As an employer and a business that works with young entrepreneurs I’ve had the pleasure (and pain!) of working with graduates, super-graduates and all kinds of people who have come through the Higher Education experience.
I’m also involved in talking to successful alumni from Business School programmes and also pleased to be a mentor as part of the very well structured ‘New Entrepreneur Foundation’. http://newentrepreneursfoundation.com/
I was therefore very interested to read an academic article on the difference between ‘Employment’ and ‘Employability’. Higher Education in the UK is heavily judged on whether students ‘get a job’ (it feeds into the league tables of course) but not so much about how well prepared the students are for the outside world and how good they are going to be in that job. The risk is that graduates see a degree as a passport to a career.
There was a time that we regarded the difference between a graduate and a ‘great graduate’ to be down to ‘Emotional Intelligence’ – how they interacted with the world and people around them. Now the expression seems to be about ‘Social Capital’ – how people work in networks and build relationships.
Critical is how Universities help students understand:
- Self-awareness about their job prospects – what is going to make them a good employer
- Developing what have to now be looked upon as ‘life skills’ – such as ability to analyse data, prepare quality presentations, media training etc.
- The real potential to run their own business – rather than preparing them for a prescribed job. Even if they choose not to take that route it would certainly make them better employees.
- What careers are actually out there – sometimes a career path is simplified by those giving careers advice because they have not got the experience themselves of the outside world
- How having access to a mentor or coach, and how to get the best out of the relationship, can make a major difference
Examples of how this can happen are increasingly seen in the press, with initiatives such as ‘CEO for a day’ http://www.odgersberndtson.com/en-be/about-us/ceo-for-a-day
For sustainability however, and real impact, there has to be more basic initiatives embedded into University curriculums which focus on ‘employability’. This requires engagement with the outside world, and particularly major employers and the increasing community of smaller businesses, many of whom might avoid looking at graduates.
A great trigger for this should be the move to provide degree level apprenticeships as part of the Government’s Apprenticeship Levy initiative. Many Universities are rushing to offer such qualifications and this is an opportunity to build something practical and with real impact.