By Noah Leavitt, director of the Career and Community Engagement Center.
The ability to collaborate, and to effectively communicate that ability, may be the most powerful assets that Whitman students can take into the world of work in 2022.
Throughout this semester I have been sharing knowledge from our partners at the National Association of Colleges and Employers, the go-to resource for tracking what is happening when students move from higher education into the economy. NACE recently shared attention-getting findings from a recent investigation into the extent that employers value new hires’ ability to work effectively with their colleagues.
NACE found that 98% of employers rated teamwork as either “very important” or “extremely important” when considering job candidates. 98%! However, a much smaller percentage of employers surveyed (78 %) said that they believe that students applying to work for them are very or extremely proficient in teamwork. That’s a significant gap and one that bears intentional focus by college career centers and other offices helping students pay attention to this aspect of their backgrounds.
At Whitman and other small liberal arts colleges, much of what happens outside and inside of classrooms is collaborative. As a result of this awareness, we are constantly talking with students about how to translate college work into professional assets. Just last week, my CCEC colleague Shelly Rasmussen and her team of student consultants hosted a well-attended workshop on team building. Students were able to create lists of group/collaborative opportunities and then reflect on skills that they were able to refine and develop during those opportunities.
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