All too often, I hear comments about how universities should be “doing more to prepare people for jobs” and how certain degrees are a “waste” because they don’t impart job-relevant skills. This is an old-fashioned perspective that deserves debunking.
Jobs? What jobs?
First of all, there would be almost no point in a university degree tailored to a particular job. Even an accounts receivables clerk – who has a fairly well-defined job – would find that the specifics of their work, the software used, the systems, and the technology would vary from company to company. The problem is far more significant once the job gets more complex or less well-defined.
Designing a university curriculum to fit a particular job would only make sense if:
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- There was some guarantee that a certain number of graduates would be employed in that particular job
- The job itself demanded unique or complex skills that were not easily transferable to another job
In other words, for the vast majority of jobs – specifically, the office-type jobs that require a university degree – it would make no sense to train a big batch of graduates every year for the specific role. What companies need is people with numeracy and literacy skills who are able to learn new things, understand processes, work well with others, and navigate complex environments. Most university curricula are, in fact, designed to produce graduates who can do these things.
Second, the very idea that it makes sense to spend three years training someone for a specific job assumes that the person will be spending their whole lives doing that job. This may be true for some people – teachers or doctors, say (who, not coincidentally, do get trained for particular jobs) – but most people’s careers will take them along many winding paths. Rather than the very specific skills they may need to be, say, an advisor at a bank, people need to learn how to learn, how to find the information they need and understand it, and how to manage themselves and their time. They must be ready to retrain and reskill many times in their lives, rather than needing to master a small subset of specific skills at age 18 that will last their whole careers.
Role-specific training is something that should be handled by the company, which is best-placed to identify what new hires need to know and instil that knowledge in them, usually with a few weeks’ onboarding. In contrast, universities can and should be equipping graduates with soft skills and lifelong learning tools, not details on how to file an expense claim at Company A.
Reality check
Often, when people say that universities should be preparing people for jobs, what they really mean is that fewer people should be going to university. A university is not an appropriate place to learn hard skills like plumbing or coding. Those types of things are best taught on the job or through a combination of intense training bursts and practical on-the-job experience. We should absolutely be doing a lot more of that.
I think teacher training colleges are a good model for this type of “job-ready” training. They train people in a well-defined set of skills and provide a mix of practical, on-the-job training and classroom learning. They also feed directly into a network of ready-made jobs. We can predict how many teachers we’ll need, so there can be a balance between students admitted to training colleges and the number of jobs available.
However, it’s entirely unreasonable to expect, say, Wits to do the same job as a teaching college (or department) when its BA grads will work at companies ranging from airlines to banks to mining companies to retail chains.
For many, many office jobs, what’s needed is a set of flexible skills and knowledge of the type that universities are well-placed to provide. The discipline of the university environment – including the preponderance of group projects – is excellent preparation for a career that will be spent negotiating with cross-functional teams and learning on your feet as your job changes.
Read also: WORLDVIEW: For most people, university is a waste of time
It’s fashionable to lambast universities for failing to provide job-ready graduates. But this was never what universities were supposed to do. They were supposed to prepare people for roles in leadership or complex hierarchies and to serve as a base for conducting research in basic science and related disciplines that would improve living standards.
If we want more training in hard skills for specific jobs, universities are not the way to do that – it would be unfeasibly expensive, for one thing. There’s also no need for three years of classroom lessons for most hard skills. Instead, we should be developing alternative training options. If manufacturers in SA find that people lack relevant skills, they should band together to open a training facility that gets people job-ready in six months. If we need more plumbers, we should expand apprenticeships.
Focusing on universities and expecting them to meet all our skills needs is silly. Universities produce one set of skills. Other institutions can produce others more quickly and cheaply.
