Three years ahead of industry

Universities need to keep well ahead of industry in order to engage with it productively, a Sydney skills symposium heard last week.

Peter Booth, senior deputy vice-chancellor of the University of Technology, Sydney, said a culture of engagement and an ability to listen were the critical pre-requisites for turning out industry-ready graduates.

“Universities generally are not very good at listening,” he told the Service Skills Australia forum.

But Professor Booth said universities also needed to be prepared to debate industry advice and “deal with the mismatches”. An example, he said, was the clash between the future-oriented agenda of universities and the “one to two year horizon” of industry.

“We’ve got a four to five year pipeline. We’ve got to think about what graduates are going to be doing in five years’ time, not the current industry problem.

“Sometimes industry advice is not future oriented; it’s about the here and now. It would be a great disservice to our graduates to focus on the here and now.”

Professor Booth said universities also needed to get a good spread of industry views. He said that when it came to perceptions about the ideal attributes of new recruits, CEOs often had quite different ideas from the HR staff who did the recruiting.

Anthony Bohm, CEO of distance learning provider Cengage Education, said industry was a broad church. He said this made it difficult for institutions to obtain consistent views when they sought feedback on whether their qualifications were “truly producing job-ready graduates”.

“Industry is not homogenous – even if you take the marketing section, the advertising guys have a very different view of the world from PR,” Mr Bohm said.

But he said institutions were doomed to failure if they started teaching subjects called ‘employability skills’.
“You have to integrate it into the content as you’re delivering the course,” he said.

“As a private provider, we live and die on the success of our graduates. The first order priority for us is to ensure that the graduates have the knowledge, skills, experience and attributes for that industry.”

Professor Booth said academics tended to “overfill the curriculum”, and needed to focus on graduate attributes rather than content. “You’ve got to get back to the core knowledge and skills,” he said.

“And you need systems and practices that facilitate that. For example, no course can get through our approval system unless it’s got documented industry input.”

He said UTS was a “qualifications factory”, like all universities.

“We’re about issuing degrees; that’s at least a third of what we do,” he said.

“But the thing is, does this qualification resonate with a workforce solution? Does it produce graduates of the future who are both job-ready and job-evolved – that is, will they evolve with the job?”

Mr Bohm said a lot of engagement between educational institutions and industry was too superficial.

“People come, nice lunch, tick, been here, thanks very much. [Or] you can do it to the extent of validating some assessments – fabulous. We try to take a more holistic approach.”