On-Demand Webinar: Readying Students for Jobs of the Future

Karin Fischer:
Hello everyone. And welcome to the today’s webinar. I’m Kiren Fischer. I’m a senior writer with The Chronicle of Higher Education, and I want to welcome everyone to today’s virtual event. We’re going to explore crucial topic, preparing students for jobs of the future. As the World Economic Forum has, has suggested or estimated some 40% of core skills required and jobs will change over just the next five years. And that kind of enormous turn, presentable challenge for colleges. On one hand, we know that students and their families come to college with the thought that they want to get a good career at the end, as well as their degree. Yet, how do you predict when there’s such, so much flux and how do you keep reading students to have the skills to help them successfully make the transition from college to career? And that’s what we’re going to address today.

Karin Fischer:
I’ve got a great panel with me and I hope that we will be getting many great questions from you in the audience as well. Before I get started, I wanted to do a little bit of housekeeping. So please send your questions, your comments, your feedback in the Q and A box in the chat. For security reasons, we will vet them. So if you don’t see it pop up right away, it’s just that we’re reading them, so please have patience. And as I said, we want this to reflect your queries, your interests, your feedback. And so please put them in the box and in the second half of the panel, I will be getting to those questions that you submit. Also, just a reminder that this panel is being recorded and we will be sending an email with a link to that recording within the next couple of days to everybody who’s signed up for today’s session.

Karin Fischer:
I want to take a moment to thank the underwriter of today’s broadcast, Wiley Educational Services. We appreciate their support for this panel and for helping to bring this conversation to our audience. Just to let you know, at about the halfway point of today’s session Liz Mcmillen, a Chronicle Editor will do a brief Q and A with Todd Zipper, who executive vice president for University’s Services and Talent Development with Wiley, and then they will talk for a few minutes and then we’ll return to our panel. So it’ll be in two parts just so we don’t lose any of you. So with the housekeeping out of the way, let me get to the introductions. I’m joined today by four speakers who bring really important perspectives and experience to this question. So first let me introduce Marc Austin, who’s incoming Dean and Associate Provost at Augusta University Online. Next, Gary Beaulieu, Senior Director of Career and Professional Success at Butler University. Iris Palmer, Deputy Director at New America Foundation. And Jack Suess, Vice President of Information Technology and CIO at University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

Karin Fischer:
So before I stumble over my words too much, lets skip to the panelists. So let me just start with a very big broad question. You know, as I said, at the outside, students do come to college with careers in mind, they say in surveys that getting a good job is quite important to them and a reason why they come to college. Yet we know that the transition to work isn’t easy and I don’t want to be overly simplistic. I know there’s many, many reasons for this, but I want to turn to each of you, and just ask you to weigh in on what you think are one or two perhaps of the most important barriers that can impede students from making a successful transition to their careers and Iris, why don’t I start with you.

Iris Palmer:
Happy to be here. Thank you so much. So a couple of things we hear from students that we’ve talked to in focus groups, one-on-one in-depth interviews, one is knowing how to present their learning and knowledge to employers when it’s not necessarily an applied course of study that they’re in. So, and getting any kind of guidance about how to communicate with employers about what they’ve learned in their education in a way that can also contribute to my second piece that we hear a lot of, which is understanding even if they are in applied fields, that some of these communication, teamwork and interaction with authority skills, what people call soft skills or 21st century, whatever we call them are incredibly important. And being able to that to an employer in any kind of interaction that they both have those skills and have learned those in through their education. So those are two that we hear over and over again from students and actually also from our employers that we, that we’ve spoken to.

Karin Fischer:
Great. And I want to, I do want to circle back to that question of how you, how you articulate it. I mean, how you most translate college to career in a few minutes. But Gary, why don’t I turn to you and ask you the same question about what in your work you see as some of the biggest stumbling blocks?

Marc Austin:
Sure. Thank you for having me. I would echo what Iris said. I definitely hear those things from students to see those things from students, but a couple of other things that we notice here is a sort of a lack ability to make a decision, to make a final decision and be able to live with that. What, what we see sometimes with our students is that they’re, I don’t know if it’s a lack of experience in being able to make a decision for themselves, but really being afraid to make afraid to make a move because they’re fear fearful that it’s not going to work out or they’re making the wrong move. And so we really, we try to work with students on making a good decision weighing options and in all the things that they do.

Marc Austin:
The other thing that I would say that I see as a barrier to some of the students being a success is less than 50% of Butler students have worked in the world of work before they come to school. Many of them have done volunteerism. They are active in sports. They’re doing other things with their church, other types of activities, but there’s a lack of understanding of the world of work. And unless they’re doing one, two or three internships, it’s difficult for them to be able to see themselves in the work environment and understand how, how the world of work is really. How it works, and so I think those are two barriers that I really see that are, that hinder our students.

Karin Fischer:
Yeah. I think, I think we don’t, we don’t always properly appreciate just the change in the lack of work experience that many traditionally age students are not, they’re not coming with that experience. Marc, what about you?

Marc Austin:
Yeah. I think a lot of students that I talk to about this question about, how do I get prepared for work? And how can I use my university experience to prepare us? Their number one question is, Marc, how do we get an edge, right? How do we because it’s a very competitive job environment. So what is it that’s, it’s going to take to help us differentiate ourselves in an environment where it’s very competitive and they know that they need to develop skills that they fundamentally have never applied before. So how do they get the edge? I think one of the biggest barriers that they face to getting that edge and finding meaningful employment for themselves is information. So as administrators, we have tons of information about job markets, about labor markets. And when we make good informed decisions about which programs to launch or which degrees to build or micro credentials to create, we’re looking at a labor market, we’re trying to understand what’s the match between a course and a program in the labor market? And those students don’t have the same level of information, especially first gen.

Marc Austin:
So I think one of the biggest areas of focus for us as administrators and university officials is to provide students with better decision making frameworks, which includes information about the labor market. So how do I make a choice between major A and B? And what implication does that have for me when I’m looking for a job? So it’s drawing that connection between college and in career, which in my mind is a function of labor market information in many respects, it’s sort of technical, but how do you build that connection? And I think especially for the first gen and some disadvantaged communities, getting that connection, especially when they don’t have a network, a personal network is really important.

Karin Fischer:
And then Jack, last but not least. Let me turn to you and ask what you’ve been seeing.

Jack Seuss:
Well, you know, what’s interesting is that most of the students that I work with are students in technical majors. And so they’ve always had this problem that frankly, what they’re learning in the classroom is going to be not that useful, maybe even by the time they’ve left the classroom and gone into workforce, or certainly within two or three years. And so they’ve been facing this problem that I explain to them, they have to explain how they’re able to learn on their own. And they have to be able to give demonstrations of how they’ve gone out and been able to acquire new skills when they’ve needed it to do projects, work, etc. that they weren’t necessarily taught in the classroom because all employers, at least in the tech sector are looking for people that are going to be able to personally grow over time with the jobs that are going to be there.

Jack Seuss:
The other two things that I sort of highlight to all of the tech students that I see coming through are the fact that they need to learn how to communicate, especially to non-technical people that often there is a way of talking about things that you have to be able to explain it and to explain it, you often have to be able to boil it down in a way that anyone could understand this. And so learning how to do those kinds of skills really set students up for success, but that’s where teaching them that yes, these courses where you have to learn how to write these courses, where you have to learn how to present are so fundamental to your long term success. That’s why we’re trying to emphasize these. And the last thing I just want to highlight what Iris said around soft skills that, we see that the difference among students one, two, three years out is these soft skills that they’re able to acquire. If they’re able to get these and have tech skills, they can do almost anything at companies.

Karin Fischer:
Jack, Iris, both of you made the point that in some ways it’s about how do you make that? How do you show what you’ve gained in the classroom? And then how do you show how it’s going to be relevant in the workplace? And so I want to ask each of you, I mean, do you, are there things that have helped, do you think in terms of strategies in helping students make employers or help employers understand the ways that what they have learned is, and can be in an ongoing sense relevant to what they are going do if they are hired? Jack, I mean what do you say to your students when you’re giving them that advice?

Jack Seuss:
No, it’s a great question. And frankly, one of the projects that I’m spending a huge amount of time on is a project here where we’re starting to implement something called the comprehensive learner record. And the whole idea of the comprehensive learner record is to be trying to bring in what your learning outcomes are in key areas, as well as all these co-curricular experiential service learning, because those elements really are defining sort of your personalized education experience, but they’re also a huge part of who you are and what you bring to the workforce.

Jack Seuss:
And so learning how you can talk about those kinds of skills is absolutely essential. And I don’t think that historically we’ve done a good job in just relying upon the transcript to be able you that. And so that’s one of my areas that I’m focusing a lot on, but in the short term, while we’re building that, what we’re really trying to get students to be doing is unpacking and talking more about themselves as the whole person and being able to be more on their feet, adaptable to quest questions that come up because many of them had experiences, they’re just trying to think of courses that they had. And often they’ve had experiences outside of the classroom that are very relevant to this and learning how to interview is an art.

Iris Palmer:
I think the interview piece is huge. Just being able to have examples in your back pocket, that show how you’ve dealt with those situations, and being able to bring that out in an interview, because Jack’s on the bleeding edge of trying to help people show through portfolios and other ways that people have these skills, but employers are behind in using those pieces I think in many different fields. Maybe not as much in tech, but in other fields, they certainly are. Another thing we’ve seen is just integrating project based, learning with employers that may hire your graduates during your entire education. And if you can do that, then they’re demonstrating those skills over and over again. And your students also have a ready made example that they can pull forward and say, here’s how I actually worked with an employer. And it’s not even like obviously internships and all of that are very important, but actually integrating it into the curriculum can be a really interesting way to give students a way to express this to employers.

Karin Fischer:
Sorry, I have to unmute myself before I’m so anxious to ask you a follow up on that question, Iris. I mean do you see, are there effective ways? I mean, I think there historically has been some hesitance about among faculty in seeing kind of career development, career prep as being their job? Are there ways in which you have seen those sort of gets effectively integrated into the class?

Marc Austin:
[inaudible 00:15:43] [crosstalk 00:15:43]

Iris Palmer:
I could actually, Yeah, I was going to turn that over actually to somebody who’s on the ground more than I am.

Marc Austin:
No worries. Yeah, no, I.

Karin Fischer:
Yeah, I saw you nodding mark. So.

Marc Austin:
In a similar vein, where we are doing a, we’re building a project, this is at George Mason in the middle of a transition to Augusta. At George Mason, we’re building a skills transcript. It’s a little bit like a comprehensive learner record. And the nice thing about this skills transcript is we’re basically mapping skills against courses. So it’s a big project and it is very complex, but the data has grown resources like Emsi, Burning Glass and others are now providing a sense of the skills that are associated to jobs and also to majors. And so that effort is very helpful to faculty instead of writing a learning objective, although they do that as well, they can see how those learning objectives relate to concrete skills that are changing in the workplace. And because those skills change, it’s not always evident to faculty that they’re conveying an enormous number of skills that are highly valuable.

Marc Austin:
So that’s sort of step one is again, use these, these data resources that we have, but even better than that is to work with employers, to understand what are those skills that they’re looking for. Jack and I are working on a project actually within the greater Washington region to better understand what those employer thought skills are, those in demand skills and line them up to the curriculum that we’re building, creating essentially digital credentials that help our students see will what they’re learning from a course in terms of skills as reflected by employers. And that’s also helpful for faculty as well. They don’t necessarily see what the employers see when employers are making hiring decisions. So getting that transparency is really the key.

Karin Fischer:
And maybe I can ask you both about, you and both you and Jack about this as you’re doing this work, but when you’re talking to employers, are you seeing sort of disconnects between what they want and what you’re teaching? Or is it just a matter of just of kind of understanding how to articulate that you’re doing already, what they want and that you just have to, as you say, make it more transparent?

Marc Austin:
It’s, it’s tough for sure, but it does take it takes time, but I think it’s a productive exercise to say, what are the skills that you’re looking for? And in this context, an association of employers gets together in the greater Washington partnership to provide that visibility for universities like ours, to understand what they’re looking for. And what we are seeing is that many of the skills, especially in technical areas are being taught in classes. They’re just not directly lined up to what an individual student would need to describe as a skill that they’re obtaining in a course, as it lines up to a job. And so making that clear is I think really the focus of our work. Yeah,

Jack Seuss:
No, I would agree. And I think if there is a complaint that I would say about employers is they are too specific with their current needs today, not necessarily thinking about their needs three and five years out. And because your point is well taken at the start of this, that many of the skills they’re going to need and their future employees, they don’t even know yet they need, because they haven’t been quite invented. Who knew five years ago, we would have the explosion that we’ve had necessarily in data science and machine learning and these sorts of elements, or that the pandemic would hit and change the way work is done. And that requires a new set of emotional social skills that we need from employees. So I think that as we move forward, employers sometimes can get too specific and that can be potentially, we have to remain ready to push back when they’re trying to be too specific on certain things to recognize that no, we have to be staying at the right level for the skills that we’re teaching.

Karin Fischer:
Gary, I want to bring you in and yeah. And ask you how, how you’ve been thinking about that.

Gary Beaulieu:
Sure. I mean, I would say that trying to get what I have seen most recently, probably in the last few years is that faculty are more amenable to being able to talk about skills and be able to understand the skills that they are teaching students within and how it relates to the world of work in some way. It doesn’t, it’s not all faculty certainly by no means, but there’s a much greater willingness than there ever has than I’ve ever seen.

Gary Beaulieu:
And one of the things that I would love to see as just a little small starting point, is for our, our faculty to put on their syllabus, what are the five skills that students are learning that can translate to the world of work or to further education or whatever direction a student wants to go in. And that’s a small thing because sometimes I think that faculty aren’t speaking the same language as employers and the more that we can get them speaking closer to each other and more alike, I think it, and be more aligned, I think we’re in much better shape. And I think that’s been a disconnect for a long time. And I think there are little small changes that you can make that can begin to get the conversation going with faculty and between employers as well.

Karin Fischer:
And have you been doing that?

Gary Beaulieu:
On, on smaller scales. Yeah. There are some faculty who in our College of Communication, many of them are really thinking about careers and how, and what students are doing beyond their classroom. And they’re really open to talking about what skills their students are learning. You know, we’re trying to integrate the NACE competencies into the conversation so that they understand how that translates to competencies and thinking about how to help students really be able to translate what they’re doing in a classroom and in their internships to the world of work.

Karin Fischer:
So you’re really not in, anyway, you’re not asking the faculty to change what they’re teaching, but rather to just shine that light of transparency on sort of the connections on, and being very explicit in some ways about what they’re actually doing in the classroom?

Gary Beaulieu:
Yeah. And, and really trying to help faculty understand the importance of building career readiness into their curriculum, even if it’s just small things like bringing alumni panels into their classroom, so that students can learn about what students, what people do when they leave your university with that major. I think small things can make a huge difference in beginning the conversation.

Karin Fischer:
Iris, I saw you nodding. Did you want to jump in here too?

Iris Palmer:
I just wanted to say that the translation between faculty and the way they see competencies and sort of the outcomes of their courses, and then what, how that translates to employers is incredibly important. I’m not going to name the vendor, but there is a vendor that works to create and embed these work-based learning, like project-based learning pieces with faculty and they actually work with the faculty to translate what the outcomes are of the project, to the employer, and like they play sort of that role. And I think whether or not you use an external vendor for that service, like playing that role as part of career services or working with your faculty and sort of career readiness is incredibly important. So backing up exactly what Gary said.

Karin Fischer:
Jack, I wonder if we could go back for a second to something that you had said a few minutes ago, which was about the sort of, sort of managing employer’s expectation too. I wonder when you have employers who are thinking about like what they need right now, and you’re saying, well, we have students in the pipeline who aren’t going to graduate for three or four years. I mean, how do you encourage them to think bigger, longer term?

Jack Seuss:
Well, what was interesting in some of these is that in some areas and Marc, I don’t know, in the skills knowledge that George Mason was doing, but thinking about the greater Washington partnership, what was a really positive was they came out with what would be called the Digital Skills General List. And frankly, this is a set of skills that all students should be able to have as they’re entering the workforce, no matter what your major and it was designed for really non-technical majors, but it covered a set of areas of some basic data analysis, basic cyber security, understanding how to be able to present and communicate data and some other aspects. And so there were some elements in there that we are starting to figure out how we can infuse across the curriculum, or if students aren’t getting it in specific classes, we’re working with our career services where they can take a non-credit practicum.

Jack Seuss:
But we’ve built out modules where they can go through and learn these skills so that they can be able to say, “yes, no matter what, my major I’ve got these basic skills.” That’s I think a really great thing. In some of the areas where we’ve had highly detailed areas in Machine Learning where there’s 80 skills, the reality is if a student had 40 of those skills, they still got five job offers right now.

Jack Seuss:
And so the idea that you’re going to want them to have all 80, it isn’t changing the dynamic. If students are, got 40, they’re going to be hired by multiple employers and probably your own companies. And so they weren’t able to actually be implementing because the job market is tight in many of these areas. Students who have the right skills are looking at two, three, four jobs offers right now. And so employers are having to settle a little bit. And so we’ve seen that they’re understanding that they don’t quite dictate, you know, exactly what they want to say, but I think it was really helpful in aligning a direction that they wanted us to be aiming. And so we’ve really worked with them to try to show that we are in that direction.

Karin Fischer:
Marc, I want to ask, have you weigh on the same question and, but just let me say in a second, and after you finish up, I’m going to bring in my colleague, Liz Mcmillen and have our little interim Q and A, but Marc, did you want to say something about that?

Marc Austin:
Just a few things, first off, yeah, the aspiration of our project was large, right? To be able to plot out all of the skills needed for that first year as a Data Science specialist or as a Cybersecurity specialist is challenging. But in those areas, there’s a lot of commonality across industry about what was needed and just winnowing out those critical factors that were most essential was very helpful. I think for our students and for faculty, the question though is about the future, right? The next big job that’s coming down the pike. And how do we begin to think about setting out those roadmaps for students to get through school, to that new career that doesn’t exist?

Marc Austin:
The best example I can think of right now is around Quantum Computing. This is a field that’s just emerging, much less a discipline in an area. So there are a number of us who are working on defining that field and working with employers to better understand what those potential future skills are going to be, but that’s way out their work. And it doesn’t happen very often. I think most of our students are just what’s their first job, right out of my program that I’m going to get not necessarily the full career. And in that area, I think specifying those skills that are in demand in the market is something we can do and has been proven successful.

Karin Fischer:
I want to come back and talk about some of those things, talk about what some successful models for university industry collaboration can look like and talk as a number of you had mentioned sort of critically, what does this look like? Particularly for students who come from backgrounds that may be not traditionally have been coming to college? And how do you make sure that there’s real equity in these roadmaps as well? But first, let me turn this over to Liz McMillen and to the audience, please do, keep putting your questions in the Q and A.

Liz Mcmillen:
Thanks, Karen. And thanks the panel. I’d like to welcome Todd Zipper onto the screen. He’s Executive Vice President of University Services and Talent Development at Wiley. Welcome Todd. I hope you’re doing well today.

Todd Zipper:
Thanks. It’s great to be here and really enjoying listening to the conversation today.

Liz Mcmillen:
So the panelists are talking broadly about preparing students for jobs of the future, from your perspective, how can universities work with the market better and not just for preparing for a better job situation, but also in essence future proofing university?

Todd Zipper:
Absolutely. And I think some of the comments here, I might be repeating myself a little bit, cause I think the panelists are definitely on the right track as far as I’m concerned. So let me just give some points from my end, is it is our belief that universities have to increasingly see employers as their customers. As much as they might see students as their customers and that might even be debatable in certain places of the world. And so with that in mind we take this idea at Wiley, we call it right to left education. Where you start with the needs of the labor market, whether that’s the employers, the jobs that are available, skills that are needed, and you sort of work backwards from there in terms of building the education programs, the pathways that are needed to really fill those gaps.

Todd Zipper:
And I think if you do that well, institutions will graduate more students and provide a stronger return on investment, really for all the stakeholders involved. Once they start to make that mindset shift, I think you’re going to see a lot of changes happening in the university. You know, whether that’s around the program that they offer, whether that’s the features, whether it’s how they serve students. So I think those are the kinds of things that you’re going to see and some recommendations I have just really thinking about the program, because ultimately that’s what students go to universities for. I have some strategies if you will, that we’ve seen by working with our 70 plus partners throughout the US and globally that we seem to think are working. First off is really try to embed career services more into the program itself.

Todd Zipper:
I heard one of the panelists sort of talk about this. I’ve seen, I’ve met a couple companies we’re actually working with one of them, where they’re doing these kind of micro internship, if you will, or working on real world problems, which has a whole bunch of implications around their education itself, but also connecting already to employers within the process. I would bring employers into the conversations, whether that’s forming advisory boards around particular programs. So you’re constantly getting that sort of real time feedback on what actually skills are needed? What our job ready graduates need to look like? So that’s be something else I would look at. I would also really study salaries around the kind of the downstream after these students graduate and making sure that there’s not a disconnect between the cost of a program and really what they’re ultimately making.

Todd Zipper:
And then finally I would relentlessly look at outcomes. I think it’s a challenge for everyone to really understand where are my graduates in one year and three years in five years, there’s some data out there, but I think it needs to get a lot more robust. It needs a whole sort of ecosystem system solution working with the Department of Education, working with surveying companies, whatever you can do to really get that. And that I think will help course correct and allow universities to be even more career connected as I like to say.

Liz Mcmillen:
Right. I think it’s interesting that there are some questions in the Q and A box just about faculty response to some of these kind of changes. How has that played out at some of the institutions you just mentioned? Has there been particular ways to bring faculty along?

Todd Zipper:
Yeah, absolutely. And I think one of the panelists said this as well or hinted this. I mean, I don’t think that there’s necessarily a ton of resistance from faculty, from what our experience is. I think it’s more of just the inertia of the system. Programs have just existed in a certain way and to make a whole bunch of changes, takes a lot of committees, a lot of work and it doesn’t mean that there’s not and people have jobs. So to really go and change things often is extra work. And so I think it’s just kind of breaking, trying to break the inertia ultimately of the institution, which is hard.

Liz Mcmillen:
Yeah, absolutely. I want to switch to the broad topic of educational benefits at companies and number of places have been adding them, rethinking them, expanding them. How do you think that they could be more strategic about those benefits?

Todd Zipper:
Yeah, it’s a great question because you know, I think the numbers somewhere around $20 billion a year in the US is given out in tuition reimbursement. There’s this tax benefit of, I think it’s $5,250. A lot of companies have this as a benefit and it’s, but from my experience in doing this over a decade, it hasn’t really been a strategic benefit. A benefit that, or that is how they’re going to actually increase the talent in their business. They’re going to retrain their talent, they’re going to increase their reputation. But I think that a lot of factors have sort of just come together. Oh, especially over the last few years that I think companies are sort of changing that mindset. As we are in this great resignation right now that we’re experiencing and we have a desperate need to recruit talent as we are in this pretty disconnected, job skills gap that we have, panelists talked about that.

Todd Zipper:
Certain people getting four offers others, maybe not so much and tons of job openings that are absolutely available that I think employers rightfully so are trying to take matters into their own hands. And that’s maybe a little bit extreme in what I’m saying here, but let’s look at Amazon as a great example of that. They recently announced the kind of the evolution of their career choice program, full disclosure, we have we’re part of their Canada Program around software development. We have our M3 talent development business as part of that, but they chose, I think it was something like 140 educational providers from sort of the mega nonprofits, like Western Governors down to Community Colleges, but they took an extremely intentional approach to the types of programs that would lead to the types of outcomes that they wanted to see for their individuals.

Todd Zipper:
Whether it was inside of their company, working for Amazon, or maybe leaving in getting a livable wage job somewhere else. So I think Amazon’s sort of leading from the front there. There’s a lot of companies doing stuff, but I think you’re going to see more companies not just having as a benefit and having call it 3% adoption, 4% adoption around specifically the tuition benefit, but actually broadening the benefit to include way more than just sort of granting benefits. So that’s kind of how I’m seeing that evolve.

Liz Mcmillen:
Right. And before I pass things back to Karin, I did want to pick up on something that Marc was just talking about at the, at the very end there about sort of the roadmap of future skills and how hard that is to really plot that out. How should universities be thinking about that and trying to look down and figure something out that’s very difficult?

Todd Zipper:
Yeah. I agree. I think you can definitely get into some analysis and paralysis here. And going back to my initial right to left education approach. I think when you start with the job and the employer and you don’t just project some sort of big statistic that you hear, like for example, Cybersecurity, right? We think, I think the latest data point is one in every five tech jobs are in Cybersecurity right now, of new jobs that are offered. But have to kind of unpack that onion to say, well, are those junior talent? Because that’s kind of what colleges are focused on is mostly graduating people at the start of their career, certainly we have master’s programs and postgrad stuff. And so to me, it’s really getting into the employers, getting into the jobs and working backwards and solving that.

Todd Zipper:
And I’ll give an example of some that we’re doing sort of partnering on one side of the fence with employers, the other side with universities. This model is called Hire Train Deploy. And I discovered it really being hired by a staffing company to do kind of the last mile bootcamp training around full stack development. And what we realized, which was exciting about this model was they started with the employer. They started with the job, then they worked backwards and they kind of put this six to 12 week program in place that really got them job ready. It taught students specific technology stacks of that particular investment bank that we were working with at the time. And so it really cut down to what is actually needed right now to get them to add value day one. And so that’s what my focus would be is continue to keep partnering with the employer, especially in the communities that universities work with and not just looking at the theoretical data and building towards that, because that actually might not get people jobs.

Liz Mcmillen:
Right. Well, thank you very much Todd. And thank you to Wiley for making this conversation possible. I’m going to hand things back to Karin and the panel.

Todd Zipper:
My pleasure. Thank you.

Liz Mcmillen:
Thank you.

Karin Fischer:
Great. Thanks everyone. And I just invite my panelists to come back on screen. Let me pick up where actually that conversation left off and ask. I noticed a lot in the chat about this and let me thank everybody. And there’s a lot of great observations, also some great resources in the Q and A. So I encourage you all to take a look at it, but I want to ask the panel a little bit about sort of the model for industry partnership. Somebody observed for example, these sort of university, industry advisory boards, for example of they’re not a new thing. And I wonder if there are ways that you have each found to sort of build a sustainable, maybe more institutionalized relationship with industry partners so that you are hearing consistent feedback and having a consistent conversation with them? And maybe Gary, I can start with you and ask you a little bit about what that kind of looks like for you?

Gary Beaulieu:
Sure. I’m happy to talk about that. So we at Butler, we’ve sort of taken an individual approach because there’s some employers are interested in certain types of activities, others, other things work for them. So we take a kind of an individual unique approach to them and kind of listen to the employers and what they’re interested in, what we do know is that most of our employers that we work with are interested in building deeper relationship. They want more than just coming to a career fair. They want to get more involved with the institution more than just posting a job. And so we have at Butler, we’re lucky to have a team of people who are out there doing that right now. They’re out there talking to employers on the university’s behalf, not just on, on career services behalf about building deeper partnerships.

Gary Beaulieu:
So let me give you an example of, one of the partnerships that we have here at Butler is we had a local employer who I was meeting with one day who talked about, we need students who have Salesforce. We need students who have some background in Salesforce. And it took a little while. It took six months to a year, but we built an opportunity for them to offer sort of a certificate or a badge in Salesforce.

Gary Beaulieu:
It’s a 12 week program. Students don’t get any credit for it, but they get to take and the company will actually pay for their Salesforce exam. So that’s a unique opportunity that we’re looking to take that model and maybe duplicate it. Because so many employers want, get, we like to get them to teach our students skills rather than just let them do an information session. So it’s getting them to really be active with our students. And that Salesforce partnership has been really good. We had about 17 students sign up this past semester. So really good opportunity for an employer and a group of students to talk to each other in hopes that a talent pipeline develops.

Karin Fischer:
So have the employers also be a resource themselves and provide some of that educational opportunity.

Marc Austin:
Yep. And it’s alumni that are teaching it. So that is even a better approach to have that.

Karin Fischer:
Marc, Jack, I wanted to ask you if you had any sort of other institutional observations for what has worked at your colleges.

Marc Austin:
Sure. I think Todd sort of hit it. It’s that relationship building that’s so important. And actually Gary, you make made the same point. You have to really understand where the employer is and build and foster that relationship. So we’ve had a couple of one-on-one type of relationships at George Mason were really very powerful. Amazon happened to be one of those where they spell out what they’re looking for. And there’s a dialogue that emerges. And for us, it was the creation of a cloud computing degree as a result of that conversation. So a whole degree in partnership with a community college Northern Virginia Community College in George Mason and Amazon. So that partnership was a unique launching point for a dialogue that’s continued into other areas, including Security, Data Analytics, and other fields that are related to it. So that’s one sort of one-on-one sort of relationship, the area that we haven’t done.

Marc Austin:
And I think I’d be interested in the others view on this, as well as these relationships that Guild education is forming with large universities or in stride where you’re basically working from the inside of an employer’s HR function to better understand what the learning needs are of that employee ways and working with universities to help develop those skills and develop those degrees actually within the workforce. So to me, that’s the next area for us to all explore in our own ways. And those are two really powerful ways to build relationships. The one on one, and then the working with a company on the inside and really understanding their attorneys.

Jack Seuss:
You know if I could add just sort of two things, I think one, we do a lot of work with our career services to be able to be collecting data on who’s getting hired. All of this data is part of the academic program review. We’re feeding it in departments have to be looking at hiring information to be making sure programs are, have effectiveness, but where we’re starting to take it, which I think will be really helpful is doing much more work where we’re mining LinkedIn data and trying to be getting LinkedIn profiles per early on as part of the career services activity.

Jack Seuss:
So now we can be following those alumni and where they’re ending up. One, it allows us to be doing what you know was sort of highlighted by Gary of how do we bring the right alumni back to be thinking about skills building or opportunities. But it’s also, I think beginning think about how broadly our students are ending up in different career slots than we might have ever imagined. And that’s happening at every university is that students are ending up in a broader array of things. And I think that’s a good story because what it says is we’re teaching the skills for students to be able to go on, learn, adapt, and develop in ways that we hadn’t anticipated.

Karin Fischer:
That’s that’s an interesting, yeah.

Iris Palmer:
I just wanted to add a couple of things to this that actually, I think reinforce a lot of what’s already been said, but one thing we’ve seen that works really well and tends to indicate a really strong relationship with employers is being able to strategically allocate and recruit adjuncts who actually work for the employers where you’re, where your students end up or where they might want to end up working. So that helps integrate the curriculum, update the curriculum, keep those skills really sharp without having to go through maybe a really formal process of continuing to do that. So this is like beyond the advisory committee, right?

Iris Palmer:
The other thing we’ve seen and Gary alluded to this too, is making sure that you’re aligning to industry recognized certifications. This is obviously particularly truein the tech sector where they have very well developed certification structures. It’s less true in some other occupationally focused work, but that’s another way where you can sort of take what the employers have decided are the skills they need and make sure that you’re embedding those types of skills into the curriculum that you’re teaching. So those are a couple ways we’ve seen that colleges have helped keep their curriculum current and have demonstrated really good relationships with their employer partners.

Karin Fischer:
You know, somebody noted was noting in the Q and A that one of the challenges is obviously the curriculum is kind of a slow beast of change that going through the pro of changing curriculum within a major might take a year. I wonder if there are ways in which you think colleges can be more nimble, that they can be innovative and look to different kinds of mechanisms to make sure that they are, for example, as you said, Iris, aligning with the particular licensure demands, for example, of a particular employer?

Marc Austin:
We all have accrediting bodies that we ultimately need to build our curriculum in alignment with in many respects and in those, standards can change over time. But the nimbleness, I think Gary was talking about earlier and Iris as well, the micro credential, which is a non-credit form of skill building and acknowledgement of what a university can help with learn and acquire in a university context that has relevance outside the university in the job market. So certainly micro credentialing and digital badges and industry based certification is an area that can supplement a degree. And I think it’s really important to think of it as a supplement, that a degree is helping you get a career, not just a job. And these micro credentials are really helpful at specifying the skills that you’ve got to be able to bring to a job.

Karin Fischer:
Gary.

Gary Beaulieu:
Yeah, I would absolutely agree. I think that is going to become ever more popular from universities is the idea of that micro credentialing or stackable credentials, whatever you call it. I think it will become even more prevalent because there are so many unique skills that students are looking to build and giving them opportunities to do that sort of degree plus type of activity where they take a coding class when they’re in communications or they take something that will really make them a more attracted candidate, I think is really a great thing that’s going to happen. We are looking right now at partnering with one of those, I won’t say which one, one of those companies that does that, because I think it is really important for students to be able to have those opportunities, to add to their portfolio skills, just beyond what they’re learning in their academic academic curriculum.

Karin Fischer:
Jack you’d mentioned too, that it’s not just about what they’re learning in the classroom period, but it’s also this sort of broader range of experiences that can really help students develop the skills. I mean, what are some other high kind of impact practice that colleges need to be encouraging need to be focused on that can ensure that students are, are getting skills, not just what’s happening in the classroom.

Jack Seuss:
So one of the groups that we’re partnering very heavily with is our student affairs. Student affairs does credible work in leadership development, in service learning, in teamwork, other kinds of activities to build out for student groups, for student leaders, for others, and being able to document through micro credentials, but have the evidence that is linked in as to what it actually means. That’s where we’re trying to be thinking about bringing some of this co-curricular elements in because for a lot of students, it’s a critically important component of their educational experience, what they’ve been doing outside the classroom as well. And so I think thinking through how we can be representing this in ways it’s not talking about necessarily putting it on the transcript, but it’s showing what they’ve been doing. And it helps them be able to talk about these experiences and tie it in to the broader mix of things that they’ve also done in the academic setting.

Jack Seuss:
And so, to me, that’s one of the areas that I’m really passionate about because I think service learning, experiential learning these all fuse to make a difference in bringing, students to be able to show what they’re able to do.

Karin Fischer:
Marcus, are you nodding?

Marc Austin:
Oh, it’s, I was just thinking, as Jack was speaking earlier about the comprehensive learner record. Transcripts, employer use them to validate that someone went to university, but they rarely open them up and take a look at what someone did, right? And when a student is going in front of an interview, they’re rarely looking at their transcript to remind them of what they, they’re looking at their resume. They’re looking at LinkedIn, that’s the place where skills need to reside and be reflected. So there’s new tools that we’re all thinking about. Digital badging, comprehensive learner records, and boy and you’re right, Jack, the experiences that someone has and let’s say a global context can be reflected in these skill identifiers, not just micro credentials, but the skill itself and.

Jack Seuss:
Exactly.

Marc Austin:
More digital world that we’re entering into.

Jack Seuss:
If, if I could have one last thing on this, though, where I think it’s important for universities to begin experimenting and thinking about this is that one of the groups that I work with nationally, we are doing a lot of work with industry about how to be thinking about what the standards need to be for their workforce hiring systems, to be able to automatically consume micro credentials. And I can tell you that in the next two or three years, almost all the major workforce systems are going to be able to be consuming micro credentials directly as part of what their intake is going to be. So instead of doing the text processing where they’re looking for keywords, they’re going to be looking for different kinds of micro credentials, and this is going to make this much more important to be exposing your learning outcomes, your skills, your competencies, through the educational process.

Karin Fischer:
Iris, is that the answer is micro credentials the way that we’re going to have overcome that translation problem that you got us started with, or are there other ways that are going to have to sort of be put in place?

Iris Palmer:
So I would just say that micro credentials are only as good as how well they’re recognized by industry. And so that’s why I go to industry recognized certifications, because those are already recognized by industry. Although they have lots of problems with them, at least they’ve been validated and they generally tend to show up in job postings and things like that. So I think the challenge with micro credentials is that translation challenge. And Jack alluded to the fact that they are working on this, particularly through their HR systems. That’s wonderful, but it’s something that I think we need to continue to follow and following up on LinkedIn and places like that, and making sure that those actually are recognized by your industry partners and that there is value associated with them, because if you are encouraging students to partake in these experiences, particularly if they’re non credit, particularly if they’re still charging tuition, I would say, you really need to validate that they are being recognized and have value in the marketplace.

Iris Palmer:
I mean that’s not always true. So, but sometimes it is. So it’s really important to continue to follow it. It is one solution. I think we need to work on both sides of the equation, both in the education side and on the employer side, to be able to make this translation and continue to work on it.

Karin Fischer:
I want to shift to gears for, for the last few minutes we haven’t talk a little bit about students themselves. I mean, I think we have to acknowledge that clearly who are in our classrooms today is shifting. We have a lot more first generation non-traditional age students, a lot of students who come from backgrounds that bring with them some headwinds and unfortunately, just as it can be challenging for those students to, to enroll in college, to be retained and to complete it. They also often face special hurdles in making this transition to career. And somebody had asked this in the Q and A, but are there ways that we should be thinking about how to also make sure that we are serving the students that we have today, that we are refining our, these sort of processes to help, especially with students who may be from disadvantaged backgrounds? Maybe Iris, I can [crosstalk 00:54:36]

Jack Seuss:
We have to do a better job of this. And it was interesting I was yesterday, I was talking to a young man and first generation, person of color wanting to get into the tech field and he’s transferring from community college. And so we’re talking about different ways. We have to get students linked as early as possible into career services. You know, often, especially students that are first gen or students of color, they may not have all of the family connections that are helping them have ask questions of parents, loved ones, others. And so you need to be able to be getting them to expert advice that can help them be able to make the decisions that they need to make. Because if you wait until you’re ready to graduate, you’ve missed out on so much opportunity between when you started at a university and when you grow graduate, it’s getting them there as early as possible to begin thinking about these kinds of efforts.

Jack Seuss:
And I’ll lastly end by saying, one of the things that he and I talked about is I could tell he is really interested in how he can create his own business at some point. And so linking him to think about many universities have entrepreneurship and other what’s great about these entrepreneurship, methods is that begin to get students thinking about how they’re doing their own personal branding. And I think that’s a key element in the workforce of the future. You know, if it’s right, that the future students that are in school today will have 20 or 30 or 40 different jobs over their year, we’ve got to be thinking about how they’re building their personal branding. And so that to me is another element that we have to begin thinking about and starting, especially with nontraditional students.

Karin Fischer:
Iris, let me turn to you and then Gary after.

Iris Palmer:
Yeah. Thank you. First, I just want to say, we see unequal access across higher education, that is particularly true though, for work based learning opportunities. And for students who do not see themselves in those opportunities, do not pursue those opportunities and are not recruited into those opportunities. We’re doing a project right now where it is very obvious that people in the groups you’re talking about black brown students do not see themselves low income students. First generation students do not see themselves in those opportunities and thus do not take advantage of them. And that really puts them at a disadvantage in the labor market. It also means we need to stop unpaid internships. That’s just one piece, but like it’s very important as far as an equity piece is concerned. I would also add gender to this list. It’s actually a huge problem across our labor market.

Iris Palmer:
There’s not much higher education can necessarily do to this. This is structural in a lot of ways. We need to improve pay, particularly in care occupations that really employ many women of color in particular. But colleges, I think, need to make their own goals for improving these outcomes. So thinking about and tracking the labor market outcomes of their students and thinking about how they can have goals to improve and create more equity in the outcomes they’re seeing for their students. And then really working with their employer partners to think structural changes in the labor market with their employer partners. You do have leverage at this point, they do need your students. So bringing them to the table and really having hard conversations about some of the disparities you’re seeing, even though you’re not knowing necessarily the exact disparities, but just like acknowledging there are disparities and having those hard conversations I think is really important.

Karin Fischer:
Yeah. Somehow we sometimes think of the disparities are going to end as who, as we get the students in the classroom and they just are deep and persistent. Gary.

Gary Beaulieu:
Yeah. I mean, I think what Jack and Iris both said was, was fantastic. It is in my mind about engaging these students very early in career conversations in career development. The one thing that I would add to what Jack and Iris said is the idea of mentorship is talking to those that have come before you, I think is critically important. I don’t believe that a lot of mentor relationships and a lot of mentor programs that are, are out there are the best to get those conversations going. I think they naturally occur more than they do when they’re forced, but there’s always alumni that are out there in cases of black and brown students, there’re alumni that are out there that really want to work with who were like them when they came in to Butler. And I think they’re, getting them interacting as much as possible, I think is really critical from a very early stage.

Karin Fischer:
So we’re going to wrap up here in a second. I want to give each of you maybe about 30 seconds just to give it a parting final thought. Is there one particular idea or theme maybe that we’ve talked about or that, I mean, I know I have about 30 more questions here for you that I didn’t get to, but that you would, maybe we haven’t talked about that you would like to leave the group with Marc why don’t I start with you.

Marc Austin:
Sure. No, this has been a great discussion and I think we hit on so many important topics. This last one is the most essential in my mind, which is creating a greater sense of equity and equality in the country. And I think universities have a lot to contribute in employers are seeking a more diverse workforce. So our ability to make skills more transparent in as part of higher education and associate that to experiential work like apprenticeships for diverse communities, I think is a really important next step for all of us.

Karin Fischer:
Iris.

Iris Palmer:
I would just say connecting to your economic development agencies, connecting to some of the federally funded research centers and thinking about that future of work and the future of skills, and what’s coming down the bike and how to connect that to your current degrees is really important. And not something we talked too much about today.

Karin Fischer:
And Jack.

Jack Seuss:
No, I just echo what has been said.

Karin Fischer:
And Gary, I’ll give you the final word.

Gary Beaulieu:
I would just say the art of being nimble is critical right now because there’re no rules for a lot of those and we’re all writing it at the same time.

Karin Fischer:
Yeah. That, that seems like an understatement. Well, thank you to my terrific panel and thank you to all of us for joining us today. Thanks also to Wiley Education Services for underwriting this panel, we really appreciate their support. Just to a reminder today’s session was recorded and we will be sending an email within a couple of days. To each one of who registered so if some of your colleagues were not able to make it, if they registered, they will be able to get some of this sort of wisdom and insight from our panel today. So thanks to everyone for joining us and for The Chronicle. I’m Karin Fischer. Have a good day.