by Alan Kantrow
Employers the world over tell us that what truly counts in hiring decisions is not the rote knowledge that helps college students answer examination questions, but skills and competencies that are essential for, and often developed at, work. To be useful, the bricks of modern education need the straw of experience-based skills. Bricks without straw tend to crumble; they cannot support weight, as has been known from Biblical times.
That should be common sense by now. McKinsey’s reports on education-for-employment initiatives drew the same linkages. And research by Ithaka for Innovate+Educate confirms that prior job performance is twice as effective a predictor of future performance as an academic degree; a job tryout is four times as effective; and a cognitive skills assessment, five times as effective as a paper degree.
Innovations in education based on skills have shown promise. So have competency-based curricular innovations by colleges such as BYU/Idaho, Southern New Hampshire University, and Western Governors’ University. And a few smart companies in the U.S. — such as Bradner Village, Berner Food & Beverage, Covidian Health Care, CG Power Systems, Energizer, Inova Health Systems, PGT Industries, Steelscape, and Subaru (in Indiana) — have started relying on skills-based hiring techniques to pick candidates. (These case studies can be read at www.act.org/workforce/case and www.newoptionsnm.info/employers.php.)
As a result, these companies have seen major performance improvements: A 25-75% reduction in turnover, a 40-70% reduction in time to hire, a 70% reduction in cost to hire, and a 50% reduction in time to train. “Instead of just getting anyone who has a piece of paper of some kind from somewhere, [these companies hire] someone who can do the job. This distinction matters,” states the Ithaka report.
To link education to meaningful outcomes, what’s needed is the ability in colleges to assess — in detail and at scale — the development of real world-relevant skills. That’s an area ripe for collaboration between the educational and corporate worlds. Because companies have a lot of experience in assessing such skills, managers can be valuable discussion partners for leaders of colleges as they move to build learning experiences that link skill-related outcomes with programs and curricula.
Assessing skills is tough, but not impossible. The Collegiate Learning Assessment and its new version, CLA+, are already in use by over 700 institutions around the world. What these instruments do is assess the effectiveness of college courses in developing not discipline-based knowledge, but the ability to “analyze and evaluate information, solve problems, and communicate effectively.” The results often shock faculty, who are more comfortable in teaching content than in developing their students’ critical thinking and communication skills.
Even in emerging markets, the discipline of skill assessment, though far from perfect, is no longer virgin territory. In India, for instance, Aspiring Minds has studied a range of sectors, identified the key roles and positions for new hires in each of them, and mapped a spectrum of skill requirements under the umbrella of a rigorous, integrative competency framework.
In parallel, Aspiring Minds has created a modular, computer-based assessment instrument, the Aspiring Minds Computer Adaptive Test, which more than a million graduates of 2,000 different colleges in India have taken. The result is deep, fact-based insights into the fit between different segments (by institution, gender, geography, and so on) of students and the requirements of specific employment opportunities. This is helping to improve the employ-ability of the millions who would otherwise pass out of India’s colleges without mastering the things they need to know in order to be effective in the workplace.
Nowhere in the world can bricks without straw carry weight any more.
Article originally appeared HBR