4 years of lectures, students working part-time to pay for books, room & board, all nighter study sessions, these are a few of the hard earned things that goes into a degree. However a degree today no longer guarantees a career in your field of study.
Employability crisis: The gap between classroom and career.
52% of U.S. grads do not get work in the their field of study, and 5.6% of grads are unemployed (higher than the adult average). When a coin toss has better odds than employability, it’s hard out there for grads.
It’s also hard for schools still reeling from federal legislation that reduced student visas (in Canada, US, Australia), or desperately adjusting curriculum to match AI’s rapid disruption, but schools are also struggling to answer parents who ask a very valid question: “What are the chances my kid is employable after I invest $30K in a degree”.
Annual tuition fees average $7,734 CAD (in Canada) and between $11k and 45k in the US.
Given international admissions have dropped 66% in BC alone, and schools like North Island College face an $8.4M decline in revenue resulting in layoffs and program cuts – schools just can no longer afford to be elusive about employability.
Why Post Secondary Career Services are bleeding engagement.
Unfortunately, even if schools wanted to track and share employability metrics, they can’t, not with the current career service tools out here. That’s biggest the biggest career-service Tech Stacks cannot keep hiring pipelines within their ecosystem. What’s more frustrating is that they weren’t even designed to help students build resumes, or help partners actively connect with grads, or empower schools to coach students, or build out hiring campaigns for hiring partners.
Besides a job board (which hosts jobs originally posted elsewhere like indeed and linkedin) and a resume repository (which is not even searchable for schools nor accessible to partners) – what can they do? Are they facilitating career services at all or adding barriers to student/employer connectivity?
As a result – student engagement is bleeding out to LinkedIn, employers are investing less in career fairs, and career services can’t measure employability.
The PDF resume is holding back grads everyone.
Did you know that the first resume ever recorded was a list of experiences written by a fellah named Leonardo Da Vinci? He used his resume to pitch to new patrons. That was way back in the 1400s and from then to today, the resume format has remained pretty much the same. Sure, how its printed has evolved, from ink on parchment, to the ribbon typewriter, to the dot matrix printer, to Adobe’s Portable document File (PDF). But it’s still just a list of experiences and skills.
Hiring is not a level playing field
We squeeze a 4 year degree into a 7 second resume.
Technology isn’t distributed fairly
While grads are applying to jobs with a resume that is stuck in the 15th century, hiring tech has rocketed into the modern era in a $244B industry with ai tracking tools, advanced algorithmic screening, and automated sms bots that text candidates canned rejection emails: “after careful consideration” seconds after applying.
Workload expectations aren’t fairly shared.
Not only do we ask grads to research, write, re-write a static resume to then slide it into a highly digitized and dynamic arena where the odds are stacked against them. But this arena has allowed bad players to introduce scam jobs, recruiter spam, ATS bias . In an attempt to keep up, the grads are leaning on ai resume builders. It’s a technology arms race which has eroded away trust, increased risk, and widened the divide between employers and job hunters even more.
An example of
Career services guide grads to carefully match keywords between their resumes and the job posting because of algorithmic screening by the ATS. Whether that’s a thing or not can be argued till we are blue in the face, but More work, and SEO. We’ve also been told that hiring managers spend an average of 7 seconds on a resume before deciding fit or not fit for the job. That’s kind of unfair given we just crafted each resume for each job to efficiently align with algorithmic screening.
In the gap algorithmic screening assesses PDF resumes like a basic keyword match failing to capture modern educational nuances. In human cases, hiring managers cite the lack of context making it difficult for hiring managers to relate classroom skills to real world potential, and unverified skill declarations which increase the hiring risk.
We all can agree, bad hires suck, but when those bad hires are grads – it reflects on the school, damaging the brand, reputation, and future partnership opportunities with the same hiring partners.
A Career services pivot
Establish a recruiting foundation.
As parents ask career services the hard question about employability numbers, career services are going to have to evolve there gameplan to include a recruiting foundation with results. In fact they’ll probably have to shift their mindset from a passive type of marketplace like a job board and career fairs to a more aggressive/active marketplace like a virtual talent showcase or an in person capstone showcase.
Partner engagement.
Partner engagement is key for job placement as you lubricate hiring funnels with recommend talent. Recommended talent reduces hiring risk and improves chances of a hire. At the same time, partner engagement maintains a dialogue with the industry about the gap between classroom skills and industry needs. Being able to adjust curriculum based on partner feedback is a huge selling point to the school… you aren’t teaching your students in a vacuum, instead you are agile and pro active.
Alumni Donor Pipeline
Finally including alumni in your long term road map to grow career services into a value add is key. Alumni are a valuable resource to the school, as they validate hiring case studies, build partner networks, act as mentors and inspire grads, and contribute to donations to the school. Maintaining engagement with alumni can and should be exercised with career services.
A more dynamic grad profile: Resume 2.0
It’s time to transition from a static document, a PDF listing skills and experiences to a digital profile that’s data driven, more accessible to partners, verified, validated, endorsement rich, digital profile.
- Showcase Verified artifacts:
One simple way of de-risking a hire is by showing context in the resume. Not just a list of things you did, but how, why, stories and metrics of successes and fails. You can show context in your skills by providing proof of work, proof of certification, endorsements to projects from faculty and workshop managers. Also coaching by faculty not only helps track Leadership, but integrates community management, and problem solving outside of formal letter grades – providing more dimension to student capabilities.
2. Skill context mapping (align curriculum with industry competency frameworks, show examples of skills in practice, projects)
Creating a common baseline in skills / competencies helps standardize how we align classroom output with office potential. Aligning the language, the naming conventions, the expectations help hiring managers trust that a skill is exactly what it means. And then taking it a step further by applying context, like how that competency was used in practice, even in a project, helps to visualize capabilities. Skills based on NACE 8 core competencies: career & self development, communication, critical thinking, equity and inclusion, leadership, professionalism, teamwork and technology
Career Services is a team sport.
Everyone needs to pitch in to raise student employability.
How Faculty can help
Faculty can align curriculum with industry feedback. Data and insights could be typically uncovered in a regular questionaire, or the ability to track search criteria in your career services portal and relayed back to faculty.
Faculty can also include a component of career profile prep in their course. Or a 100 level class can be dedicated to professional career services that teaches profile developement, employment strategy, and can have the ears of industry leaders who can contribute insights.
Faculty can endorse, provide feedback and coach students individually. This type of support can be super informal, but encouraged and build traction with the career services engagement
How to Engage Employers:
Build an Industry partners pipeline with talent showcases featuring verified grad profiles. Invite parters to access that pipeline without having to invest time, or energy. Draw partners in with showcases of hand picked grads that suit the type of skills that partners requires. Than invite them to dip into the talent pool of grad profiles. These profiles will need to be digital, dynamic and searchable.
Replace the analog hiring workflow with an asynchronous, multi directional relationship builder. Accelerate time-to-hire with dynamic, de-risked profiles with verification and endorsements and context.
Tech Stack Transformation- end the glorified passive job board and adopt an active pipeline of candidates present in polished, searchable showcases.
Analytics Layer: Real time dashboard so DEAN gets real time insights: where the gaps are, the rate of employability, the most active partners
Bottom Line:
Tie employability to metrics. Feed employability numbers to Admissions. Boost employability rankings and encourage alumni donations because of the launching pad your school gave them. And to start? Prompt leadership at your schools to audit existing career ecosystems and research new methodologies presented by companies (like Pounse).
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