The Trap

Once students have jumped over the hurdles that University or College throws at them, a different set of pressures kicks in.

When are you going to find a job?

Does your University experience actually prepare you for a job?

In addition to my teaching and research roles at University, I have worked as an academic career counsellor for thousands of students over a 10 year period. Most students are already working part-time jobs in areas that don’t require formal qualifications, and the realities of the gig economy may seem at odds with the typical routine of lectures, assignments, and exams... If you’re working in jobs that are casual, independently contracted, or offered through online businesses, it can be hard to connect the dots between the formal qualifications you’re working so hard to pursue and what pays your bills week to week. Many people (and governments) view Universities as service providers to not only students, but also employers. Unless our degrees are training you for specific jobs currently in demand with employers, everything’s off the table.

Sadly this is the trap we can all too easily fall into - letting short-term goals obfuscate our long-term potential.

What if the economy changes?

What if the market becomes saturated and the demand for these roles dwindles?

What if employers’ needs change overnight, say in response to a “hypothetical” global catastrophe?

All of this rhetoric can feel quite alienating to the individual student, who has no control over any of these regulations or market forces. How should students navigate this rapidly shifting employability landscape?

Shifting the Goalposts

It may be tempting to think about studying and degrees as a transaction for employment, but that is selling the whole process short. Yes there are placements, internships, and opportunities for work-integrated learning, but which job should your studies be preparing you for exactly? Every profession evolves over time, and odds are you may end up working in an area that you didn’t originally train in anyway.

Depending on which statistics you read, we will work in 13-17 jobs that span across 5 different careers throughout our lifetimes. Can a single 3-year degree prepare you for all of these jobs and careers? Or do you need to complete a different qualification every time you switch jobs? While I am firmly in the camp of life-long learners, that sounds awfully exhausting.

My focus as a teacher is to facilitate the development of transferrable skills - hands-on competencies, absorbing large volumes of information, or online communication - foundational skills that you can apply in a range of different professional contexts. If you’re setting yourself up to have as versatile a skillset as possible when you graduate, you may have more value to a broader range of different employers.

The Softer Side

Universities have been thinking about the problems surrounding employability and curriculum design for a very long time, and this contemplation (for the most part) has made its way into Graduate Attributes. Every University will have their own flavour of graduate attributes, but it is essentially a mission statement for what students should be able to do after graduating from that institution. This in some way is a tacit acknowledgement that we should be training students for more than one specific job - ideally many different types of jobs that utilise a variety of skillsets.

I think it is interesting that the commonality underlying many of these sets of graduate attributes is not all about technical knowledge based within the discipline. Many of these attributes revolve around “soft skills” - time management, team work, ability to acquire and process new information…

In my experience the “one to rule them all” is communication. If you are an above average communicator, you have an extraordinary advantage in life, let alone in the workplace.

Can you put people at ease?

Can you communicate with clarity and efficiency?

Can you adapt what you’re saying to different target audiences?

This is particularly valuable in a job interview setting, when the pressure is on for you to outline your value to potential employers. If your experiences are different to the other potential candidates, can you make the case that this is a strength rather than a weakness? Can you articulate what it is that has made you productive in previous jobs, and how this can translate into a new working environment?

Reps, reps, reps

Interviewing and writing selection criteria to pitch yourself to employers is a real skillset that takes time to develop, but it may not be explicitly embedded into your studies. If you graduate with an amazing GPA but do so at the cost of isolation and social experiences, how can you learn to relate to your co-workers, empathise with clients, and manage the expectations of your supervisors? You may have technical mastery and deep knowledge of the area, but poor communication skills (for better or worse) is often what employers notice first.

The responsibility largely falls on the shoulders of teachers and educators, to design our classes with explicit opportunities for students to “get the reps” in good communication practices.

Is there anything you can do as a student to further develop these skills?

One of the best ways is to find a (very non-glamorous) part-time job or volunteering opportunities that requires you to talk to different people all day long. Our natural inclination may be to stay within our social circles, but working in retail and hospitality really forces you out of your social comfort zone. Relating to people from all walks of life requires you to have interacted with people from all walks of life, and you can be more strategic in independently setting up these opportunities for your professional development even while you’re studying.

When I was a university student, I started an after-hours high-school tutoring business - I would drive to students’ houses, talk to them and their parents, and try to teach anything and everything - Science, Maths, English… Every high school has a slightly different take on the standardised curriculum, and each student had different familial expectations and pressures to manage. Talking to different families about the transformative potential of studying and education for 20 hours a week was my way of racking up 10,000 hours of practice. It allowed me to hone and refine my communication skills over time, and hit the ground running when I first started as a University Lecturer.

Making the Connections

Despite an ongoing shift towards flexibility in the workplace, formal qualifications from long-standing institutions are still a pre-requisite for employment in most professional contexts. The “piece of paper” that is your diploma is not enough though, and students and teachers need to think strategically about how to develop these ancillary supporting skills along the way. These are big problems with no obvious answers, but we need to lean on our professional and social networks to figure it out.

Jack.