"Field Notes" is an occasional Connect column covering practical and philosophical issues facing admissions and registrar professionals. The columns are authored by various AACRAO members. If you have an idea for a column and would like to contribute, please send an email to the editor at connect@aacrao.org.
by Lesa K. Beals, Senior Associate Registrar, Purdue University
There has been a buzz about competency-based degree programs. According to proponents, they allow a shorter time to degree, lower costs and lead to a more-prepared employee.
But does a degree in a competency-based program make landing a job easier? Does showing an employer a list of competencies make someone a more desirable hire? Not necessarily, according to the research. Here’s why, and some ideas about the work that still needs to be done.
Employers may not know what competencies they’re looking for
I did a little research to determine how employers have been responding to the idea of a different kind of credential. The following chart is based on Monica Herk’s Committee for Economic Development research into the skills are sought after by employers today.
Based on this chart, it’s clear that identifying a candidate for employment with these top sought-after skills will be difficult if just using the traditional transcript. For example, most institutions don’t offer a three credit course in “Customer Service.” Given this, one would think institutions would strive to have a degree that includes a list of competencies. However, “[e]mployers remain generally unable to articulate discrete needs as competencies; they rely instead on hiring generalizations grounded in the traditional idea of ‘fit’ that lack the specificity needed to create an effective competency map,” according to an article on Competency-Based Higher Education written by Chip Franklin and Robert Lyle and published by AEI Series (2016).
“Employers traditionally approach hiring decisions from a generalist perspective, focusing on an applicant’s general skill set and overall fit within a company rather than the targeted skills required for a specific job opportunity,” Lyle and Franklin write. “Although some employers believe that this generalized approach helps them hire the right people, nearly two-thirds think that they could be doing better at identifying students with the skill set required for the specific job.”
Their research also suggests that hiring managers find it difficult to clearly identify the competencies required for their positions. As I watched my faculty colleagues invest their time to peel apart their degree programs to identify the competencies that make up their degree, I can appreciate a hiring manager’s difficulty. Many hiring managers or even human resource representatives may struggle with this same task.
Looking forward
As a Competency Based Education Network (CBEN) partner, I take these issues as a challenge to our membership and other stakeholders. It will take all of us with the drive to move competency-based education forward. The partnership is daunting, but it’s possible. Questions to consider include:
- Do we undertake hundreds of partnerships across the country with targeted employers to review job descriptions to peel apart the competencies?
- Do we develop training for employers to teach them how to do it for themselves?
- Does add this competency to our degree programs now allow our graduates to use it later in their careers as they become the hiring manager?
Answers likely emerge as we try a combination of the above and other strategies.
This isn’t an empirical study on this topic by any means. However, if even with my casual research I found many studies suggesting similar concerns we all have much work to do. I find this work very exciting as we consider transforming the age-old framework of an academic record and traditional degree. We are making history AACRAO. I look forward to working with many of you on this challenge.
For more information about AACRAO’s work moving beyond the traditional transcript, click here.