Article 2: Does university prepare students for employment? Alignment between graduate attributes, accreditation requirements and industry employability criteria
With much to be admired, graduates usually experience misalignments between their aspirations and the real world. The college environment shapes students to resemble its standards and those whom these naive lives trust for advice. With less knowledge of what the world looks like, their dreams and aspirations after graduation are shifted and changed by existing problems that need unique solutions.
College students are raised in an environment that demands one set of navigational skills, and they are then cast out into a different setting requiring a different set of skills, which they have to figure out on their own
Academic grades are more confounded with socioeconomic status and demographic variables.
a. Social background plays a significant role in determining employability and the life of a graduate.
b. Universities rarely teach attributes that are in line with emotional intelligence like resilience and integrity. The academic grade received thereof rarely reflects their real intellectual competence. Graduates are humans, and like any other person, they meet challenges that require do not need any education to solve.
c. Graduates are equipped with skills that are less important in a society where they need to adapt to a new world that is unfamiliar to them.
A college degree indicates what an individual has studied, but performance in the real-world depends on their ability to think, reason, and learn.
a. When hiring, most companies focus less on academic achievements. Graduates who possess additional skills like learnability are more likely to get and retain the same role for a long time.
b. As exemplified by many commencement speeches, most graduates yearn for their fulfillment. However, society makes them change their mindset to accommodate the new diverse world they are into after school.
c. When recruits and graduates are required to fill a positional gap in an organization, an academic grade does not entirely translate to an excellent performance. They need additional soft-skills to become valuable assets to any organization.
Few colleges focus on skills necessary for graduates to thrive outside the school setting, compromising the very reason most of them joined higher education – to get employed.
a. Graduates live with people – close-relatives, and friends, in an increasingly dynamic environment. Other than employability, soft-skills learned in college can offer great insight into providing solutions to common problems.
b. Few universities have contact with employers. It limits the extent to which the curriculum offers valuable insight into what they ought to do as far as employability is concerned.
c. Graduates are shaped by problems that require a solution but not entirely by their aspirations and dreams they generate while in the higher learning institutions.
Out of college, world problems shape graduates’ life, constructing their soon-to-be life, from their calling. The independence and fulfillment desires preached in most commencement speeches may not be helpful anymore to such graduates. Perhaps, there is more to life outside the school beyond an academic degree that may not reflect an individual’s emotional intelligence and intellectual competence.
List 1 outside source that you have used
What do employers want from Canadian higher education? (2015, October 15). Universities Canada. https://www.univcan.ca/media-room/media-releases/what-do-employers-want-from-canadian-higher-education/
