Comments on: Whose university, and why? pt1.

By: Pat Parslow

Pat Parslow — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 15:36:36 +0000

@David I think there is a difference between what line managers, senior managers and HR people want, which is one of the things which gives rise to the beautifully phrased issue you raise.Senior managers want independent self-starters who can manage their own time, to work under their line managers who they would prefer to do exactly as they are told in a more-or-less autonomous way but reporting back with detailed figures which will never be read at least on a monthly schedule.Line managers want excellent team players who will do exactly what they are told to do on demand. In some cases, they like ones who can be assigned tasks and act autonomously within a tight specification without oversight, but those actually appear to be rather rare.HR people want everyone to accept low pay, long hours, be newly qualified with up to date technical skills and at least 5 years commercial experience.I think this multi-faceted beast then tries to influence universities to change curricula to fit their needs. One of the things that they all appear to agree on is that graduates need transferable skills. This is presumably so that the employers don’t need to spend money on re-training the graduates to be able to do the actual jobs the employers think they want to employ them to do. I say ‘think’ because the advertised jobs are seldom related in any strong way to the actual roles people end up in once employed. But anyway, the fascinating thing is that while those transferable skills might be thought to be, oh I don’t know, being an independent learner, what the universities seem to end up teaching as transferable skills are, well, writing CVs. Which may not be quite what the employers had in mind…

By: David Kernohan

David Kernohan — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 15:19:42 +0000

@David pretty much like medieval clerics, then? 🙂

By: David White

David White — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 15:18:28 +0000

In my experience employers want independent self-starters who can manage their own time, are excellent team players and will do exactly what they are told to do on demand…

By: David Kernohan

David Kernohan — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 15:14:39 +0000

@David I think it’s more a shift in perception and purpose rather than an activity. As I’ve said in elsewhere employers generally don’t know what they want, so the fact that we all troop along after what they think they want is both silly and a cornerstone of HE policy.I wonder if there were similar discussions between the Church and the University of Oxford in C14th? 🙂

By: David White

David White — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 15:10:57 +0000

I’m not convinced that vocational specialization within HE is actually serving employers well. Are universities really responding to the needs of employers or the desire of individuals to improve their CVs?