For many college students the prospect of finding a job after school seems like a far-off event that will take place once you get there. Freshman year the possibilities are endless and finding a job is an event for the far-off future.
Sophomore year finds students interested in thinking about the work they plan to encounter – with no thought as to the company to work for; that step comes later. Junior year brings a sense of “top dog” and knowing that school is going well and that someday you may work for a living. Senior year begins in the fall and students begin to realize that soon they will need to begin applying for jobs, but by the spring the realization comes home and finds the student furiously applying to jobs across the board in hopes of finding employment. But are these jobs that the student is applying for a good fit? Here we find that the question muddies the water with every effort to understand it.
An article in Fair Observer titled “Why Can’t College Graduates Find Jobs?” tackles the same concept. It has found that the answer is much more complex. There may be a discrepancy caused by the complexity of articulating the idea of what an employer is looking for in a prospective employee.
Many companies are asking for the same set of skills made up of cookie cutter items like critical thinking skills, problem solving skills, group abilities and good communication skills. This reads as a typical liberal arts style degree which focuses on general abilities like communication and interaction with others.
However, it has been found that in the last ten years that liberal arts as a degree title has taken a hit to its integrity. Robert Lytle is a managing director and co-head of education of Parthenon-EY, a global education consultancy. He was interviewed as a part of the Fair Observer article where he was quoted as saying, “There’s a lot of empirical evidence that suggests students who go into a liberal arts program actually do not advance in their critical thinking skills over time. [Combine that] with the fact that they don’t get a lot of what [employers] are pointing at, which is real-world experience, soft skills and the ability to work in a group.” He then goes on to make the point that many degree programs do not help with obtaining job specific skills which many employers are looking for.
Now I believe that this is not a problem for many future engineers here at Michigan Tech. The school offers coursework that also integrates many opportunities for performing and encouraging the evolution of at least a modicum of experience in their field before they step out of the door into the labor force. They are given an edge on their resumes by being able to list projects and other opportunities as experience – which is the bottom line for many employers. In other places outside of technical colleges and universities this may not be the case. For some liberal arts degrees there is a lack of capstone projects to showcase a senior’s accrued growth over their years of learning. The bottom line: you have to do your research on the prospective degree program at any university to find what works for who is hiring to work the job that you want to do.
