Global Career Compass
Leveraging Education Abroad for Student Career Development & Employability
My Point of View on Study Abroad and Its Impact on student Career Development & Employability …
I hope you enjoy watching these presentations which deliver my point of view – well known if you follow me here or @tillman_marty – on a topic which continues to resonate on campuses and with private organizations in the international education field. This year, the political turmoil in the United States and within the EU over “Brexit” promise to fuel ongoing concerns about a downturn in global student mobility; this, in turn, will impact – perhaps tamp down – the expansion of opportunities for students to build their employability toolkits.
Impact of Learning Abroad on Student Career Development & Employability
Panel Discussion: IIE Survey of Impact of Study Abroad on U.S. Students (2017 IIE Generation Abroad Summit)
The session analyzed findings of the IIE study, “Gaining an Employment Edge: The Impact of Study Abroad on 21st Century Skills & Career Prospects” showing that study abroad contributes to the development of transferable skills and positive employment gains, with the impact varying according to program characteristics, study destinations, and the students’ goals. Download the full report here: http://bit.ly/2xbaGk9. Panelists: Christine Farrugia, Deputy Head of Research at IIE; Marty Tillman, President of Global Career Compass; Ann Hubbard, VP at AIFS Study Abroad; and Maggie Becker, Director of Career Services at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
A [Brief But Spectacular] 6-Minute Talk:
“Closing the Employability Gap for Students Studying Abroad” (2016 IIE Generation Abroad Summit)
This was an innovative approach at the second IIE Generation Abroad Summit allowing many points of view to be shared with participants.
Latest U.S. Survey on Impacts of Studying Abroad & Linkage to Student Employability
For my campus followers: Did you see the IIE survey? This is my summary of its key findings; you can view a you tube video of myself and colleagues discussing the report, at the Fall ’17 IIE Generation Abroad Summit in DC, on my Twitter feed @tillman_marty [as a pinned tweet].
At the recent IIE (Institute for International Education) Generation Study Abroad “Summit” held in Washington, D.C., a research survey report was released: “Gaining an Employment Edge: The Impact of Study abroad on 21st century Skills and Career Prospects in the United States, 2013-2016.” https://www.iie.org/Why-IIE/Announcements/2017-10-02-Gaining-an-Employment-Edge The survey is important because of its size – over 4,500 alumni – and scope ( respondents studied abroad between 1999-00 and 2016-17).
This Summit was the third sponsored by IIE in support of their initiative to double the number of American college students studying abroad by 2020. I’ve presented at all three events and this week, I joined colleagues in this live-streamed discussion on the report and the linkage of study abroad to post-graduation employability: https://www.facebook.com/IIEglobal/videos/10155683584138428/#IIESummit2017
Readers of this blog know I’ve been writing and discussing this topic for over a decade. It is heartening to know that all major associations and organizations…
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Preparing Students for Employability in an Unstable Ever-Changing Global Economy
I thought I’d jumpstart engagement in 2018 with this ’17 post. I’d like to receive reader comment on how you see the impacts of our changing global condition on your students…How is your organization or institution adapting/innovating?
The unenviable job facing faculty, career service professionals and international educators sending students abroad, is embedded in the title of this post. We know the world of work is always changing – and within any given four-year period, how is it possible for campuses and their curricular and co-curricular offerings to stay ahead of the local-national-and global economy and the skills necessary for students to succeed upon graduation?
Sharma quotes the senior minister of state for education in Singapore who says: “How do you cope with the fact that the education you have may not perfectly prepare you for your first, second, third, or whatever number of jobs?”
One response in this piece comes from Nina Waaler, vice-rector for education at Oslo and Akershus University of Applied Sciences: “…universities must instill curiosity and openness [in students] so that they know that what they are learning probably will not be current…
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Preparing Students for Employability in an Unstable Ever-Changing Global Economy
The unenviable job facing faculty, career service professionals and international educators sending students abroad, is embedded in the title of this post. We know the world of work is always changing – and within any given four-year period, how is it possible for campuses and their curricular and co-curricular offerings to stay ahead of the local-national-and global economy and the skills necessary for students to succeed upon graduation?
Sharma quotes the senior minister of state for education in Singapore who says: “How do you cope with the fact that the education you have may not perfectly prepare you for your first, second, third, or whatever number of jobs?”
One response in this piece comes from Nina Waaler, vice-rector for education at Oslo and Akershus University of Applied Sciences: “…universities must instill curiosity and openness [in students] so that they know that what they are learning probably will not be current when they are looking for a job…and institutions have to find the mix of factual knowledge and tools to be open and rigorous at the same time. Finding the right balance when the slope is changing (of course, she’d use a skiing metaphor!), is the great challenge for institutions.”
As in the Soffel piece, and as has been outlined in numerous pieces of research, we do know quite a bit about the collection of skills and competencies –in a broadly generic way- that most companies and organizations “require” or prefer to see in their job candidates. Several of my blogs in recent years have called attention to the “toolkit” which students should carry with them after graduation…
The challenge facing all educational institutions is laid out well by Moller in his paper: “In many industries and countries, the most in-demand occupations of specialties did not exist 10 or even five years ago, and the pace of change is set to accelerate. By one popular estimate, 65% of children entering primary school today will ultimately end up working in completely new job types that don’t yet exist.”
But you say, none of this has much to do with true purpose of “higher” learning or with the mission of the university…And I’d say, really? Well, perhaps faculty who started their careers in the last century might say something like this. I know the international educators I know, have worked with, and who are in leadership roles on their campuses – or with non-profit educational organizations (and for-profits, too) are actively engaged in re-thinking how they do prepare students for entering an economy which is ever-changing. They are trying to re-design their programs to purposefully engage students in learning how to choose opportunities which will develop both cognitive and affective skills. They are striving to help students take risks in their experiential learning. To “see” the deeper meaning in what they are learning outside the classroom.
This post reflects thoughts gleamed from the following diverse set of recent research papers, reports and essays written over the past year and a half or so:
“Future-ready Universities and Graduates: Quality Education Beyond the Horizon,” 6th ASEF Conference & Students’ Forum, 2017, Singapore, Prof. Jorgen Ostrom Moller http://www.asef.org/images/docs/ARC6_Commissioned%20Paper_MOELLER.pdf
The Future of Work, Jeff Selingo https://www.workday.com/content/dam/web/en-us/documents/whitepapers/the-future-of-work-part-two.pdf
Gone International: Mobile Students and their Outcomes, report of the 2012/13 graduating cohort http://go.international.ac.uk/sites/default/files/Gone%20International%20mobile%20students%20and%20their%20outcomes_1.pdf
How do you prepare students for an unknowable future? Yojana Sharma http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20171014062003256
College is Just the Beginning: Employers’ Role in the $1.1 Trillion Postsecondary Education and Training System https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/college-is-just-the-beginning/#full-report
What are the 21st-century skills every student needs? Jenny Soffel https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/03/21st-century-skills-future-jobs-students/?platform=hootsuite
Latest U.S. Survey on Impacts of Studying Abroad & Linkage to Student Employability
At the recent IIE (Institute for International Education) Generation Study Abroad “Summit” held in Washington, D.C., a research survey report was released: “Gaining an Employment Edge: The Impact of Study abroad on 21st century Skills and Career Prospects in the United States, 2013-2016.” https://www.iie.org/Why-IIE/Announcements/2017-10-02-Gaining-an-Employment-Edge The survey is important because of its size – over 4,500 alumni – and scope ( respondents studied abroad between 1999-00 and 2016-17).
This Summit was the third sponsored by IIE in support of their initiative to double the number of American college students studying abroad by 2020. I’ve presented at all three events and this week, I joined colleagues in this live-streamed discussion on the report and the linkage of study abroad to post-graduation employability: https://www.facebook.com/IIEglobal/videos/10155683584138428/#IIESummit2017
Readers of this blog know I’ve been writing and discussing this topic for over a decade. It is heartening to know that all major associations and organizations in the field of international education – here and abroad – have moved to support the changing narrative about the value proposition of co-curricular international experiential learning of all types: service-learning, study abroad, internships and volunteerism. The issues covered in this survey and the findings now have a place on the agenda of NAFSA, EAIE, the Forum on Study Abroad, the Career Integration conferences sponsored by the University of Minnesota Learning Abroad Center & CAPA, and major associations in Australia, Japan, Canada, and elsewhere.
Here are the major Recommendations from the survey:
Coach students on how to communicate effectively the skills learned through study abroad to employers. The survey findings indicate that many employers do not ask about study abroad experiences during interviews. Those study participants who took the initiative to raise their study abroad experiences during job interviews reported a stronger connection between study abroad and employment offers, suggesting that students can benefit from interview coaching or training on how to communicate the value of their study abroad experiences to employers.
Integrate clear employment-related learning outcomes into the design of study abroad programs. While some respondents reported feeling uncertain about how to convey their study abroad learnings to prospective employers, nearly all participants reported using these skills on the job. To help address this gap, Study Abroad and Career Services offices should work collaboratively to infuse explicit career-oriented learning goals when designing study abroad programs, as well as help students to explicitly identify the transferrable skills they hope to gain through study abroad. These goals should be incorporated into all kinds of study abroad programs, including shortterm and long-term programs, those that are classroom-based and experiential programs such as internships. “I always wanted to go into medicine and was always interested in international medicine. So, I really knew I needed experience in that realm… Because you can’t be taking care of patients and come at them with a completely wrong baseline assumption about what their life is like or where they’re coming from.” Humanities Major Short-Term in Haiti, 1999/00 Current Industry: STEM 20
Leverage the strength of short-term study abroad programs in developing teamwork skills. When considering study abroad length, a longer time spent abroad does have a positive impact, especially for foreign language development, but short-term programs are also beneficial, particularly when more highly structured. Shorter term programs may be a preference for students that either do not have time to study abroad longer, or for students who may benefit most from the development of skills like teamwork, leadership, or work ethic. To enable the development of a range of employment-related skills, a variety of program types with different work-related learning objectives should be offered to students, including study abroad programs of varying duration, programs that emphasize independent learning or teamwork skills, and both classroom-based and experiential opportunities such as internships and volunteering.
Encourage students to study somewhere that is culturally or linguistically “different” than what they already know. When working with students to choose study abroad destinations and programs, consider their prior international exposure, and encourage them to push the envelope accordingly. Immersion in a culture that one is not familiar with already or that is linguistically or culturally different from home can have powerful career impacts. Students studying in unfamiliar destinations acquire greater intercultural skills and report more positive career impacts than students who study in more familiar destinations.
Increase STEM students’ participation in study abroad. STEM majors in the study noted that study abroad provided them a high value in being able to develop “soft” skills that were largely not addressed by their programs at home. STEM students reported especially high study abroad gains in skills such as oral and written communication, interpersonal skills, flexibility, adaptability, and intercultural skills. Many of the students noted that these skills set them apart from other job candidates in their field and gave them an edge in the job market.
There’s a very clear roadmap which senior campus administrators and faculty can adopt and adapt to support their campus internationalization policies and practices. The research regarding the link between education abroad and the development of critical skills and competencies, valued by employers in all sectors, is known and it is consistent.
The challenge to higher education institutions is to ensure that the benefits of going abroad accrue in equal measure to ALL students regardless of race, socio-economic background and ethnicity. We should resolve that EVERY student has an equal opportunity to reap the rewards of an international experience during their four years to gain the same advantages with respect to their future employability.
Complacency, Civic Engagement & Experiential Education…
What do these pedagogies and words have in common? The answer is DACA. And a play I saw last night here in DC called “The Arsonists,” written in 1958 by a Swiss writer, Max Frisch and re-named in a translated British production in 2007. The moral message of the play is this: A complacent and inert citizenry, where fear and reluctance to act, makes them complicit in their own destruction. Frisch wrote his play as a metaphor to engage his audience in thinking about what actions they could/should be taking to fight back against the rise of Nazism and Communism.
And another convergent moment came last evening before the play when my wife and I were dining right next to a table of about twenty youths all wearing DACA protest T-shirts; they had just come to celebrate their participation in yesterday afternoon’s protest of the DACA decision by the President at his hotel downtown…
Complacency: Gone. Whether it was in Charlottesville a few weeks ago or yesterday, students and their adult supporters have turned out to peacefully demonstrate and say no to the politics of fear and bigotry. To the inhumane decision to deport almost 800,000 children brought here by their parents – and who have successfully made a constructive life for themselves throughout the nation. There has been a marked uptick in citizen engagement in cities and campuses across the country.
Civic Engagement: I’m sure there are many ways to define this term, but, at its root, it plainly describes the ways in which citizens stand up and make their voices heard. The DACA decision by Trump has, for some time, been a catalyst on and off campuses for student action. And action by “Dreamers” who have been invisible to most Americans. The threat to them has been taken up by other students, faculty and staff — broadening engagement of all for the benefit of a few…
Experiential Education: In 1982, in one of my earliest published pieces for the National Society for Internships and Experiential Education (January-February, Experiential Education), on “Principles of Experiential Cross-Cultural Learning,” I said:
“If experiential cross-cultural learning means anything in the world today, it must be a vehicle for shaking loose the complacency of students about critical world issues and fostering an appreciation for the diversity of national interests and cultural values struggling to co-exist on the planet.”
At home, the threats are great and coming at us weekly. Abroad, there is a resurgence of fear, due to the instability of the North Korean regime, unlike anything I’ve seen since the early days of the Cold War and the Cuban missile crisis. Again, as if history is repeating itself in our lifetime, I quoted Dr. George Bonham in my 1982 essay, author of Education and the World View (1981, Council on Learning):
“We live in a world that is increasingly anarchical, increasingly unpredictable and increasingly a world not of American choosing or of America’s imagination. We may now find ourselves at one of the great disjunctures of our national history…The world has unalterably changed – and so must American education.”
How eery to read this in the current moment. I see students demanding and fighting for change. I see our higher educational institutions both resisting change and stumbling forward to keep up with the pace of local and global events. And we citizens? We’re being forced into corners. We’re fighting each other in the streets. We’re shouting past one another. What will bring us together? As I write, it appears the only thing that has overcome our divisions is the terrible devastation of recent natural disasters.
Maximize the Impact of International Experience via Purposeful Career Integration on Campus
My colleagues at The Learning Abroad Center on the University of Minnesota campus have announced plans for the third conference on the important and essential topic of career integration to be held in Washington D.C., August 8-10, 2018. The theme of the 2018 conference, “Leveraging Partnerships,” examines how connections between study abroad and career services professionals can be maximized to help students find success in the job market.
Go to https://umabroad.umn.edu/professionals/career-int/conferences/2018-conference/ (register on this page at careerintegration.org). I’ll be tracking the program all year long and inform readers of those developments here and via my twitter feed @tillman_marty. I’ve been fortunate to present at the first two conferences – in 2014 & 2016 – held on the campus of UMN and near the offices of CAPA in Boston.
The Career Integration conference, while modest in size, attracts a diverse group of professionals from both career services and study abroad offices around the country. It’s become an important meeting place to address barriers which inhibit these offices from working together, along with senior international officers and faculty, to deepen student learning outcomes from their international experience.
Followers of my writing over the past decade know of my advocacy for integration of student advising services to assist students maximize the impact of their international experience. However, this topic is not only about the cross-training of career and study abroad staffs, or the design of reflective practices before a student leaves campus, while s/he is abroad and upon their return; it’s about – in a more complex analysis – the manner in which a campus chooses to fulfill its mission to internationalize the curriculum and foster a holistic understanding among all staff and faculty of the institution’s role in preparing global-ready graduates. Graduates who have been actively – and purposefully- engaged in building their toolkits of skills and competencies, in and outside the classroom, to provide a foundation for their employability (at home or abroad) after graduation.
Two books are available on the above UMN webpage, comprising brief essays on topics addressed at the 2014 and 2016 Career Integration conferences: Career Integration: Reviewing the Impact of Experience Abroad on Employment I and II
For further background on the issues discussed in these volumes, see my publications and essays on my LinkedIn profile at https://www.linkedin.com/in/martintillman
FOUNDATIONAL READINGS FOR EDUCATION ABROAD SCHOLAR-PRACTITIONERS
Anthony C. Ogden, PhD, Executive Director of Education Abroad and Exchanges at Michigan State University, has crafted an important resource for all professionals in the education abroad field. I think it’s also quite relevant for anyone working in any aspect of international education – on and off campus. I’m very pleased that he has included several of my publications under the category of Career Development & Employability. Readers of my blog know that I’ve been writing on this topic for over a decade.
This is from the introduction to his reading list:
http://educationabroad.isp.msu.edu/files/8614/9925/6468/Foundational_Reading_EAProfessionals.pdf
In an era of increasing accountability within U.S. higher education, it is strategically important that education abroad professionals not view research and scholarship as a burden or an addition to an already demanding workload. Rather, we must recognize that at a minimum, our professional success is closely tied to our ability to effectively identify, access, and utilize research and scholarship to inform our collective practice.
It is important for education abroad scholar-practitioners to challenge untested claims and avoid casual assumptions about the potential value and impact of education abroad (my emphasis). The following is a brief list of some of the major knowledge areas within contemporary education abroad scholarship and a listing of books, book chapters and/or articles that provide foundational reading within each area. Familiarity with this essential reading will provide insight into the existing research and scholarship that informs our practice.
My Work Cited in Study of Impact of International Experience on Employability of Chinese Students
I’m very pleased to find my work cited in a new research report issued by the Centre for Global Higher Education in London. An excerpt is at: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/my-work-cited-study-impact-international-experience-career-tillman
International and transnational learning in higher education: a study of students’ career development in China by Ka Ho Mok, Xiao Han, Jin Jiang and Xiaojun Zhang
The full report is here: http://www.researchcghe.org/perch/resources/publications/wp21.pdf
Published by the Centre for Global Higher Education, UCL Institute of Education, London WC1H 0AL http://www.researchcghe.org © Centre for Global Higher Education 2017
The Destruction of Anbar University & Finding a Pathway to the Future for its Students
I’m just back from the 69th NAFSA: Association of International Educators annual conference in Los Angeles. It’s my 40th year of membership in NAFSA. My career has circled through many many upheavals on the world stage – and the conference has grown so large (9,700 in attendance from 107 nations) in scope that it’s become a gathering of educators struggling to make sense of war, conflict, and social upheaval in the most complex regions of our world society.
One of the most difficult sessions for me dealt with the destruction of the campus of the University of Anbar in Ramadi, Iraq (http://www.ibtimes.com/iraq-militants-attack-anbar-university-3-guards-killed-1595792) . I can still vividly recall the slide show shown depicting how ISIS forces destroyed virtually every academic building on the campus – including the building which contained the offices of the speaker calmly describing the carnage and pointing out the slide of the building which housed his office…It looked like the bombing of Dresden in WWII.
This session was ostensibly about “what comes next as the country rebuilds’, however, I left the session immeasurably saddened by the destruction I was watching. Yes, there was talk by an IREX representative of new scholarships, and the hopeful (albeit measured) optimism of the outgoing Iraqi cultural affairs officer about prospects for re-building the economy and educating students for a new future; however, clearly, this future is a long way off. A pathway which collides with so many unknown political forces in the region.
Anytime we discuss education, there’s an implied optimism about the power of knowledge and the willfulness of the learner. The hope of these speakers was dependent on the defeat of ISIS. One of the slides showed students returning to clean the grounds with their bare hands. I’m not sure what else I can say about this scene — only that it was so sobering and far removed from the display of strength of the global higher education system in the conference exhibit hall.
As Kurt Vonnegut would say, “And so it goes…”
Global Career Compass 