Employability, the buzzword in recent days, is defined as “the capability to move self-sufficiently within the labour market to realize potential through sustainable employment.“
In simpler words, it means having a set of skills, knowledge, understanding, and personal attributes that allow a person to choose and secure occupations in which he/she can be satisfied and successful.
At present, the essential career skills are Critical Thinking, Problem-Solving, Teamwork, Collaboration, Communication, Emotional Intelligence, Creativity, Initiative, ability to deal with complexity and ambiguity. For an individual, the ultimate goal is to develop these essential soft skills along with specific hard skills get a job and secure the future. Colleges are expected to develop these essential career skills in their students for higher employability and a successful future. However, the question is, are they doing enough?
Students enrol in a university with an aim to get a good job. But if institutions are unable to develop and nurture them with the desired in-demand skills, students have a hard time getting into jobs and growing. This often leads to under-employment and unemployment. Such a situation is common because colleges and universities are bound by rules, regulations and specific curriculums highly focused on building hard skills and less on soft skills.
Many of the global universities are taking several innovative steps to make their graduates more employable. They're helping students develop the desired soft skills to get a job (dressing, interview technique, what makes a good resume), which is never simple. And most importantly, they help people understand how to operate after they join an organization. There are modules about being an effective colleague, managing people, and making a difference.
Despite all such attempts, there is still a skills gap. Organizations around the world are reporting an increasing lack of job skills’. Recruiters state that the workforce lacks the hard skills and job (soft) skills required to fill the ever-increasing number of high-skilled jobs today, ranging from entry-level positions for college graduates to leadership roles within an organization.
As per the Wiley Education Services and Future Workplace report, the skills gap grew 12% last year (WES/FW). Also, the world is evolving; we live in the information age where the trend is shifting in favour of highly skilled knowledge workers. The 2018 Future of Jobs Report estimates that 75 million jobs will be displaced by 2022 in 20 major economies due to the skills gap, and these are the three key reasons:
- Technology acceleration
- Unprepared management
- Lack of Essential Skills
Needless to mention, the skill gap is real, and there's compelling evidence for it:
Introducing an employability-related skills & leadership programs in education lead by 3rd party is one of the best bets for colleges and universities to tackle the skills gap issue. Such programs can help students develop the essential employability & leadership skills, allowing them to perform their best in new workplaces from day one and excel in life.
Why LeaderU is a complete skilling program for college and universities?
LeaderU is FranklinCovey's global leadership & career skilling certification program, which is specially designed for higher education institutions.
It helps help students and individuals become principled leaders by mastering over 30 essential professional competencies with its programs.
It bridges the career-readiness gap by offering a plethora of prebuilt self-paced courses, a resource library for college professors, and a leadership certification for the prebuilt self-paced courses. All the courses on the LeaderU platform consist of video lesson modules, exercises, quizzes, assessments, discussions & assignments, recorded webinars, and additional resources for each course module. Also, students get an internationally recognized certificate on successfully passing the certification exam to help them step ahead on the leadership & career success ladder.
For three decades, FranklinCovey has been training leaders from the world's most respected organizations, including Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, and education institutions.
Instead of focusing directly on teaching and improving leadership skills, LeaderU focuses on helping learners reflect upon their character and paradigms to help see leadership attributes in an entirely new light. In this process, learners get to recognize their strengths and weaknesses and the root cause of their actions. LeaderU then helps them adopt the See-Do-Get model to polish their leadership skill and prepares them to become a principles-based leader to achieve lasting results.
LeaderU is not just for your students but is also for your faculty.
Click the button below to get in touch with the LeaderU team to know how the program can help your students and staff
