A Model for Integrating a Career Development Course Program into a College Curriculum

The purpose of this dissertation has been to address the need to practicalize higher education by expanding career coursework into an ongoing career curriculum, beginning in a student’s freshman year of college. Career development needs to serve as a finishing school for a college degree, the place where all a student has learned is combined into an awareness of the talents and skills they have developed, and can now be marketed to potential employers. The working world has become a volatile environment, and we do our students a disservice if we do not properly prepare them for the reality of the workplace of the 21 century by helping them monetize what they’ve learned. Unlike previous generations in which people often worked for one company during their entire career, corporate loyalty and job security are now a thing of the past. “In the postmodern world, changes in the social context and global perspectives have changed the properties of career to one that is described as mobile, self-determined, employer independent, and free of hierarchy” (DeFillippi & Arthur, 1994, p. 309). Unlike their parents, college students today will probably never work for just one employer and then retire. For them, work will mean freelancing. A freelancer is defined as “a person who sells services to employers without a long-term commitment to any of them” (Freelance, n.d.). Chapter One of this paper sets forth a brief background on the issue, the problem and why it is important, and the purpose and significance of the study. Chapter Two is the literature review, and includes an historical overview of career development in the United States, best practice career development courses in higher education, and a A Model for Integrating a Career Development Course Program xii discussion of the theoretical model. Chapter Three deals with the methodology, including the research questions, the subjects to be interviewed, and how the data will be collected. Chapter Four provides the results of the research survey. Chapter Five summarizes the findings, discusses their implications, and presents suggestions and a new model based on those findings. A Model for Integrating a Career Development Course Program 1 Chapter One – Overview The working world has been changing radically in the last few years. Obstacles inherent in navigating the world of work have increased because of the accelerated rate and unpredictable nature of change. for more than a decade, there have been calls for new counseling models to help people deal with the personal, workplace, and career changes they now encounter . (Maglio, Butterfield, & Borgen, 2005, p. 76) After teaching career development courses and coaching hundreds of college and graduate students for many years, the author advocates an overhaul of the manner in which career development is delivered. Rather than simple occasional one-on-one coaching sessions with a career counselor or a semester-long career development course near the end of college (or graduate school), students need to be trained over time to package and market themselves. While there are useful career courses offered at the college level, including the Boston University School of Management’s Charting Your Career Path, and The MBA Career Course (2009) at University of the Pacific, these are insufficient to the challenges facing college graduates in the 21 Century. In present day corporate America, the employment landscape includes layoffs, downsizing, offshoring, outsourcing, mergers, etc. Early retirement is increasingly being offered. With these prospects on the horizon, a college graduate has little alternative but to freelance. “[C]areer uncertainty is a fundamental experience that affects people’s vocational behaviors, attitudes, and emotions . people experience uncertainty because of the changed nature and structure of the world of work” (Trevor-Roberts, 2006, p. 108). Given the new reality of the working world, our role as educators is to properly prepare our students to navigate it. We need to “teach them what they have learned,” A Model for Integrating a Career Development Course Program 2 build their self-confidence about who they have become “a career course can change students’ negative thinking” (Osborn, Howard, & Leierer, 2007, p. 364), help them define and market the specific skills they can now offer, and prepare them to be of service to employers. The Problem and Why the Issue is Important There is a gap in higher education between how students are prepared to enter the workforce and what employers require in new employees. Students complain about not being properly taught how to find work, and employers complain that students do not have a firm sense of what it is they offer and how they can positively impact the needs of a business. It is the author’s belief that because the traditional ways of preparing our students to enter the workforce are insufficient to the freelance workplace of the new century, as educators (and career counselors), our mission must be to modernize – and expand – the manner in which we deliver career training. With shareholders demanding increased profits every quarter, there is enormous pressure on companies to continually lower expenses. Corporate executives are increasingly being forced to reduce the size of their workforce and instead hire people on an as needed basis, thus removing the expense of paying employee benefits. Job insecurity is becoming the norm, so our task as educators is to provide relevant training for our students, the freelancers of the future. A Model for Integrating a Career Development Course Program 3 Concurrent with this trend is the massive retirement of baby boomers. Seventysix million Americans were born during what is known as the baby boom (1946 – 1964). Using 62 (the early retirement age for Social Security) as a guide, millions of boomers began retiring in 2008, when those born in 1946 reached 62. Millions more will do so every year until 2025 (U.S. Department of Labor, 2010). Though many will continue in their current jobs, and others will find new careers and work past the age of 62, millions will permanently retire from the workforce. When they do so, this will have a major impact on the economy, creating a need for younger workers to fill their jobs. In addition, in order for the United States to remain competitive, we will have to prepare our workforce for the unique challenges and opportunities of the global economy. Career training has traditionally focused on helping people acquire marketable skills. However, as companies recruit, train, and promote from a worldwide labor pool, in addition to their skill set, American workers will need to develop a “global mindset” (Rhinesmith, 1992), equipped with an understanding of how the new labor market works. Those with a global mindset are able to look at issues contextually, embrace ambiguity, trust process over structure, perceive change as possibility, value diversity, while striving for continuous self-improvement. This creates the opportunity for institutions of higher education to transcend traditional forms of content delivery by preparing students for a world that requires both technical (the hard) and communication (the soft) skills (Carnevale, 1991). Career educators must ready students for the global marketplace, and career coursework must integrate vocational training into a traditional A Model for Integrating a Career Development Course Program 4 academic education. “The best liberal education may come to be seen as career education; the best career education may be seen to be liberal education" (Zwerling 1992, p. 108). According to Kanter (1991), employment security is becoming "employability security" (p. 9), knowing that one possesses the skills required to find work and the flexibility to expand and adjust them to changing requirements. Just as any business owner is responsible for the growth of his or her company and its ability to adjust and flourish in a changing marketplace, students must be taught to take responsibility for the growth and development of their own careers. Given all these radical changes in the workplace, more needs to be offered to college students than a single career course or an optional hour-long meeting with a career counselor. Training students how to market themselves is a process that can only be learned over time. The first step is understanding the employer’s perspective. Employers today are faced with a number of pressing issues, including those presented in the following sections. No time. Technology, specifically laptops and cell phones, have turned workers into their own secretaries and assistants. Workers in today’s labor market are doing the work that in years past was performed by at least two people. Given their increased workload, employers and hiring managers do not have the time to conduct thorough searches of candidates to fill a particular job opening. A Model for Integrating a Career Development Course Program 5 Too many resumes. Companies typically receive hundreds of resumes in response to any job posting, and no longer have the time to read through all of them. They resort to their “informal network” of friends and colleagues to find appropriate candidates for any job opening. Nobel laureate Herbert Simon (1957) coined the term “satisficing,” meaning that it is human nature to settle for the first solution or alternative that meets our minimum requirements. This is a necessary and pragmatic approach, especially whenever we face many choices. Thus the best candidates for a position are often never interviewed, and the person ultimately hired is someone referred by a trusted colleague, and simply “good enough” to do the job. Need to minimize risk. Given they generally no longer have the time to properly conduct due diligence on the people they interview, it is more prudent for employers to rely on their own network of contacts. Job cand