For graduates, each passing day is a harbinger of new challenges – that make the world more competitive and demanding.
On one hand, educators strive to prepare their students for this relentless reality with the best of everything: the best of education, experiences, and skills, to help them establish a bright future (of which workplace is a major component). However, when students step into the real world in search of employment, they often face the hurdles of being “unprepared”.This sense of ‘unpreparedness’ hampers their advent of kick-starting their career and also negatively impacts their morale and self-worth, leaving students with a dire sense of doubt about the fate of their future.
On the other hand, if you step into the shoes of an employer, you will see a want for better employees – who can handle the chain of command, communicate well, handle customers-clients, manage meetings, reports, teams, and what not. This want for better employees is not because of the lack of education, but for the lack of employability skills that are often ignored in majority of the institutions. This gap between what is taught to our students in educational institutions and what is asked of them in the industry are far ends of the spectrum.
Our relentless academic focus and slow to adapt curriculum mean that students are not taught important workplace enabling skills in educational institutions. Spoken English, basic writing, critical thinking, and problem-solving are some of the most basic skills that most entry level jobs require and yet, we see our graduates struggling to achieve these simple benchmarks. Colleges and universities need to have a certain scalability as part of their curriculum to produce graduates who are ready for any workplace. Graduates, who aren’t limited by their academics and collegiate degrees, but rather are enabled by them to choose from a variety of career options. We believe every institution is aware of these facts, but only a few have invested in solving the same.
Every institution’s reputation and pride comes from the success of their students. Equip the students with the tools and skills to enable them to be “employment ready”; and the institute is at the pinnacle of its glory. However, to get there, it’s extremely critical to identify what the students lack.
Skill Measurement is imperative in determining your students’ weaknesses and strengths to determine the training they ought to receive; provide them with what they lack and reinforce the qualities they possess.
The other important aspect of your focus should be on improvement – a phase that includes a detailed analysis of the areas that are critically require improvement, the path the candidate should take towards such improvements and interventions to facilitate and measure such targeted improvement areas for students.
This should enable your students for the Employment Readiness phase – a continuous process, vital to the professional development of your students. It is imperative to equip our students with all the specific employability skills that they need to score an opportunity
This flowing three-step process of Skill Measurement, Improvement, and Employment Readiness lays crucial emphasis on identifying student skilllevels. As soon as students enter your college, you need to identify their skill levels to implement appropriate training, pedagogy, and curriculum forteaching and reinforcing these necessary skills in students. Finally, a yearly assessment of this process will ensure that your efforts as an institution and that of your student are being put in the right direction, and proper development is followed in case of loose ends.
This three-tier process ensures development and regular yardsticks of skillset that are imbibed in lines with the dynamic industry needs. With proper identification of skills and interests, your efforts are rightly channelized to achieve the end goal of employment ready students. This not only enhances the overall quality of education but also contributes exponentially to the reputation of your institution.
For those of you who can relate to the aforementioned issues, I introduce you to an employability enhancement program – “AceTrac”.
To bridge the gap between education and employment readiness, MeritTrac has launched “Acetrac- The Employability Enhancement Program”- A one stop solution to assess students, identify and enhance their skills, and offer recruiters access to an employable talent pool.
AceTrac helps you break the vicious cycle of the blame game and actually get into the action to make the required changes to prepare students for a better tomorrow.
Education is a tough job. It always helps to talk about the problems and solutions you come across. Find out more about AceTrac and share your experiences. Or drop a comment in the section below.
