Closing the Skills Gap and Enhancing Employability Through Industry-Academia Collaboration

Introduction

College graduates are entering a tumultuous and rapidly evolving workplace. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report (2023) shows that the majority of organizations predict their job functions will transform dramatically in the coming years, driven by macro trends, the largest of which is technology adoption. Although technical literacy is among the top ten employability skills, the highest rated are actually soft skills, otherwise known as power or durable skills: analytical thinking, creative thinking, resilience, flexibility, and agility. Employers are seeking contributors who can help solve their increasingly complex problems and have the ability to adapt and learn quickly (World Economic Forum, 2023).

Similarly, McKinsey and Company conducted surveys of 18,000 people in 15 countries, focused on defining the skills needed in the future world of work (Dondi et al., 2021). A key finding was that to be successful across all sectors, particularly where automation is increasingly employed, workers must be able to adapt to changing ways of working in order to contribute value, predicting an increase in demand for technological, social and emotional, and higher cognitive skills. Further, according to a survey of employers conducted by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), the most important skills employers are seeking are problem-solving, teamwork, work ethic, analytical thinking, and communication (2023).

Although the McKinsey study found that those with university degrees are more likely to possess many of the necessary skills, the report concludes with a call for educational reforms to increase skills competency (Dondi et al., 2021). In particular, the report suggests that colleges and universities increase their emphasis on self-leadership skills like self-confidence, risk-taking, and grit and interpersonal skills like negotiation, empathy, and collaboration. Yet, NACE (2022) reports that students rate themselves higher on their career-readiness competencies than employers do, indicating both skill and awareness gaps.

Higher education has a unique opportunity to strategically partner with industry in the classroom to better prepare students for their careers and to meet the ever-changing global challenges they will face in their workplaces. Experiential learning, “the study of learning through action” (Payne et al., 2011, p. 206), has been shown to offer significant benefits as compared to the traditional “banking” methods of education such as lecturing. However, experiential learning broadly includes case studies, simulations, and service learning (Kolb & Kolb, 2017). Internships and extracurricular activities have historically provided industry experience opportunities for students, but they are not available to all and can be inconsistent. Thus, many students miss out on beneficial professional developmental experiences.

A subset of experiential learning, course-embedded client-based projects (CBPs), can result in increased career readiness and student engagement, and importantly, be available to all students in the class. In CBPs, students apply concepts, theories, and models they are learning to develop real-time solutions for a current industry problem an organization is facing, improving their critical thinking and problem-solving skills (Shanahan et al., 2021). To be most effective and enable student autonomy and professional development, faculty must adopt an andragogical approach, shifting their role from that of “lecturer” to “facilitator” as they coach students in both skill development and content application.

Andragogy is the theory of adult learning wherein students are assumed to be more self-motivated and independent, and the instructor is seen more as a facilitator than as the primary source of knowledge (Knowles, 1970; Taylor & Kroth, 2009). CBPs allow students to transform into career-ready young professionals, achieved by promoting learner autonomy and self-directed learning. As such, an andragogical approach is ideal for CBPs and can be more appropriate and effective for college students, encouraging personal responsibility both for their actions and their careers.