General education is not the problem. The problem is that many institutions have not designed a coherent employability architecture.
Students develop the skills, attributes, and professional habits that constitute employability across general education, the major, co-curricular learning, work-related experiences, assessment, career services, and employer engagement. But these components are often managed separately, assessed separately, and treated as separate parts rather than as elements of a connected architecture. The result is that institutions may be developing employability in important ways without being able to see it, coordinate it, improve it, or make it visible to students, employers, accreditors, and the public.
At the end of my last blog post on general education, I suggested that the next step for many institutions should not be another list of skills. It should be a structured exploration of how general education, the major, co-curricular learning, assessment, work-integrated learning, and employer expectations fit together to strengthen employability. The response to that post reinforced the point: the issue is not general education alone. It is the institution’s employability architecture.
An institution’s employability architecture is the set of learning experiences, work-related experiences, career supports, assessments, employer relationships, and feedback loops through which students develop and demonstrate the skills, attributes, and professional habits that constitute employability. The employability architecture must also by future-focused. It includes general education, the major, co-curricular learning, work-integrated learning, assessment, career services, employer engagement, and feedback from students, alumni, and employers. General education is an important part of this architecture, but only one part. Each component matters because employability is developed across the student experience, not in a single course, office, requirement, or workshop. The employability architecture must also be future-focused. It is not enough to ask whether students are prepared for today’s work. Institutions also need to ask whether their employability architecture is preparing students for multiple possible futures of work.
The Responsibility Problem
Every component of the employability architecture is managed by a different part of the institution. Because of this, the components of the employability architecture are often disconnected. This is both a leadership problem and an organizational problem.
If multiple institutional components contribute to employability but no one is responsible for the architecture, the institution will struggle to improve it. Assigning responsibility for the employability architecture, whether through a single leader, a cross-functional structure, or a standing leadership group, can strengthen coordination across the components. But leadership alone is not sufficient; silos can exist even with unified leadership. This is why the organizational structure is so important. It must facilitate communication across the architecture and also incorporate employers into it. Employers are not just recipients of an institution’s graduates; they should be participants in shaping and improving the architecture. But most institutions have not built that relationship into the design of the architecture in a systematic way.
What This Produces
When an effective leadership and organizational structure for the architecture does not exist, three things tend to happen.
Students experience the architecture’s components as disconnected. As I noted in the last post, this is not just a communication problem. It is a design problem. Students complete general education requirements, move through the major, and participate in co-curricular and work-related experiences without a clear sense of how these components connect to one another or to their futures.
Second, employability gets developed unevenly. Some students develop the skills, attributes, and professional habits employers value. Many do not. This is because the components rarely share with one another what they are observing about students’ development of employability-related skills, attributes, and professional habits.
Finally, many institutions cannot tell how well employability is being developed because they are not examining the architecture as a whole. No one can answer the question that matters most: where across the student experience is employability actually being developed, where are the gaps, and what evidence do we have?
Why This Matters Now
The institutions that will prepare graduates well are not the ones relying on the addition of a general education requirement or another career readiness workshop. They are the institutions that examine their entire employability architecture and ask hard questions about how effective it is.
Many institutions cannot answer basic questions about where and how their students are developing the skills, attributes, and professional habits that constitute employability. This matters not only for students, but also for institutional credibility, accreditation evidence, employer trust, and the public case for the value of higher education. It becomes a compounding problem as work changes. Institutions that cannot map their current employability architecture, or that discover the architecture is not working well, have a weak foundation for preparing students for multiple possible futures of work.
The Question Worth Asking
Three questions can provide insight on the effectiveness of an institution’s employability architecture.
1. Can you map your institution’s employability architecture?
2. Can you identify who is responsible for each part?
3. Can you see where the connections are strong and where the gaps are?
If the answer to any of these questions is no, that is where the work should begin. Not with a new framework or a revised set of learning outcomes, but with an honest examination of what the student experience is actually designed to develop, whether the architecture is coordinated well enough to achieve those goals, whether the architecture’s components have a shared understanding of employability, and whether there are feedback mechanisms to identify how well students and alumni are demonstrating the skills, attributes, and professional habits that constitute employability. This is the foundation from which institutions can begin to design for the future of employability.