Teaching the One Skill Employers Desire Most

• Too often, administrators and faculty fear that if they focus too heavily on marketable skills, their colleges and universities will turn into vocational schools. But this is far from the case.
• Ensuring that students develop skill sets in areas related to adaptability might be the best way that colleges and universities can reverse society’s declining confidence in higher education.
• Once students are made aware of the importance of adaptability to their future careers, they will be more likely to seek out opportunities to develop related skills.

Parents and students are increasingly assessing the value of a traditional college degree through a more practical lens. Students are asking discerning questions: Will higher education help me stand out from peers when competing for jobs? Given the pace of technological advancement, will what I learn today still be relevant in a few years? And, most importantly, is the total cost that I pay for college worth the return?

As educators, we should be asking ourselves these same questions. Instead of bristling at our stakeholders’ rising skepticism, we should embrace it and adjust. The reality is that “traditional” course content simply may not be good enough anymore. With the proliferation of YouTube videos, LinkedIn Learning options, and any number of online education platforms, students can learn just about anything they want from the comfort of their couches.

But that said, we in higher ed can add real value if we do one thing in particular: couple course content and experiences with the application of concrete skills. In doing so, we enable our students to demonstrate the trait that is most in demand among employers: adaptability. Students who cultivate this skill won’t just be better prepared to navigate change. They also will be more likely to develop greater self-awareness, pursue their passions, and graduate with richer learning journeys to share with potential employers.

Unfortunately, in higher ed we too often lump all skills into the derogated bin of “vocational training.” But teaching adaptability will not turn universities into vocational schools. It will, however, prepare our graduates to thrive in the workplace, regardless of their degrees. If we teach adaptability correctly, we can make every major we offer more valuable and show our stakeholders that the cost of our programs is well worth the return.

Making the Case for Adaptability

In fact, teaching our students to adapt to the changing world may be our best response to the public’s declining confidence in higher education. Collectively, U.S. institutions have seen a precipitous drop in enrollments—this has been especially true for the humanities, where enrollments have declined by 25 percent since 2012.

A recent article in The New Yorker, “The End of the English Major,” reports humanities majors have fallen by more than 50 percent at some colleges and universities. This trend has impacted both private and public institutions. No discipline will fare well if its curriculum does not respond to change.

By coupling course content and experiences with the application of concrete skills, higher education will enable students to demonstrate the trait that is most in demand among employers: adaptability.

Like universities themselves, students must develop the skills to adapt to a changing world. Throughout their careers, large outside forces—such as economic shocks, global competition, and new technologies—will impact their work and organizations. But as employees, our students will also be forced to adapt frequently to much smaller, internal shifts in the workplace. They must work on projects involving different teams, sets of tasks, and routines. They must face ill-defined challenges with different demands, work within different resource constraints, and take on shifting leadership roles.

The more adaptable employees are, the more they will be able to respond to the diverse and dynamic changes that occur across projects, collaborators, technologies, and time horizons. By learning this one skill, they increase their value to employers substantially.

Revealing the ‘Hidden Curriculum’

To prepare students to meet the challenges of rapid change, however, colleges first must design programs that help them combine passion with practicality. By this, I mean that, to learn critical skills such as adaptability, students should not have to choose between subjects about which they are highly passionate and those that seem more practical and economically viable. We should help them cultivate practical, career-ready skills, no matter what their majors.

Unfortunately, most colleges and universities address such skills development through what I call “a hidden curriculum” that isn’t always apparent to students. In other words, students might have opportunities to build the skills for adaptability—whether by taking classes outside their majors, pursuing double majors, completing extracurricular projects, or taking on leadership roles on campus. But we often do not provide them with a formal framework that makes the content of this “hidden” curriculum explicit.

As an example, students might be passionate about history. But if what they learn in their history courses is not directly tied to the skills they will need to find meaningful jobs, this is an opportunity lost. Even worse, some students who love history might decide to major in another field that does not interest them as much, simply to ensure they can find jobs after graduation. This scenario invites a whole new set of problems when, years from now, our graduates find themselves in jobs that do not fulfill them.

That’s why it’s so important for us to add content and experiences to our courses that will make students more aware of the importance of adaptability. By making our hidden curricula visible, we can build the missing bridge that connects their passions to the realities of the world of work.

University administrators and faculty can be extremely reluctant to build such bridges—that is, to emphasize skills development in the context of college education. Their reluctance stems from a line of thinking that pits us (college) versus them (vocational training). Some academics even view skills development as beneath them. And it’s the students who suffer as a result.

We must change our collective mindset. We must no longer frame traditional college education as antagonistic to the acquisition of skills, or vice versa. Instead, we must recognize that higher education can serve more than one goal.

Adopting the C+MAC Framework

All key stakeholders—students, parents, faculty, and employers—would benefit if higher education adopted a method to teach skills related to adaptability. I explored this idea in a recent study, “The Skills That Help Employees Adapt: Empirical Validation of a Four-Category Framework.” In this paper, I outline a framework that higher education institutions could use to help their communities cultivate adaptability on a broad scale. This framework is based on four interconnected sets of skills related to adaptability. I call it C+MAC, which stands for Cognition + Motivation, Action, and Connection.

The four key areas of C+MAC each encompass a set of actions, as well as a subset of six skills or attributes that make those actions possible:

Cognition (can do)—Actions within this category include gathering, organizing, and processing information; drawing insights from that information; responding to unexpected events; and coming up with solutions to challenges. The six skills of Cognition include organizing, problem-solving, planning and reflecting, analyzing and focusing on details, conducting quantitative evaluations, and developing expertise in a discipline or field of study.

Motivation (will do)—Actions include persisting through obstacles, bouncing back from failures, and engaging in work that needs to be done even when that work is not of one’s choosing. The six attributes of Motivation include intrinsic engagement, grit and work ethic, resilience, determination and purpose, dedication, growth mindset, and desire to master one’s chosen field.

Action (do alone)—Actions include generating ideas, executing and testing those ideas, leading efforts for change, and influencing others. The Action area encompasses leadership, the power to influence others, the ability to execute plans, behavioral flexibility, bias for action, creativity, and entrepreneurial initiative.

Connection (do with others)—Actions include coordinating large collective tasks, collaborating with others, and managing conflict when it arises. The Connection area requires important social skills such as teamwork, collaboration, oral and written communication, social tact, empathy, interpersonal ability, and intercultural intelligence.

Adaptability in Action

Before students can practice honing their skills, they first need to know what they are trying to cultivate. That’s why, after I present the C+MAC framework to students in my classroom, I ask them to conduct 360-degree assessments of themselves—a first for many of them. They evaluate how well they demonstrate these skills and reflect on how others view their strengths and weaknesses. It can be an eye-opening experience for them to see differences between their self-evaluated scores in each category and those given by their peers.

As part of the 360-degree assessment, students write personal reports and then work together to identify which coursework or campus experiences contribute to learning skills in these four areas. Once they’ve learned the framework, they have no problem quickly identifying the learning experiences that will help them strengthen each skill set.

Students might be passionate about history, but if what they learn in their history courses is not tied to the skills they will need to find meaningful jobs, this is an opportunity lost.

For example, students who score lower in Cognition might consider taking a psychology course that will help them develop skills in decision-making and problem-solving, or they might decide to take a statistics course where they can work on their quantitative and analytical skills. Those who score lower in Motivation could take special advantage of learning opportunities that arise during long-term projects that present frequent obstacles.

To hone Action skills, students could deliberately take courses in leadership, entrepreneurship, and social innovation. To build strengths in Connection, they might take courses in the social sciences on human behavior, or look for opportunities to develop empathy, teamwork, and communication skills during their group projects and presentations.

With this knowledge in hand, my students now have fresh perspectives and are better able to identify future opportunities that could further enhance those skills. One class even created a resource for incoming students that recommends courses, experiences, and student organizations that can contribute to building skills in each area.

The Long-Term Value of Higher Ed

When we clearly emphasize the importance of adaptability in all courses, we show our students that the courses where they can pursue their passions can also serve them after graduation. In addition, we make it far easier for them to explain the long-term value of their passion-driven course selections to their parents and to describe their learning journeys in compelling ways that will resonate with future employers.

The framework provides faculty with clear guidelines for how they can adjust their syllabi to incorporate these competencies, show students how these skills are interrelated, and motivate students to seek out opportunities to practice them. More broadly, administrators can use the framework to reflect on the curricula they offer and explicitly link relevant experiences, all with the understanding that doing so will not take away from or cheapen course content.

Educators can—and should—meet the moment in which we find ourselves, by designing curricula that combine the accumulation of subject matter expertise with the cultivation of adaptability. If we provide such learning opportunities to students, we can prove that the economic benefits of a college education far outweigh its cost.