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Tuesday, January 24, 2017

On Elephants

Elephants figure large (ba dum boom, ching!) in English idiom.
  • The elephant in the room.
  • Seeing the elephant.
  • Blind men and an elephant.
  • White elephants.
  • Pink elephants.
  • When the elephant dances.
  • Elephants never forget.
Elephants are large, expensive, complicated, dangerous, gentle, magnificent, social, intelligent, and most assuredly non-ignorable. Sometimes other colleges at the U think of CLA as an elephant, some days beating out a trail for others to follow, and other days blundering around (see dancing elephants and mice).

Here in UGE we have a baby elephant of our own: the Career Readiness Initiative. It’s new. It’s complex. It’s going to grow into something huge and be pretty expensive. You can no longer ignore it. It’s going to establish or widen some paths in CLA, and we think it’s going to be a wonder and magnificent when it is fully grown.

I got started on this extended metaphor when thinking about all the various pieces that go into the Career Readiness Initiative, and how it is difficult to see the whole initiative when you are involved in only one or two particular pieces (i.e., blind men and the elephant). In this blog post I want to talk about the initiative overall, so that we can all see how our particular parts fit into the whole.

This is a long post, so grab some coffee and settle in.

History

Dean John Coleman’s first roadmap goal is “CLA alumni will be the most desirable graduates available.” That is, the students that we produce will be the graduates that employers want to hire or that graduate/professional schools want to admit. We summarize this first goal as “Readiness,” and the accelerating growth of the Career Readiness Initiative is UGE’s response to the challenge of meeting the Readiness goal. Note that “career” is interpreted very broadly to include traditional employment but also to include further education, entrepreneurship, artistic practice, government/military service, and other post-graduation courses.

You might ask why career readiness is such an important goal in a college with programs that tend to be contemplative and can appear to be ungrounded in “reality.” That question answers itself. We are 100% convinced that liberal arts degrees prepare our students for their post-graduation life. We inculcate habits of mind, methods of argumentation and observation, multiple worldviews, areas of knowledge, and other characteristics that are the foundation for a successful career in addition to successful citizenship and full life.

The problem is that others outside of, or not exposed to, liberal arts do not always see these more ethereal and internal qualities. Sometimes others see these liberal arts qualities but don’t appreciate them, because one of our qualities is a tendency to question everything, even basic beliefs, and that can be uncomfortable and upset apple carts. Sometimes others step away from the liberal arts in response to deafening media and political rhetoric in support of science, technology, engineering, and math. Fundamentally, though, the problem is a basic lack of understanding about how liberal arts and our ways of thinking promote lifetime success.

That lack of understanding is ours to correct, and it is vital that we correct it, because the “others” mentioned above can include legislators, administrators, parents of our students, and sometimes even our own students themselves. These are key constituencies for us. One educational aspect of the Career Readiness Initiative is to build the understanding of the liberal arts’ role in career success, and thus mitigate the fear that some have about the wisdom of a liberal arts education. I have said it before, and I will say it again; we will know that the Career Readiness Initiative is working when we see enrollment in the humanities go up.

The Readiness goal has hit a vein of strong support. Our students are enthusiastic about it. Their parents are reassured by it. Employers are eager to get CLA students. And the provost has supported Readiness with recurring funding to double the number of career counselors beginning in FY 2014-2015, recurring funding to support Readiness beginning in FY 2015–2016, and recurring student fees funding to increase the number of academic advisors beginning in FY 2016–2017.

Given this surfeit of good will and support, you have to ask what the problem is or has been. We might break that down into several parts:
  1. Students sometimes concentrate on their most favorite aspects and approaches in the liberal arts, thereby missing out on some other things that liberal arts can offer.
  2. Students do not always see how their liberal arts education prepares them for careers.
  3. Even if they see that, students cannot always articulate that preparation.
  4. Even if they can articulate it, students cannot always translate that preparation into an employer’s context.
That’s written as if students lack this and students can’t do that, but the fact is that this is not a shortcoming of the students, it is a shortcoming of the mindset and programming of the college.

The mindset among some faculty has been that these four points really aren’t the job of the college (academic advisors and career counselors would disagree). Dean Coleman’s Readiness goal is a clear repudiation of that point of view. Readiness is the job of the college, and all of us, including faculty, have a role to play. The historical lack of programming has been pragmatic: we were understaffed in student services. While we could always find ways to spend more money :-) the support described above puts us in a place where UGE and the rest of the college can promote career readiness in a new and very substantial way.

Framing

We (that is to say, I) originally framed our approach to readiness as “course bundles,” clusters of courses that, taken together, would ensure that a student had seen and studied a sufficient variety of topics and approaches to acquire a broad range of skills that would make them attractive to employers. I thought it was a good idea, but it was ultimately flawed, because it only addressed the first of the four issues mentioned above. Fortunately, we hired Ascan Koerner to be the faculty director of our readiness initiative. Ascan and the team that he assembled reframed readiness in CLA around ten “Core Career Competencies.”


In the competencies framing, a student is career ready when she has acquired the competencies, can articulate their value to an employer, and can translate them into the employer’s context. A full listing of the Core Career Competencies and their definitions can be found on the CLA website, but the following graphic summarizes them in pleasing form:

CoreCareerCompetencies-Rotation2-cap3 copy.jpgWe didn’t just make up these competencies. Instead, they were formalized after significant research and extensive discussions with local employers. 
These competencies should look very familiar. Students, advisors, and faculty deal with multiple lists of requirements and outcomes, include liberal education requirements, writing requirements, student learning outcomes, and student development outcomes. How do these all fit together? As shown in the table below, these different lists of desiderata have substantial overlap and redundancy. Some might find that annoying: yet another list of things for students to think about. I find it encouraging: even when viewed through various lenses, the same kinds of qualities keep rising to the top as most needed, and the liberal arts is woven through them.

 
One thing that is apparent is that the first nine Core Career Competencies are effectively covered by the goals of academic requirements, Student Learning Outcomes, and Student Development Outcomes. Our existing curriculum and programming is, in principle, supposed to be in place to bring students up to speed in these areas. In fact, that is one of the main points: liberal arts education already provides the competencies students need for career success.

Noticeably missing any parallels in the other lists is Career Management. Thus we might not expect all students to receive as much education in this area as would be desirable, and our programming in UGE will need to address this gap.

The Core Career Competencies address the “what” (issue 1 raised above), but they do not address the “how” (issues 2, 3, and 4 above). The Career Readiness Initiative is introducing the RATE process to deal with the how. RATE stands for Reflect, Articulate, Translate, Evaluate (it also works with gerunds Reflecting, Articulating, … or with nouns Reflection, Articulation, ...; it’s all good). RATE ties these generic ideas, ideas common to academics and development, to the career context.

Students have lots of experiences. These experiences include courses, internships, research opportunities, study abroad, mentoring interactions, leadership roles, and so on. We want students to Reflect on their experiences and how these experiences support the student’s development of a competency. We want students to be able to Articulate their skills and competencies. That involves taking those reflections and putting them into words (or portfolios, etc.). We want students to be able to Translate their competencies into career contexts. How does what you learn in an ethics course or an internship at an NGO translate into being a better employee for this employer? These all involve thinking about the connections between what a student has done while in CLA and what the employer is ultimately looking for. Reflect now and deeply, before the student is in an interview; practice the explanations; look at things from what an employer wants. This is the essence of the RATE process.

OK, OK, so far we have a rodent process; what is the E? The final step is for each student to Evaluate her/his level of competence. This will help each student determine where she is strong, or where he is weak and needs more work. This can help the student choose courses or co-curricular activities, and it can also be useful in matching a student’s competencies to the needs of a job.

To recap, the Career Readiness Initiative is about helping students acquire the Core Career Competencies and helping students make themselves desirable to employers by making clear their competencies in ways that the employer can use. Nine of the ten competencies are covered by academic curriculum; the Career Management competency will need to be covered by UGE. We will develop and use the RATE process to help students assess, build, and express their competencies to employers.

Components of the Career Readiness Initiative 
We have deep expertise in our Career Services office that our students tap daily and that we have exploited to create our Readiness framework, but all of UGE, not just Career Services, will need to be involved to achieve the Readiness goal. This section describes the many components of the Career Readiness Initiative currently active or under development; association of these components with elephantine anatomy is left as an exercise for the reader.
  • Leadership. The overall Career Readiness Initiative is led by Ascan Koerner, faculty director, and Judy Anderson, coordinator. They are housed in 106 Johnston.
  • Compass Team. This team does have joint projects, but it also consists of leaders of, and people involved in, various subprojects. The Compass Team has representatives from curriculum; communications; advising/MLK/PES; FYE; career services; employer relations; office of application development; alumni relations; recruiting; learning abroad; LATIS; and the language center. It’s a big team, and I hope I haven’t missed anyone.
  • Tag line. Career Readiness – the Liberal Arts Advantage
  • Career Guidebook. We have written an approximately 100 page career guidebook for CLA students. It will be available in about two weeks, and we will have enough copies to give them out free of charge to all interested CLA students. This guidebook is, for all intents and purposes, the textbook for the Career Management competency. It was based on input from a lot of people and includes many of the materials available from Career Services.
  • SuperStrong. The Career Readiness Initiative is paying for all CLA students to have access to the SuperStrong Interest Inventory, and paying for certification in the Strong Interest Inventory for approximately 30 career counselors and academic advisors. All students in CLA 1002 (the FYE second semester course) will take the SuperStrong as part of the course. Advisors and career counselors will have access to the results to assist in their interactions with students.
  • RATE tool. We have constructed an online tool that will allow students to self-assess on each of the ten core career competencies as well as reflect/articulate/translate on experiences (courses, internships, etc.) that lead to the development of competencies. This tool was developed by staff from LATIS and the Language Center and will be piloted in spring 2017.
  • Administrative system. We have constructed an online system that will provide access to the RATE tool and help students explore experiences that would be most useful in developing their competencies. The students can enter their career field goal and their major. The system takes those bits of information and the results of the rate tool to construct recommendations for experiences to build certain competencies. The tool uses linkages between majors, careers, and experiences as revealed through competencies. This system is under active development by our Office of Application Development, and it will provide better and better recommendations as it gathers data (for example, if several students indicate that experience X helped them develop competency Y, then X will become a more frequent suggestion for other students who need to develop Y).
  • Courses. FYE courses CLA 1001 (somewhat) and 1002 (especially) will include Readiness curriculum. ID courses offered by Career Services have also been redesigned for our readiness framework. ID 2201 has been approved as a new sophomore career course that will follow on the material in CLA 1002. The existing ID 1201 will be refocused toward transfer students and be roughly comparable to the Readiness material in CLA 1002 and ID 2201. ID 3201 is being reformulated as a Readiness capstone course, making full use of the RATE tool. ID 2201 will debut in fall 2017, and the modified ID 3201 is being piloted in spring 2017.
  • Faculty/departmental involvement. We will work with departments on a few fronts. First, we will provide modest financial support to departments that include Core Career Competencies in their career programming. Second, we will work with departments to include Core Career Competencies in their own internship and career courses. Third, we will work with faculty not to change their courses, but rather to reference Core Career Competencies where appropriate. Ascan has already begun the outreach to departments.
  • Faculty Fellows. We will establish a modest fellowship for faculty who wish to learn more about how to include Core Career Competencies in their courses. This will be joint with the Center for Teaching and Learning and will be modeled on other teaching improvement fellowships.
  • Advising and career counseling. Career Readiness will become a common framing and a common language for many of our interactions with students. We expect students’ self evaluations via the RATE tool and SuperStrong results to become two more tools in the advisor’s/counselor’s toolkit.
  • Communications. The language and visuals of Readiness and the Core Career Competencies will become more and more widespread in our communications with students, parents, and applicants.
  • Certificate. We are discussing a possible undergraduate certificate in Career Readiness. This would be a transcriptable credential that indicates that the student has worked through the many facets of Readiness. More information will follow if the certificate ever comes to fruition.
  • Employer engagement. The competencies were constructed from employer needs, and the Readiness initiative should provide excellent framing for working with employers. This goes beyond getting them to post jobs and internships for our students (which we do want them to do) to include their participation in programming (resume reviews, mock interviews, information sessions, etc.) that can build on the competencies.
  • Internships. Employers tell us that internships are key experiences in making student career ready. As the Readiness initiative builds momentum, the demand for internships and internship scholarships, already high, is expected to grow substantially. We will need to put additional effort and resources into sourcing internships and connecting students with them.
  • Alumni mentoring. Dean Coleman is extremely interested in engaging our alumni in mentoring relationships with our students. Such a link with “the real world” helps students visualize how readiness works, and the relationships strengthen engagement of both students and alumni. One to one mentoring relationships might be ideal but would be a major challenge at scale. However, other mentoring structures may reap many of the same benefits.
The last three of these components are more outward facing than the preceding components and have, as yet, received less focus in the initiative; that will change. I apologize for giving some of these components short shrift in the descriptions, but I’m already on page 8 (and the playoff game has already started).

Where to from here? 
If you’re still with me, you can see that we have a lot of balls in the air right now in the Career Readiness Initiative. It’s exciting, but it’s also a little bit scary to be attaching the wings as we’re rolling down the runway (you do know that elephants can run surprisingly fast, right?). Just bear this in mind: if we can implement our initiative, we will be so far ahead of other institutions that we will be a model that others imitate. In fact, that has already begun. Aspects of the Career Readiness Initiative have been described at national and international meetings, and the response was people lining up to learn more (and when they imply that they will foot the bill to fly some of us to New Zealand for a week to talk Readiness, you know that they were seriously impressed).

So chin up and take a deep breath; we’re making history here.