Global Career Compass
Leveraging Education Abroad for Student Career Development & Employability
Invited by Department of State U.S. Expert’s Program to Deliver Workshops in Zimbabwe
I’m pleased to share news that I’ve received an invitation by the Department of State to deliver a series of workshops, in cooperation with the Ministry of Education, to university administrators and faculty, high school guidance counselors and education NGOs to strengthen their abilities to offer career counseling to young people. I will travel to Harare next September 29 through October 6.
The proposal states: Zimbabwe’s educational system is largely a British-based, examination-driven system that no longer meets the needs of the economy, development or workforce in the country. University graduates face a bleak employment scenario and official unemployment remains at over 90%. High school graduates are forced into narrow university disciplines without much thought about career paths that meet their interests and talents. There is a blatant dearth of career guidance or counseling at both the high school and university level. We would like to bring an international career counseling expert to lead workshops to help university, school and government administrators to recognize this problem and begin to take concrete steps to change the situation. This speaker program has two main objectives: 1. To assist Zimbabwean universities to start career advising centers or programs, and 2. To assist counselors at high schools in Zimbabwe to strengthen and broaden the career counseling methods and resources they use with their students.
I welcome comments from anyone who has traveled to Zimbabwe! And certainly from anyone with information about the labor market and higher education system in the country.
I delivered a series of similar workshops for the same DOS program in 2003 in Tbilisi, Georgia.
“Investing” in Students–As Long as They’re Good Wage Earners!
How could I not comment on this idea! http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/05/03/plan-floated-britain-investors-pay-tuition-and-students-repay-based-income —
Under the plan, a student would sign a contract with a special purpose company, acting for a university or group of universities, to repay a fixed percentage of their earnings over a set number of years. Banks would package the graduate contracts and sell them on to investors, particularly pension funds.
“The sale proceeds will vary based on the market’s perception of the future earnings potential of the group of students,”
Of course this works for investors as long as they somehow can identify students worth the “risk.” Hmmm. But it does appear to guarantee employment – with what the British refer to as “special purpose” companies.
Would U.S. investors buy this idea? Would academic institutions on this side of this side of the pond approve of this novel marketing of their degrees?
Creating Globally Minded STEM Professionals through International Internships/Work Abroad Programs
I participated in an important workshop in Washington this week http://www.iie.org/Who-We-Are/News-and-Events/Events/2012/STEM-Internships-Workshop (all presentations are online at this site). A coalition of education abroad professionals at IIE, NAFSA’s Work, Internship and Volunteer Abroad (WIVA) Subcommittee, and UC-San Diego conducted a 1 ½ day workshop targeted to STEM faculty and staff, Career Services professionals and Education Abroad professionals. The workshop addressed internship and work abroad programs in the STEM fields, specifically creating, maintaining, funding, and assessing these programs.
The need for globally minded and competent Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) professionals in the U.S. has been documented repeatedly in recent years. International internships and work abroad programs provide a means for addressing this need that meets the education and curriculum demands placed on our technical students. Yet few U.S. schools have established such programs or have strong mechanisms for integrating them into the STEM curriculum.
There is no question of the need to widen opportunities for more students to realize the benefits of international work and internship experiences – in all fields. However, the STEM fields offer many opportunities for academic institutions to partner with industry. It’s a win-win venture. The workshop provided a window on best practices around the country.
Book Review: International Students and Global Mobility in Higher Education: National trends and New directions
My reviews appear regularly in the NAFSA International Educator: http://www.nafsa.org/_/File/_/ie_mayjun12_bookreview.pdf.
This is an important book for international educators who wish to look behind the statistics of student flows around the world. The overall data on student flows referenced throughout the book have been widely reported in varied online sources and by IIE in its important Project Atlas Web portal, the Atlas of Student Mobility. And while the impact of the rise in numbers of student flows across borders is well known to International Educator readers, the editors suggest what is new and consequential in their analysis are the “drivers of student mobility and the new modalities through which this migration occurs.” This frames the central focus of the book whose chapters provide campus policymakers and administrators with an in-depth analysis of the political and socioeconomic factors that influence the flow of students from the United States, China, India, Germany, the UK, Australia, Latin America, and selected African nations.
Study Abroad: Students “Dialogue” on Impact in the Job Search
Fair to say that this Boston Globe student-led blog site conveys a mixed bag of just a few student commenters….I found it unfortunate to see how many comments were so far removed from the focus of the article itself: http://www.boston.com/lifestyle/blogs/thenextgreatgeneration/2012/02/go_abroad_get_hired_corporate.html?comments=all#readerComm
For those looking to share a more serious framework with students to help them see the value-added of their international experience – if they choose to plan for it–see my AIFS Student Guide to Study Abroad And Career Development at http://www.aifsabroad.com/international_perspectives
Chinese Universities Struggle to Increase Ties to Employers
Perhaps this essay in the Chronicle should be titled “Chinese Universities Strive to Democratize Relations to the Marketplace”: http://chronicle.com/article/Chinas-Universities-Struggle/131610. Much as has happened in India and others in the “BRIC” family of nations, Chinese educators are trying to figure out how to transform their institutions to better prepare students for employment in their globalized economy. As the piece points out, it was only 40 years ago that professors were condemned toviously manual labor if they were suspected of harboring “capitalist sympathies.”
The scale of the Chinese problem with “employability is huge: “about 23% of the 6.5 million who graduated in 2011 are still out of work.” An earlier post discussed the new interest and support of career coaching professionals at Chinese universities –they have a daunting task ahead of them.
This article discusses the new dialogue taking place about the merits of government programs which encourage “universities to design new majors that focus on emerging industries like bioengineering and alternative energy.” This is seen as one way to create direct linkages between a university education and employment –an issue many nations are confronting since the global economic downturn in 2008. Apparently, most linkages with industry are “overly reliant on the efforts of individual professors.”
Lastly, it seems that where there are successful curricular partnerships with industry, they exist at so-called elite universities. Students at what are referred to as “midlevel” institutions have a much harder time finding employment as their institutions have few ties with industry. The article cites growing interest of administrators at “lower layers” of the higher education system in learning from American educators how to create more curricula flexibility and build ties to industry.
It may take decades for universities to close the employment gap of their graduates –this begs the question of how China will manage an annual unemployment rate of 77% of their college-age graduates in coming years.
Graduate Business Schools & Employability of International Students
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304072004577323861675549408.html There seems to be good news and bad news: we know there is a rise in enrollment of international students – especially from from India and China – at all levels of of U.S. higher education. But what to do about the soft job market? What is the career office to do to develop employment options to match the rise in demand?
At Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management, one-quarter of the Nashville, Tenn., school’s 2011 M.B.A. class was international, with a number of students from China, India and South Korea. “If we have too high a [percentage] of international students and then we can’t place them, shame on us,” says Tami Fassinger, chief recruiting officer at the school.
I appreciate the candor in this statement. It’s not merely a global search for new sources of revenue, is it? There does need to be an overall institutional strategy to assist international students – at both undergrad and grad levels -find employment. At Vanderbilt, one approach is to admit students who are a good “fit” for the job market [I assume this means in terms of prior work experience and skill sets]. Of course, at the undergrad level, admissions offices cannot be that selective…which begs the question of how a student is to evaluate whether or not their choice of an academic institution will measurably advance their career prospects. At MBA or business schools, in the STEM fields, this assessment process is certainly much easier.
India native Rajeev Samuel, 30, wanted to stay in the U.S. after his graduation from the Simon school [at U. of Rochester], preferably near his wife, who is based in Chicago. At one U.S. company, Mr. Samuel made it to a final-round interview only to have the company ask if he would relocate to India or China for the job. “I’m paying for a U.S. school in U.S. dollars, and I don’t think I can pay it back using an Indian salary,” he says.
Career offices at business schools cited here are making extraordinary efforts to build new partnerships with international companies to advance employment prospects of their international students. My own experience is that placing the burden for success in the job market solely on the career office’s outreach is shortsighted. The entire institution needs to develop an integrated strategy for such outreach and partnership development as part of its internationalization plan.
On Internationalization of Latin American Universities: Students… “will find a way home”
The Chronicle reports on the recent Congress of the Americas and the debate on the opportunities and challenges of interest from North American institutions in partnering with Latin American universities http://chronicle.com/article/In-Brazil-a-Conference-on/131721. Interest from both Canadian and American university representatives was high- especially with Brazil in light of its emergence as a global economic power. The essay was interesting in noting concerns about “the increasingly commercial focus of internationalization.” Somehow I doubt this was a concern shared by North American educators looking for added revenue from a new wave of international students (i.e: it was reported that Canada’s delegation signed 35 new partner agreements with 18 Brazilian institutions.
Trying to allay fears that a new era of “brain drain” was on the horizon, the EAIE president, Gudron Paulsdottir stated: “People will find a way home. And when they study, they will build knowledge and build networks.” The Canadians want to increase the number of Brazilians studying North from 500 to 12,000 – a huge shift of brainpower and labor market talent out of the country…How long before they return home?
Networking for a Job in Indian IT Sector
This post from the Harvard Business Review is a mini-story of one engineers’ pursuit of his first job and how it influenced his approach to finding employment a decade later…http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/04/share_your_own_job_search_story.html?referral=00563&cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-daily_alert-alert_date&utm_source=newsletter_daily_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alert_date
Globalization and the spread of technology has fostered a set of common attributes to job searches around the world.
What Being Global Really Means-A Leadership Perspective
Interesting statement from Ángel Cabrera,president of Thunderbird School of Global Management, and president-elect of George Mason University. I heard him speak in a small seminar room st SAIS shortly after his appointment to Thunderbird and was very impressed with his perspective.
… Truly global leaders act as bridge builders, connectors of resources and talent across cultural and political boundaries — relentlessly dedicated to finding new ways of creating value. They don’t just think and act global, they are global.
