Higher Education and Employability

 By Dr Hazman Shah Abdullah*

Employability is the primary mantra of today’s higher education institutions. For some, it is the raison d’etre, especially those who depend solely on students for their income and the primary attraction of their offerings is jobs, good jobs, and high-income jobs. The written purpose, philosophy, credos, principles, and values which adorn the halls of the institution and in their strategic documents fade when you really listen to the voices on the campus. It will be loud, pervasive, repeated, systematic, blunt, and blithe.

The primacy of employability of course places the needs of employers at the centre of the orbit of curriculum, teaching, learning, assessment, services etc. Regulators, quality assurance bodies, university management, ranking bodies etc. make this point palatably stakeholder engagement. Many faculties are still refusing to admit to this and fighting it in whichever way they can. I have urged them to be open but not reverential to the employers and the haloed practitioners. Challenge their orthodoxies for proof of relevance and scale of need. What do employers want and care about? Do they want more of the same? More than a decade ago, there was a European study which asked students, faculty and employers, to rank the different generic aspects of a bachelor's or cycle 1 programme as they call it under the Bologna Convention. One area where there was a visible difference was academic research. Faculty ranked this very highly but not students and employers. The European universities have not thrown formal research out of their curriculum because it’s the 2nd pillar of their mission. But tactically, you can always dismiss a study or findings that run counter to your own beliefs or interests with a million little arguments. Faculty members are trained in this art and science - how to challenge the credibility of facts or knowledge. We call it epistemology - the science of confirming good science or knowledge. They may not be as good at this as the policy-level civil servants who tend to accept their own findings and ignore the rest.

Employers do care about technical knowledge - the value a graduate brings to their organisation.  They want specialists but not a large army of them.  What they want are non-technical skills aka soft skills in copious amounts in all specialists but what they mean by it is not exactly what you find in textbooks. Leadership (less instruction, more independence), interpersonal skills (communicate with empathy and know your place as per company culture), resilience (able to take a lot of crap from peers, employers and customers), teamwork (play your part for the betterment of the company), problem-solving (satisfy the customers preferably with no cost to the employer), critical thinking (think hard and deep but always be mindful of the power and politics of the place), adaptable (do whatever is wanted of you), rapid and continuous learning (learn on your own and do it fast).

Universities are and have been good at teaching technical skills. Engineering science, medical science, design science, social science, management science, information science etc. are what the faculties are qualified to do and can potentially do well. When it comes to soft skills - hmmm, it is not something the faculties were taught or trained or qualified to do. But they try because it is part of the programme's learning outcomes. Seriously, the opportunity for developing soft skills is not always a planned one. In fact, many planned interventions are hopelessly ineffective. It is serendipity - chance learning. This seems to flourish in all universities but especially in badly managed universities!

Let us take a measure of what typically happens in a bachelor’s programme in developing soft skills. Communications skills - make repeated presentations (mastery of PowerPoint and not necessarily point making without fancy aids), interpersonal skills (discussions within groups - actually communication with familiar faces or friends), adaptability (live with class cancellations due to lecturers attending important meetings, and cancel your weekend life or in rare occasions a pandemic breaks and life changes radically! - serendipity), resilience (tolerate crap from your university and lecturers but this is not designed. It is serendipity.), leadership (if your group assignment is not making progress, step in and take over - serendipity ), teamwork (letting all group members including supervisors to take the same credit for work they did not contribute directly. It is plagiarism - undeserved credit. Lifelong learning (develop loyalty to further studies at the university). It is peripherally about searching endlessly and aimlessly on Google for ideas, references, assignments, and a desire to know more and outside the scope of the programme), problem-solving (the only real problem solving is solving the conflicts with your timetable  and managing time and academic overload - serendipity),  critical thinking (is asking searching questions in a case study but not about the curriculum, delivery, fees policy, lecturers’ conduct, university or public policies - it’s often about politically correct thinking but is it thanking!), ethics and professionalism (knowing the rules of good conduct - not observing the teaching that comes from the unethical environment of the university and beyond - its harmless classroom ethics) and digital skills (LMS use, troubleshooting in videoconferencing sessions,  have FB, IG and WhatsApp, PowerPoint, Word and  Excel in that order)

So much of soft skills are serendipitously acquired. Bad universities, ironically, create more opportunities provided you have good students! Good universities might inadvertently remove this serendipitous learning!

*Dr Hazman Shah Abdullah was a Professor of Administrative Sciences at Universiti Teknologi MARA until his retirement in 2018.  During his tenure at the university, he also served as the Assistant Vice-Chancellor (Quality Assurance). Dr Hazman was the Deputy Chief Executive Officer (Quality Assurance) of the Malaysian Qualifications Agency (MQA) from 2015 until 2018 and continues to serve as a quality assurance expert for MQA.