Thinking About Working Issue #10
Written by Noah Leavitt, Director of the Career and Community Engagement Center
“One man [sic] can be a crucial ingredient on a team but one man cannot make a team.” — Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
“When you need to innovate, you need collaboration.” – Marissa Mayer
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 what extent employers value new hires’ ability to work effectively with their colleagues.
NACE found that 98% of employers rated teamwork as either very or extremely important when considering job candidates. 98%! The message is clear: if you are going to make your way through the volatile, energized, hybrid world of work in 2022 you are going to need a strong skill set focusing on how you relate with people all around you. (NACE has been particularly interested in tracking the importance of collaboration and teamwork, as that is one of the eight areas of their Competencies for a Career-Ready Workforce initiative)
NACE also found, however, that 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. However, my colleagues and I in the Career and Community Engagement Center have noticed that often students have not been invited to “unpack” their college experiences in terms of collaboration and team-building skills sets. They are having these experiences, but they do not yet appreciate the ways that those experiences will be of interest to employers outside of higher education.
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. They were also able to learn the importance of being aware of their non-job-related activities and how they could refer to them in their resumes, cover letters and interviews. (Take a look at the article that Shelly shared with the students that explains how to articulate your collaboration skills.)
Of course, collaboration takes place in-person and on-line (and often, both!). While in-person is more common for students on campus, when students graduate they will be interacting in a larger arena. In response to a recent question about advice several alumni pointed to resources that students might want to become familiar with or try. Design thinking expert Katie Krummeck ’03 noted in the Whitman LinkedIn community that she “can’t live” without MURAL. Youth development leader Dan Prince ’87 noted in Whitman Connect’s “Calling All Whitties” community that he finds CoCreative to be an energizing resource for online collaboration. (In the CCEC we have found Slack to be an effective easy-to-use tool to increase our creative interaction this year.)
One important result of these kinds of online tools is that collaboration can become more accessible and inclusive. Similarly, in a recent article from the Sloan School at MIT, “How to make ‘work of the future’ work for everyone,” the authors note that collaboration between new employees and supervisors/managers will increase in importance for how work is done.
Because May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, I will leave you with a powerful idea from serial entrepreneur Charn Bak, featured in this week’s important Forbes article “Collaborative Lessons From Three AAPI Business Owners”:
“I think amazing things can happen with collaboration and believe relationships are the most important thing over any personal or business success. I would not have had the same experience without the ability to collaborate with talented founders and teams who shared the same vision to help each other as we grow. Some of the most memorable times I had were collaborating because it forces you to work together to produce a win-win with various folks.”
This is my final post of the semester. Congratulations to all students on reaching the end of the ’21-22 academic year. Over the next few months I’d love to hear about your summer and post-Commencement adventures and I invite you to stay in touch via email (leavitns@whitman.edu) and / or LinkedIn. Keep thinking about working!