I have two sons who both graduated from the University of New Hampshire. One graduated with a bachelor’s degree in history and the other a bachelor’s degree in physics. One has worked for the past five years at Formlabs, a company that manufactures and sells 3D printers. The other graduated a year ago and is still unemployed.
You might assume that the son with the STEM degree is the one working for the tech company and the history major is the son who is unemployed. If that is your guess, you would be wrong. The son who never took a math course has been promoted four times and comfortably makes a six figure income. The other can solve complex problems in 3 dimensions but has struggled finding a job that would take advantage of his coursework.
Some might think that success in the job market is as much a function of the state of the economy as it is what you majored in. For the son who graduated five years ago when jobs were plentiful, it is understandable why a tech company might be willing to take a chance on a history major. Compare that today with a weakening economy where there are many more qualified candidates (based on their work experience) thereby making it particularly challenging for a fresh graduate to compete for a limited number of skilled jobs.
While that is an important factor, and the economy may dominate regardless of one’s qualifications, I have come to believe that the difference is how each approached their undergraduate experience. My son, the history major, who spent four years being asked why anyone would major in history and what kind of job can you get with that degree, realized that he would need an internship to get his first job. The other, perhaps foolishly, thought that merely having a STEM degree would open many doors and as a result need not bother.
That being said, just having an internship and thinking everything will somehow magically fall into place is no guarantee of employment. Being passionate about 3D printing, my son found an internship with a small contract manufacturer that taught him how to take a CAD drawing and turn that into a finished part. He learned that 3D printing is more an art than a science. As importantly, he worked with a small team that taught him how to collaborate and also had him interact with clients. When it came time to develop a new line of business, he played an important role in the business development process. In other words, when it came time to go on the job market, he not only had real experience, but also, a fully developed set of work-ready capabilities.
One of the few hires with real experience in the industry gave Joshua a head start in his entry-level sales role. He could speak to customers with authority and as importantly, with his previous experience working as part of a small team, understood that by helping others to be successful, they in turn would share with him whatever success they enjoyed. As one of the few individuals in the company who could speak intelligently to the sales, marketing, service, and engineering teams, he quickly found himself as the go-to person that could help communicate across departmental lines. This led to his first promotion to Sales Engineer, his next to Lead Sales Engineer, his third that had him think more strategically as part of revenue enablement, and then back to the sales organization as the manager of sales engineering and enablement. All within his five years after graduating with a history degree.
In contrast, his brother, who has no relevant work experience, is finding it challenging to find a company willing to hire him. While few are able to complete a physics degree, employers (apparently) much prefer to see some type of engineering degree or relevant work experience that demonstrates how someone has put their degree into practice.
What all of this illustrates is that the ability to launch a career depends on not only what you know, but as importantly, what you can do. However, how is today’s college student going to learn those soft/smart skills that employers covet? Every major likes to advertise its ability to develop critical thinking, problem solving, or in many cases, important communication skills. However, when their development is a by-product of the acquisition of knowledge, it is not clear that they offer much to employers who are looking for signs that a graduate can solve their problems, work on their team, or communicate effectively within their organization.
To prepare the next generation of thinkers and doers, work-ready capabilities must be developed within an authentic context that mirrors the way that organizations work in today’s economy. Yet, for many students, an internship capable of helping them develop these skills are beyond their reach. This prompted us to ask instead whether it is possible to bring an equivalent experience to campus that would help in the development of work-ready capabilities.
Capabilities in contrast to skills, reflect the ability to problem solve within an unstructured or unfamiliar environment. It is the ability to “think on your feet” when confronted with something new that often holds the key to success in a dynamic environment where the rules and players are constantly changing. After all, college is supposed to be something more than just training for a particular job or specific career. It is to help students learn how to apply a set of principles to a given situation and communicate about it effectively to a diverse audience. Yet professors often are out of tune with the audience or application within the context of current business practices.
For these reasons, knowledge creation needs to not only encompass the formation of new ideas, but also how to put those concepts into practice in a manner that is useful to potential employers. This requires a different mindset and approach to the curriculum. In what might seem to be counterintuitive, faculty and supporting staff need to think less about careers and more about different types of work. The focus needs to shift so that students can develop a better understanding of what they enjoy doing and a portion of the curriculum must contain opportunities to more fully develop those skills and capabilities that would enable a graduate to employ them effectively.
Our solution has been to develop a program we call Business in Practice. It is a series of two credit courses that work in combination with our core curriculum to develop a set of work-ready capabilities that help to accelerate the professional development of our students. We offer roughly 70 courses a year to approximately 2500 students. Each course is taught by a working professional and is designed to leverage their professional knowledge and experience in a way that promotes the development of soft skills. They run the gamut from how to tell a story using data, license a product, walk a store and create a set of actionable recommendations, construct an immersive experience for C-suite executives, leverage Salesforce, use culture as a source of competitive advantage, or construct an engaged workplace. Regardless of the topic, each course serves as a vehicle for providing our students with an opportunity to work collaboratively, make thoughtful recommendations, or communicate effectively to a business audience. Each course is designed so that when a student leaves the course, they can easily construct a narrative that speaks directly to what they got out of the experience and how it better prepares them for what will be expected after graduation.
The hope is that our graduates will be less subject to the vagaries of the economy when it comes time to look for their first job. The lesson I have learned watching my two sons and their respective job searches is that there is more to it then the selection of a major. It is time that we give our graduates the tools they need to catch the attention of potential employers and provide them with work-ready capabilities that enable them to do as well as think.
Postscript: My younger son finally land his first job with
BAE Systems. I like to tell him he is a “personality hire.” When asked what he would bring to the team, his response was “a nice vibe.” Actually, it probably has more to do with his ability to do higher level math and his experience with programming.
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