Making Competencies Count as Much as Degrees

Timothy Harding:

It’s about a student, whether traditional age or non-traditional age, really taking charge of their career preparedness and thinking about the skills that are required and needed for that regardless of major. And we see employers, two thirds latest, national Association of Colleges, an employers study on how employers are using skills-based hiring now found that two thirds of them are using skills-based hiring. So the old traditional mindset of what is your educational pedigree, what was your GPA is becoming less important. The good news is this, there is a movement now, at least in the United States, and I think it’s not restricted to our boundaries here, of thinking about the whole collegiate experience as an opportunity for developing competencies that will definitely bring a student career readiness and preparation, but also contributes to their academic success, and it also contributes to their life preparedness.

I mean, they’re learning these transferable skills that do all of those things. So in colleges now, there is a movement where we have identified what we call the NASSA eight competencies, which are core competencies. They are not intended to be exclusive. They are the evergreen competencies that a student needs regardless of career field they’re going into or industry. We know that they are critical for their success, and we start with that core and then we can build on the specialized knowledge and competencies that students need. But the idea is that it’s an institutional cultural change where the entire experience that a student has as a college student contributes to that development. And so when you’re thinking about a class, and Kelvin was talking about this earlier on, I think it’s important the content that they learn in a class, but it’s also important to think about how you are learning that content, how you are accomplishing the work in that class, because those are the transferable skills that can contribute to your career readiness and your preparation.

And the problem is, and this is the role of educators, we can’t rely on students, especially traditional age college students who 17, 18, 19 whose brains aren’t completely developed. We can’t rely on them to make that connection of how they’re learning something, the meaning of learning, which is so critical here. So whether it’s a curricular experience class that they have or it’s a co-curricular experience, even a student activity being in student government, being a leader on campus offers an opportunity for skills development. But we have to create means for them to connect that meaning to learning and then map that learning to the competencies. And the good news is there are a lot of institutions that are doing this now, and it continues to be elevated. The challenge is how do you scale it so that you impact every student and make certain that we’re achieving that skills development that we want as they graduate? So it is really about moving away from checking a box to make certain that you are going to get that piece of paper, that degree when you walk across the stage, and you actually have achieved transformational learning and skills development in a very intentional way.