Teaching Students about the World of Work: A Book Review

Abstract

APA citation: Hoffman, N. & Collins, M. L. (Eds.) (2020). Teaching students about the world of work: a challenge to postsecondary educators. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.

Community colleges are on the front lines on the training for our modern workforce. These institutions offer various educational opportunities, including 2-year degrees, credit-bearing certificates, industry-recognized certifications, and continuing education programs. As society began to question massive student loan debt versus the value of college education, community colleges began offering more industry-recognized certifications to quickly reduce student loan debt and move students into the workforce. Employers are starting to see that industry certifications are not enough to sustain employability and growth as these programs do not offer students the habits of mind, employability skills, or a mechanism for lifelong learning.

Teaching Students About the World of Work, A Challenge to Postsecondary Educators, addresses a topic that many postsecondary institutions seem to overlook. Sustainable employability is not a paradigm built upon technical skills; indeed, many employers said that students with soft skills are more desirable because if they have mastered the art of social capital, then they can be easily trained on technical skills (Gauthier, 2020a, 2020c). Thus, the pendulum seems to be swinging back toward a time when a college degree was essential for workforce success. Several studies have been conducted which reveals that integrating soft and hard skills develops students holistically (Deming, 2017; Hamilton, 2020; Hora et al., 2016). As the text's central theme is predicated on the idea that all students enroll in higher education to find work eventually and that in order for them to be successful when they do, work must be part of higher education curriculum.

The claim that community colleges tend to rest student success solely on access to higher education tends to align with institutional behavior in terms of curriculum development, which in some cases omits the habits of mind and seems to ignore the purpose of a community college, leading to what the author refers to as “structural discrimination in the labor market” (Collins, 2020, p. 33).

During a panel discussion on NPR’s OnPoint with then host Tom Ashbrook, Bunker Hill Community College President Pam Eddinger talked about the social fabric students need to be successful (Eddinger, 2014). In Chapter 2, Eddinger and co-author Richard Kazis discuss how experiential learning opportunities play a significant role in helping students build a social capital network; thus, the social fabric to support sustainable employability. They profile various organizations that promote structural internships, including Ohio's Department of Higher Education, Indiana Chamber of Commerce, Iowa's Legislature, and Ascendium Education Group.

As Chapter 2 discusses the importance of experiential learning in developing students' social capital, the authors articulate three prevalent challenges in offering internships: employer support, staff capacity, and student schedules. Community colleges often have an inadequate staff to support large-scale programs such as internships and apprenticeships, and the average age of a community college student is 27, and many students must work full-time to support themselves and their family.

A call for community college research is a vital discussion offered in the chapter. While research has generated recommendations for postsecondary institutions, the authors call for research that seems to focus on a large-scale review of experiential benefits across community colleges of various sizes.

Gutman Community College became a leader in competency-based and experiential learning through “research-based, high impact, best practices in curriculum design – active, project-based, student-centered, and experiential learning” (Gatta & Ziehmke, 2020, p. 54). Chapter 3 discusses the Ethnographies of Work (EOW), a first-year course students must take. In comparison, this course helps students understand work through a social science lens to identify the meaning of work and personal agency within the labor market.

Ethnographies of Work includes the relationship between soft skills and social capital as they relate to the inequalities experienced by students and employees. However, EOW also helps inform students about career choices and the critical role of work experience to guide decisions.

As community colleges are perpetually chasing money to support the education they provide, often, the value of education gets lost, and the foundational objective of supporting students' progress from a job to a career is often forgotten. Chapter 4 discusses the relationship between a job and a career in that many postsecondary institutions develop career pathways that focus on short-term technical skills of high value but ignore the skills used to build stability and advancement. This chapter offers the reader valuable information about how to analyze career advancement and provides a framework for job identification; for example, the authors indicate that lifetime jobs are careers, springboard jobs lead to careers, static jobs do not lead to a career, and rarely lead to higher-paying jobs. Chapter 4 concludes with a discussion about career-focused curricular pathways, support for analytical, communication, and social skills, and a brief explanation of work-based learning.

Community colleges (for various reasons) inherently do a poor job defining what makes a good job. Since postsecondary institutions are under constant strain to meet enrollment and completion benchmarks, they unfortunately and implicitly exploit minority students, especially those enrolled in industry certification programs, which lead to static jobs (Gauthier, 2020b). Chapter 5 explains that good jobs offer employee meaning, purpose, learning, and growth, and this is where community colleges tend to misunderstand their role in society. Chapter 6 discusses working theory's psychology, which strives to guide education across various stakeholders through critical reflection and action.

One of the hallmark considerations community colleges must address when developing curriculum are work-related barriers (chapter 7) and implicit skills (chapter 8). Given that community colleges operate under a vale of ignorance, they cannot predict the students' skill level or background who enroll. Many of these students are plagued by unemployment or underemployment. Other students use community colleges as a fallback, and many of these students are from low socioeconomic backgrounds resulting in reduced levels of self-efficacy coupled with deficient vocational identity, which leads to complications in progress and low completion rate. Chapter 7 discusses these issues, including career knowledge, social identity, and internal and external structural barriers to success.

Implicit skills, frequently referred to as soft skills, including teamwork, motivation, communication, among other day-to-day skills, are “overarching 'master' skills that form the capacity for learning, on-the-job training, and professional advancement as well as managing relationships with managers, coworkers, and customers” (Orrell & Seibert, 2020, p. 133). These skills gained much attention since community colleges started focusing on short-term technical skills as employers insist that community colleges spend more time developing students' social capital and less time on the explicit skills specific to industry and procedure. Table 8.1 offers stunning results from a study conducted by the National Association of Colleges and Employers. This study revealed that employers are more interested in soft skills (communication and problem-solving among the highest ranked) than explicit or hard skills (technical skills ranked among the lowest). As Chapter 8 appears to be the thesis of the book, the content of this chapter is a Sharp reminder that community colleges have a long way to go in terms of earning the trust of local employers in that employers insist that colleges couple competency-based education and general education develop students with the capacity for sustainable employability and growth.

To earn a good job, defined earlier in the text, students must learn to be strategic in that they must understand the labor market, hold a high level of vocational identity and self-efficacy, and contrary to ancient culture, they must understand that earning a college credential offers them an opportunity for success, and it is not a guarantee. Chapter 9 offers a framework for guidance in developing curricula and policies that include considerations for social capital and skill to understand that students enroll in a community college with a specific outcome. This outcome cannot be reached without the development of social capital and skill.

In conclusion, community colleges can prepare students for work and to transfer (Cummings et al., 2020). However, in the course of trying to satisfy endless benchmarks and irrational responses to labor market data and grant demands, many of these institutions decided to double-down on pathway dependency, and as a result, they became more entrenched and less capable of finding their way out. An unfortunate effect of being entrenched is not trusting the data, not listening to the business partnerships' recommendations, and refusing to adhere to the recommendations of contemporary stakeholders (Bathmaker, 2017; Van Noy et al., 2016; Peters et al., 2005).

There is no question that “community colleges do many things well” (Osterman, 2011, p. 130). Even those institutions unknowingly exploiting minority students with industry certification programs have great qualities, albeit contributing to societies inequality. However, in today's fast-paced world of work, employers are looking for competency-based education, experiential learning, and social skill development to be built into curriculum. Community colleges that cannot offer these will be left behind as employers will search for employees elsewhere, including more flexible, and perhaps private institutions. While community colleges are the premier institutions for work-based preparedness, knowledge remains an important aspect of workplace success (Hirsch, 2019). Unfortunately, many of these colleges are several steps behind preparing students for sustainable employability and growth contributing to the skills gap.