Or: The deadly sins of marketable skills
You probably know that the state of Texas expects institutions of higher education to define and assess the marketable skills that students can reasonably expect to acquire in a course of study. In many programs, this is a no-brainer. There are, for instance, a fairly specific list of skills that an RN or surveyor should have on graduation that would make him or her “marketable.” This exhortation from the state is pretty vacuous when it comes to technical skills, mainly because we’re doing that anyway.
Technical skills aren’t the challenge; the challenge is what to do about so-called “soft skills.” I detest this term: If those skills were so soft, more people would have them in abundance, employers wouldn’t have to keep asking for them, and higher ed leaders wouldn’t be wringing their hands trying to figure out how to “teach” them. Just about everyone needs skills like how to communicate clearly, how to cooperate with colleagues, how to set logical priorities, etc. The challenge is to determine what those skills are and how to inculcate them in our students.
Each discipline has its special challenges here, but my focus is marketable skills in the liberal arts. You don’t have to take my word for this — after all, my degrees are in things like music, history, and philosophy. Employers themselves are telling us that they value liberal arts students as employees. And moreover, there is growing evidence to support the claim that the study of the liberal arts prepares people for career progression and growth in ways that narrower technical specialization doesn’t. But. . . .
In our zeal to help our students prepare for the future (and to satisfy the state), there are two main things that frequently go wrong.
Employers tell us that they value LA students for specific skills and expertise: Let’s unpack this. First, who is a liberal arts student? They are not just students who major in one of the traditional liberal arts disciplines, like philosophy or art history. They are students who, whatever their “declared” program of study, have a foothold in the liberal arts — not just trivially, as in, “I took Brit lit to check that graduation box,” but a deeper engagement. That’s tricky, but it’s not one of the deadly sins, so I’ll save it for another day.
What are those specific skills and areas of expertise that LA students possess that makes them stand out? That’s also challenging, but thinking about what those skills are and how best to inculcate them helps us identify the sins.
The Deadly Sins
When institutions get worked up about marketable skills, the motivation is usually good and even mostly sincere: They want to help students succeed, both in their programs and in their lives. But typically, institutional leaders address the challenge of cultivating marketable skills by telling professors to teach them. As in, embed this or that marketable skill in your curriculum, make charts and tables, create assignments, check boxes, do reports — months of fruitful labor. Too bad it’s also mostly dumb.
Look at this logically: If employers already value LA students’ assets, whatever they are, then it does not follow that professors need to do anything differently. Pause and think this through: Employers are saying that these are the things they like — as in, already like. Nothing about this implies anything about what professors do or should do, except that they are already doing something the employers value and should do more of that. Period.
A logical approach to marketable skills would involve encouraging professors to focus on teaching and pursuing the excellence of their disciplines, since doing that, presumably, is what they were doing when they produced the students that employers say they value as employees.
On the other hand, students typically discover the marketable skills they acquired in their LA studies after they’ve landed a job. For instance, they get an assignment or task at work that elucidates this or that skill. It may or may not occur to them to ask where that skill came from, but when they do, they often find that it came from a LA course or program of study.
This line of thought implies two criticisms of our (higher ed, not just ACC) current approach to marketable skills, both of which are understandable — but still misguided.
Sin #1
If employers already value something about the experiences our students are getting in their courses and programs, then it makes no sense to tell profs to add anything. Yet that’s what we often do. We look at employer surveys or focus groups or even ad hoc comments, and then we turn that into a campaign to get professors to “teach” that skill. As I said, dumb.
There are three reasons why it’s dumb. First, it doesn’t follow logically, which is bad enough for anyone partial to reason. But second, if we do go down the path of telling profs to teach, say, critical thinking skills — because, for instance, we saw some employer say “critical thinking skills” in a survey — then we make an additional mistake. We have not looked beyond the surface of the term to see what the employer means by “critical thinking skills.” If we take time to do a little conceptual analysis, we may find that what employers mean by a term like “critical thinking skills” is not what professors mean.
I’m not sure I need to explain why this matters, but I will, for completeness: If professors are promoting what they mean by critical thinking skills because that’s what they think employers mean, then employers are not getting an enhanced version of what they want.
I have examined, in a fair amount of detail, about a dozen or so terms from employer survey data, and I can tell you that in most of the cases, the meaning and perspectives of employers doesn’t match those of professors at all. Here’s an illustrative case: “critical problem-solving skills.” I was having a conversation with a CEO about what she means by “good critical problem-solving skills” — a characteristic she told me she values in LA students. She told me that employees with a background in LA were able to identify the value schema of her company and then “solve business problems within the contraints imposed by those values.” That’s not what most of us professors mean by terms like critical thinking or problem-solving.
But the interesting revelation in that conversation is not the misunderstanding. Rather, whether we are speaking the same language or not, the liberal arts — you know, with all its obsession with things like interpretation and hermeneutics — is actually a great way to hone your “value schema analysis” skills and learn instrumental rationality so you can test out options to see which solutions survive the tests imposed by your values. QED.
The third dumb thing about this approach is that it actually undercuts the very thing employers say they value. If your average LA professor has to cut back 20% on deep engagement with her discipline’s content and methodology to teach a marketable skills “unit,” then that’s a 20% reduction in what employers are getting out of a liberal arts education.
Parable 1
You go to the market to buy flour. The shop owner says, What do you like in a good flour? You say, Well, I want flour that comes with some recipes, to make it more useful. So the shop owner tells the miller, Stop spending so much time picking good wheat and milling it, and devote 20% of your time to writing recipes to make the flour more useful to the end-user.
Dumb.
But notice: There’s nothing inherently dumb about recipes, or even about wanting flour to come with recipes. What’s dumb is trying to offload the work onto the wrong expert.
Sin #2
In higher ed, quite often, marketable skills are not defined by the right people. Typically, when we have some big push to embed marketable skills in our curriculum and we want to get “professor buy-in,” what do we do?
You guessed it: We go to a department meeting and ask professors, What marketable skills are you teaching in your courses? Dumb. Professors aren’t employers per se, and LA professors — for all their expertise (and be it noted that I would not trade a bevy of scholars for all the CEOs in Texas) — these profs do not typically have a grounding in what employers are looking for, except impressionistically.
But here’s what’s really dumb: Instead of noticing that the professors’ lack of depth concerning marketable skills is largely due to the commitment, dedication, and sacrifices that these people have made to become experts in their disciplines, we act like they should know what marketable skills are, and worse, that they should be shamed that they don’t.
PARABLE 2
Picture a roomful of higher ed leaders. I ask them, What’s the best way to approach formalizing sentences with multiple quantifiers of overlapping scope? Most of you (you know who you are!) are not going to have a meaningful answer. But you try, drawing on what you do know, and you make up something that sounds plausible.
Now, how would you like me to go around saying things like, Those people and their corner offices! Can you believe how naïve they are about quantifiers? They couldn’t find the scope of a universal quantifier if it bit them on the ankle. How out of touch can a person be?
The moral of this story is: Don’t ask LA professors what marketable skills are; that’s not their thing. Let them (in fact, encourage them, support them, cajole, beg, expect them) do what they are good at, namely, pursuing and teaching students the excellences of their disciplines, through deep engagement with it.
Whether employers and professors speak the same language is actually trivial. What counts is that we teach students how to translate between these cultures. Which means that we do need to find ways to teach this translation process explicitly. But here’s the irony: LA courses actually provide the foundation for this skill because so much of what happens in typical LA courses involves precisely the hermeneutic skills of sensitive translation between interpretive frameworks.
In brief, it is the liberal-artsness of liberal arts education that we can count on and leverage in helping students learn how to market their skills.
Penance
I’ve been critical of the way we usually approach marketable skills, but I want to end on a more constructive note. I propose that the best way to promote and inculcate marketable skills in the liberal arts is to follow three relatively simple principles:
- Support and value professors’ work in pursuing and teaching the excellences of their disciplines. This will ensure that they have the time and the focus to do what employers value in our students, namely, deep engagement with the content and methods of the discipline.
- The best way to define marketable skills is to look at skills that the people making these decisions value as marketable — employers. Once we understand — meaning, really understand — what employers mean, then we know what they value and what they want our students to know and do. Then we can use what we understand to find those skills and expertise, by other names, throughout our curriculum.
- Once we know these alignments between employer and professor languages and cultures, we can create a halo of ancillary services for our students, to help them identify, define, and document the skills employers value.
meā culpā?
If you thought, “Hey, that sounds like a homily” as you read this, congratulations, and thanks for staying awake.
There’s a lot more we need to say about how to make this work, but my point is to help us acknowledge that well-meaning approaches can still be misguided and to get us moving from the theoretical to the practical.
I know some people aren’t going to like this, and to them, I say: Take logic and a course on Melville, and call me in the morning. If that doesn’t do the trick, I’ll be happy to refer you to a liberal arts scholar.
