Global Career Compass
Leveraging Education Abroad for Student Career Development & Employability
IMPACT OF INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION ON STUDENT CAREER DEVELOPMENT
See the agenda and presentations at the conference of the International Management Institute at American University. I was a presenter: http://www.american.edu/sis/imi/conference/Tillman.cfm
Presenter(s): Senem Bakar, Associate Director of Exchange Visitors & Student Services, American University, David Fletcher, Career Advisor, Career Center, American University; Martin Tillman, President, Global Career Compass (GCC)
Globalization of the workforce, increased mobility of students, rising demand from employers for “global ready” graduates, are but a few of the new forces of change impacting the traditional structure of international educational experiences offered to students. These forces are found to influence the focus of higher education policy and planning with respect to campus internationalization and in particular, the development of partnerships with business and industry to widen opportunities for experiential learning and practical work experience. While efforts to internationalize campuses has risen dramatically in recent years, there remains a need for more purposeful and structured inter- cultural experience to provide students with the skills and competencies employers are looking for to build their global workforce, whether those experiences are in local communities or in other countries. This session will focus on strategies to enable students to understand how their education abroad experience will fit into their career “toolkit” when they are developing a job search strategy -and marketing their international experiences to employers.
Moral Challenge to International Educators
See the new report by the International Association of Universities, Affirming Academic Values in Internationalization of Higher Education: A Call for Action
I am concerned about the “asymmetry” of access to international experience which the IAU report gently labels an “adverse consequence” of globalization.
There is much research supporting, for example, the advantages which accrue to those students able to participate in an international work, study or internship program. I’ve written extensively about this advantage in terms of how employers value skills and competencies among the minority of American students who do access such experiences. Certainly the opportunities for students from other than developed nations to gain a real strategic advantage in the global job market is quite limited. So what we face is a growing inequality of access built into the higher education system – both here and in other societies- for students without the economic resources to join the global job market and realize the benefits of membership in a globalized economy. The academic discussion of “brain circulation” and student mobility – when examined through the prism of economic equality – surely highlights a new moral challenge facing international educators.
Risks of Globalization for International Education Community-Spying by Foreign Government Agents
This story has just been sent around by a NAFSA colleague: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-04-08/american-universities-infected-by-foreign-spies-detected-by-fbi.html. I recall the days when the National Student Association was, in fact, tied to the CIA, and yet this is a serious matter in the current geo-political atmosphere.
As a junior at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan, Glenn Duffie Shriver studied at East China Normal University in Shanghai. After graduation, he fell in with Chinese agents, who paid him more than $70,000. At their request, he returned to the U.S. and applied for jobs in the State Department and the CIA. He was sentenced to four years in prison in January 2011 after pleading guilty to conspiring to provide national-defense information to intelligence officers of the People’s Republic of China.
And on the other hand, the story also highlights the need for caution by institutions seeking to expand their global reach by establishing branch campuses and hiring host-country faculty and/or seeking funding from wealthy foreign investors:
Michigan State University President Lou Anna K. Simon contacted the Central Intelligence Agency in late 2009 with an urgent question. The school’s campus in Dubai needed a bailout and an unlikely savior had stepped forward: a Dubai-based company that offered to provide money and students. Simon was tempted. She also worried that the company, which had investors from Iran and wanted to recruit students from there, might be a front for the Iranian government, she said. If so, an agreement could violate federal trade sanctions and invite enemy spies. The CIA couldn’t confirm that the company wasn’t an arm of Iran’s government. Simon rejected the offer and shut down undergraduate programs in Dubai, at a loss of $3.7 million.
International Students- They’re Looking to Work, Too…!
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. This WSJ story, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304072004577323861675549408.html, highlights the difficulty career service offices at business schools are having in placing their international students. Having lived through some very difficult years in my former work in career services at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, I empathize with the career staffs cited in this story.
As this piece begins: Graduate business schools, eager to enhance their global image and offset declining demand at home, are attracting international students—and that is causing headaches for the career-services offices….Is this a surprise to any institution that aggressively recruits international students? Perhaps there is an absence of overall strategic planning which examines the capacity of the institution’s student services to meet the demands of a growing population of international students. And the burden surely falls upon career services when it comes to building linkages to the marketplace which open doors for these students.
On Valuing Study Abroad: A Global Mandate for Higher Education
This is a succinct and well written IIE briefing paper – http://www.iie.org/en/Research-and-Publications/Publications-and-Reports/IIE-Bookstore/~/media/Files/Corporate/Publications/Valuing%20Study%20Abroad.ashx – from a conference where the British Academy and the University Council of Modern Languages (UCML) released a joint position statement, Valuing the Year Abroad, that advocated support for funding a third year abroad for British undergraduate students and drew on case studies from a survey they conducted among study abroad alumni. With representatives from the United States, China, and Germany, the international panel was invited to discuss British government and higher education policy on study abroad, and other countries’ policies and best practices in study abroad.
The University of Rhode Island’s five-year program that grants students a BS in engineering and a BA in a foreign language. was cited as a best practice model. In the fourth year of the program, students go abroad to study engineering in the foreign language (German, French, Spanish, or Chinese) of the host country university, and then do a hands-on internship with a company in the host country (for example, one URI student in Germany took engineering classes in German and held an engineering internship at BMW).
The “Relevance” of the Liberal Arts & the 21st Century Workforce
This is a topic which has been around for a long time; it has surfaced as a hot issue in terms of the impact of the recession on state economic development. And this in turn has led to a discussion about the linkage between college majors and entry into the workforce after graduation. Wake Forest is holding an interesting conference this week on “Rethinking success” and their site has a great list of readings: http://rethinkingsuccess.wfu.edu/resources
Career Services at Chinese Universities-A Growth Occupation
I’ve been meaning to comment on this Chronicle article: http://chronicle.com/article/In-China-as-Job-Possibilities/131127/. I thought it was difficult enough to work with 500 students at Hopkins-SAIS career services; now we see an awakening of a new career path for Chinese higher ed professionals in the career counseling field! Of course, they are having to deal with finding employment for 6.3 million college grads!
Actually, the campus offices are referred to as “employment-guidance” centers. The case study in this article describes the canter at Nankai University in Tianjin. While the typical Western career services office employs a variety of coaching tools and a variety of service-delivery models, Nankai relies preponderantly on web-based tools. In the last 4 months of 2011, the web site posted 30,000 job ads from 2,600 employers!
According to the HR director of a major staffing agency, Fesco, students “have no conception of what a job or a career means.” This points to the legacy of “job allocation” rooted in the Communist system’s practices. The idea of freedom of choice based upon assessment of student career aspirations may be a goal in the evolving profession of employment counseling, but, it’s a long term one.
International Students Key to Michigan’s Economic Growth
The Global Talent Retention Initiative [GTRI] http://detroit.cbslocal.com/2012/03/21/colleges-international-students-key-to-michigans-economic-growth/#.T3NFXtZ_zVk.email of Southeast Michigan is a wonderful model pointing to the convergence of interests among educators, academic institutions, and industry –all working together towards the economic revitalization of the state. And it illustrates the critical contribution of international students whose career choices and areas of study are highly correlated with job opportunities in the marketplace.
The GTRI is a joint effort of Michigan State University, the University of Michigan and Wayne State University. The program director states, “So we’re launching an aggressive new effort to help Michigan-based companies fill jobs in the STEM fields with talented engineers from overseas. We think this effort will pay for itself immediately because these employers will have the talent they need to win new contracts and immediately contribute to the Michigan tax base with improved profits and income tax generation.” Fast-paced economic growth in the health care, computer and engineering sectors, coupled with a shortage of domestic students graduating with degrees in the high-demand science, technology, engineering and math fields, has created a significant percentage of jobs in Michigan that employers are unable to fill, threatening further economic growth and their ability to compete.
“The fact that there just aren’t enough American-born students earning degrees in the STEM fields means that there is a significant mismatch between degrees granted and available jobs. Programs such as GTRI’s are critically important for connecting businesses with the talent they need to grow and remain globally competitive.”
The GTRI is a product of the Global Detroit Study about the impact of immigrant talent on the region’s economy. In collaboration with seven partner universities, the American Immigration Lawyers Association, Michigan’s economic development agencies, and ethnic chambers and organizations in Southeast Michigan, GTRI provides international students and local employers with training and resources on relevant immigration regulations, finding a job and working in the Detroit area, and many cross-cultural issues that both employers and international applicants may experience during the hiring process.
Global Mobility,Work & Family
I was struck by this NY Times op-ed and its focus on a topic not usually reported on in mainstream media –the difficulty of adjusting to life in our globalized economic marketplace: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/22/opinion/many-still-live-with-homesickness.html?_r=1&emc=eta1
“ACCORDING to a recent Gallup World Poll, 1.1 billion people, or one-quarter of the earth’s adults, want to move temporarily to another country in the hope of finding more profitable work. An additional 630 million people would like to move abroad permanently.” This number might or might not include the 3.3 million students studying outside their home country. Those of us working on college campuses have direct contact with students, scholars and researchers from around the world – but no matter what purpose one has for leaving one’s home country, it is not an easy transition and often comes with a lot of deeply felt emotional baggage.
The world is flatter, but, this does exacerbate the impact of the transitions we make as we move around the planet. As the writer says, “Technology also seduces us into thinking that migration is painless.”
Role of Private Sector in Linking Education & Employability
Reporting on IFC conference on private education, “Making Global Connections,” University World News http://test.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=2012031514592545 offers glimpse of growing efforts to bridge employer needs for talent with innovative private sector education initiatives.
The article states: Some “30% of employers globally say they do not find enough people for the jobs that they have,” Gassan Al-Kibsi, managing partner at McKinsey and Company in Saudi Arabia, told the IFC’s conference on private education held in Dubai from 6-8 March. Top-up courses for graduates, devised with industry in mind, can bridge the gap between academic courses and working life. Such courses are organised to supplement university degrees and are often provided by private or non-profit institutions. “Government institutions are often unable to understand employers’ needs,” Al-Kibsi said.
The International Finance Corporation (IFC) has built an investment portfolio of US$400 million involving 69 projects in 33 countries, many of them in higher education. “Like it or not, the private sector will increasingly be part of the solution in offering skills to young people all over the world,” said Guy Ellena, the IFC’s Istanbul-based regional director of manufacturing, agribusiness and services for Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. “We really believe there is a major role for the private sector to complement public education,” he told University World News.
To understand the changing role – and new funding priority – of the IFC with regard to private sector support in the education sector, go to http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20120224110837965
Global Career Compass 