Solving Graduate Unemployment (Part 1)

Nick
Nick
Aug 23, 2017 · 4 min read

Ever since we started thinking about how to tackle graduate unemployment, we’ve been investigating its main drivers and root causes. This is the first of a two-part series describing our understanding of the graduate underemployment/unemployment problem. You can find part 2 here.

The last few years have been challenging for universities across the nation, with severe budget cuts, a rapidly changing job market, and disturbing levels of graduate unemployment/underemployment. As the existing system struggles to adequately prepare students for careers they’re passionate about, not only will it become harder to justify the constantly rising tuition but also risk its core mission of developing members of society. The challenge is akin to the challenge most enterprises today face — do more with less.

Universities are rich with resources and activities that allow one to tackle new challenges, expand their network, and build robust careers. They even have dedicated career centers designed to support students in their career development. So, what’s causing this stress to the system? To truly understand the issue, we must delve into both sides of the equation: job market, and universities.

Job Market: Rapid Changes & Obscurity

The job market is shifting at an accelerating pace, where career paths are shrinking, new ones rising, and others transforming. Roles increasingly require interdisciplinary backgrounds, proficiencies with several tools and technologies, and better demonstration of soft skills. The rate of transformation is quickly outpacing the integration of this information to higher education, resulting graduates entering the workforce with outdated and/or irrelevant combinations of skills.

To make things even harder, the increasing variety and specificity of industry’s needs are raising the bar for entry-level jobs. Companies are becoming leaner by automating and outsourcing core functions, causing the responsibilities of entry-level jobs to become more sophisticated. Consequently, employers demand more specific skillsets from candidates, at levels of granularity the college degree credential alone cannot provide.

Universities: It’s an information problem!

On the university side, we see academic programs with great features like the flexibility to fulfill requirements with electives & work experiences, absolutely necessary in the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of today’s careers. The challenge seems to be twofold, at different stages of the career development process.

First, the barrier to information for discovering & making key career decisions (e.g. researching paths & in-demand skills, finding out ways to develop skills) is too high. Students, particularly those exploring their passions, have an already overwhelming host of complexities during their transition to college life, preventing from driving their career development.

Second, there seems to be an information gap in how students choose to build skills- between what’s available (courses, internships, projects) and their relevance to students’ dream careers in terms of obtained skills & knowledge. Collectively, these two forces leave students to fend for themselves, and by the time they start focusing on careers, it’s usually too late.

Isn’t that what career centers are for?

Career centers are charged with providing this guidance and perform very well on certain components, where one-to-one interaction is crucial, but face two key limitations.

The first is access to real-time data of the interrelationship between jobs and activities at their campus. It’s incredibly hard for advisors to not only keep track of the rapid transformations in the job market & in-demand skills but also to connect these with resources at their campus.

The second is scale, where it isn’t uncommon for a dozen advisors to be responsible for thousands of students, limiting the level of personalization they can provide. Unlike the “one-time” nature of e-commerce purchases, careers require a level of personalization that is continuous and adaptive.

Ultimately, students are responsible for their own careers, but the barrier to the information necessary to make complex career decisions (what paths there are, what choosing one major over another means for career options, how to build in-demand skills) is unnecessarily high for students who are just starting to learn how to manage the complex college life.

So, what now?

When you put the pieces above together, the problem essentially becomes one of communication and information. Job markets aren’t providing universities with up-to-date, accurate, and useful information on the job market and its needs, universities struggle to support the career development of students without this information, and students are left in the dark, not sure where to even start. So, what’s the best approach to solving this puzzle? Read about our vision of a higher education experience that will solve this issue, without compromising its broader role in disseminating knowledge here.

Do you see happening in your own institutions? Do you think we covered the key drivers? Share your thoughts below!

A note about us

We’re recent college graduates with first-hand experience of this issue. We (and most students you talk to) realize that career development is way harder than it should be, and our mission is to make it as seamless, personal, and efficient as possible — so students can immerse in the more important aspects of the college experience.

The solution we are working on, PathBase, is a smart career companion that helps students build dream careers by using job market data & machine learning. It helps with things like discovering their path, finding out which skills to build, and landing opportunities using its tools & data-driven ePortfolio/resumes. It’s free for any student, and just started Beta — so use it with your students!


Originally published at blog.pathbase.io on August 23, 2017.

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Nick

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Nick

Editor at PathBase

PathBase

PathBase

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