going to major in,” he said. Nearly 70 percent of high school graduates enter college within three months of graduation, but only 50 percent of them end up graduating from college within four years, “because we rush so many of them off directly after high school,” he said. “We need much more career exploration in high school and college so that students can understand what the jobs they think they want are really going to be like. The more exploration we can encourage students to do, the better off students will be.”
Selingo says that very few of today’s students will work for one employer or in one industry for their entire careers. They will have to reinvent themselves several times throughout their lives, and that we have to “prepare them for the ambiguities of today’s workplace.”
“Students have to leave college with more than just pieces of paper (degrees) to success,” he said. “In many ways it doesn’t matter where you go, it’s how you go to college that matters more.”
For more information about Selingo’s work, visit www.jeffselingo.com. For more information about Lipscomb’s competency-based education program, visit www.lipscomb.edu/professionalstudies.