College to Work: Beyond the Skills Gap

One of the more heralded higher education books of the past few years, Beyond the Skills Gap: Preparing College Students for Life and Work is timely, relevant and most welcome. Kudos to Matthew Hora and his colleagues, Ross J. Benbow and Amanda K. Oleson, for looking beneath, behind, and beyond the sound bytes. Far too many of us, in higher education and outside, have used the term “skills gap” without truly understanding what it means, where it originated, or what it obscures. No more.

The book is grounded in years of research in Wisconsin, ground zero for changing policies to address employer and employee wants. Hora, a new transplant to the state with an appointment at the University of Wisconsin Madison as an assistant professor of adult and higher education and as a researcher in the Wisconsin Center for Education Research, tackled the question of the skills gap from the perspective of industry and education. Following the recession of 2008-9, Governor Scott Walker enacted policies changes that redirected resources at attention from “traditional” liberal arts higher education to career and job readiness. The justification for these shifts was to fix the “skills gap.” Hora and his team went to businesses, labs, classrooms, and factories, asking questions. They met with CEOs, human resource hiring managers, supervisors and experts in the field. Their focus was not on the politics or the politicians. It was what people on the ground who worked on the issue thought about it and how they addressed questions of education, training, and hiring. Their book explains the key concerns driving the skills gap argument, sets out alternative (and better) explanations, and offers research on what skills educators and employers think are most valuable and important.

Spoiler alert: educators and employers value the same outcomes.

Hoy and team round out Beyond The Skills Gap with a look at teaching practices, and the systems that support those practices, that would inculcate the skills, values and habits that would make for valued employees. One of the underlying themes of the book is that understanding the distinction between training and education is essential for across the board success. Training is short, offering a student the ability to gain a particular skill for use in a particular setting. Education is long-term, offering students the opportunity to grow, adapt and develop behaviors of mind that will allow for success in a variety of settings.

The anthropological skills that the authors bring to the task allow for exploration of key terms like “education” and “training.” They dive into what different stakeholders picture as success – and overlaying that are preferences, biases, and other cultural factors. As a good example, people do not consistently respond positively to the idea of “college for all” – even though many who work in higher education think that it is a good idea. The book highlights an awareness that stereotypes and caricatures impede effective communication and understanding.

Hoy also locates the question of who applies for which job, who gets hired, and who stays or leaves in the job, within contexts of geography, economics, politics and culture. Thoughtful analysis can always advance any number of good reasons that low-paying jobs with limited opportunities for advancement rarely attract candidates. A key takeaway from Beyond The Skills Gap is that there are often many reasons employers face challenges hiring and retaining a strong workforce – and that focusing on only one component in the equation, higher education, distorts effective thinking and problem-solving. The journey from individual to student to applicant to employee is affected by multiple factors, many of which fall outside of higher education.

All the research led Hoy and team to assert that the very idea of a “skills gap” is a zombie idea – dead but still walking. He takes pain to emphasize, however, that the absence of the meme is not the same as the absence of a problem and opportunities. He makes it clear that finding appropriate employees is very difficult for employers. He stresses that higher education plays an essential role – and that higher education could be much more effective. In fact, Hoy argues that traditional modes of instruction, which are at the heart of the academy, are inadequate when it comes to transferring school-based learning to the world of work. It is a point that academia will have difficulty digesting fully – and one that we need to wrestle with and try to fix.

Beyond the Skills Gap does a fine job deconstructing the meme of a “skills gap.” It is less effective, though, outlining a theory of improvement. I am a big fan of creative use of Bourdieau’s theories of culture and I see their relevance in many settings. The book’s summaries of Bourdieau and their applicability to the questions here, though, are not particularly strong.

In contrast, the surveys of employer and educator wants are extremely apt. All want technical skills, ability and knowledge, a strong work ethic, problem-solving, communication and teamwork skills, and other skills associate with a liberal arts education. The only outlier is “critical thinking.” Educators ranked “critical thinking” higher than employers – and I would argue that it’s primarily because only academics are comfortable using the term and concept. It is how we often talk about academic performance. All the responses reinforce consistent habits of mind that are well-established practices and values in higher education.

The book’s solutions name a key problem to overcome: the lack of coördination, communication and integration of the fields of education and the workplace. Hoy identifies different kinds of partnerships, outlines how they can be strengthened, and the importance of win-win relationships that reinforce good behavior on all sides of the equation. This is extremely helpful.

Beyond The Skills Gap gives all of us in higher education much to consider. It also underscored our (and by that, I mean all of us who work in higher education) collective responsibility to frame and advance the value of higher education in all its variety to employers and policy-makers in the world outside of our campuses. We have to do a better job. And for those of us fortunate enough to hold leadership roles, it is our job.

David Potash