Defusing a ticking time bomb by getting graduates jobs

With graduate unemployment recognised as a ticking time bomb in many countries, innovative ways to get graduates into jobs were presented at the International Finance Corporation (IFC) conference held in Dubai this month.

They included special preparatory courses to make students more employable and aligning curricula more closely with industry needs.

In particular, in disadvantaged areas access to quality education is crucial if students are to be employable. Often the poorest students only have recourse to low quality institutions and emerge with inadequate skills that leave them unattractive to employers.

But it is not just a problem of oversupply of graduates as the university sector expands in many countries.

Some “30% of employers globally say they do not find enough people for the jobs that they have,” Gassan Al-Kibsi, managing partner at McKinsey and Company in Saudi Arabia, told the IFC’s conference on private education held in Dubai from 6-8 March.

Top-up courses for graduates, devised with industry in mind, can bridge the gap between academic courses and working life.

Such courses are organised to supplement university degrees and are often provided by private or non-profit institutions. “Government institutions are often unable to understand employers’ needs,” Al-Kibsi said.

The IFC – the Washington-based private funding arm of the World Bank – is investing in a number of projects around the world to boost employment prospects, particularly in the wake of the Arab Spring, which was sparked by disaffected youth.

China

The Arab world is not the only region suffering from graduate unemployment.

In China, where graduate joblessness has rocketed in recent years, an innovative local company Ambow Education has set up 30 ‘career enhancement’ centres around the country including in Beijing, Guangzhou, Kunshan and Dalian, where the government has provided a purpose-built campus, but also in disadvantaged areas.

Ambow courses help students who have graduated from lower-tier universities to improve their job prospects in the information technology sector in China, where even internships in companies can be hard to come by.

It has an extraordinary 500 university partners and 10,000 corporate partners.

“The university curriculum is out of date. So because of the mismatch, graduates need six to eight months [in-house] training in order to become employable. We partner with companies, understand their skills and needs, then form the curriculum,” said Jin Huang, Ambow founder and CEO, who said that the organisation works with major IT companies like CISCO to devise the bridging curriculum.

Ambow now claims a 95% job placement rate for students, who pay fees to attend university upgrade courses that last two to three months. “It does not replace [on-the-job] training but can shorten it,” she said, describing the job preparation courses as the “last mile in education”.

It is an impressive statistic, with 80% of students being from disadvantaged regions and not from the most prestigious universities.

With the rapid growth of universities in China in recent years there is fierce competition for qualified job candidates, Huang said. At the same time the skills deficit “has become a bottleneck for companies to further grow their business. Sixty percent of companies report that graduates lack the necessary skills.”

According to Huang, it is not the role of research universities to prepare graduates for jobs as they must “concentrate on innovation”. Meanwhile vocational institutions are preparing students for specific sectors such as engineering or nursing rather than upgrading generic employment skills.

So there is nothing to help the general graduate become more employable. “Right after training with us, they find a high-salary job,” she said. “We are also providing a service to companies to provide them with better quality graduates.”

Arab world

In Egypt an innovative non-profit foundation is also bridging the gap between graduate qualifications and business skills.

“The classical problem in the Arab world, and Egypt is one of them, is that the university graduate does not have much to do with business requirements,” said Moataz Al-Alfi, CEO of Egypt’s Americana group, the Middle East’s largest food conglomerate, and vice-chair of the Future Generation Foundation (FGF), a non-profit organisation.

Through FGF, students are trained in basic business skills using specialists who give them “a lot of tools to help them join the business market,” said Al-Alfi.

“We have developed the programme to suit more specific business requirements. In the beginning it was more generic business requirements,” he said. Now they have added skills such as marketing, tourism and information technology. “The investment is really worthwhile because it gets you a job.”

Since its inception FGF has grown into one of the largest organisations of its kind in the Arab world, enabling 100,000 or 93% of its graduates to find jobs – many of them out of work for three to four years.

“We are now teaching other NGOs what we are doing, and starting to multiply what we have done to deliver through the community,” Al-Alfi said.

Latin America

Elsewhere, though many people from disadvantaged communities have managed to scrimp and save to obtain a university education, they continue to have the biggest problems finding jobs.

The non-profit private UNIMINUTO – Corporación Universitaria Minuto de Dios in Colombia offers academic programmes to students in poor neighbourhoods in big cities and indigenous regions, so that students can remain in their towns “and work for the development of the region,” Leonidas López Herrán, the rector of UNIMINUTO, told University World News.

“Many of them are the first in their families to go to university.”

UNIMINUTO rents or shares buildings with local education institutions in order to keep tuition fees affordable. But it is links with industry that ensure courses are designed with jobs in mind.

“We work together with the different sectors in [outlying] areas, such as coffee and rice, and we develop a curriculum that is relevant to these sectors,” said López, adding: “We are very close to employers."

“There must be closer proximity between companies and institutions of higher education in order to train the workers that Latin American companies require. This is where technical training takes on a vital role,” said Jaime Alcalde, rector of Duoc UC in Chile, whose name derives from the Spanish acronym of the university department for workers and farmers, Departamento Universitario Obrero y Campesino.

Duoc UC has 70,000 students on a dozen campuses, many of them from disadvantaged backgrounds and three-quarters of them the first in their families to benefit from higher education.

IFC funding helps reduce the interest on student loans and has enabled Duoc UC to expand into technical sectors such as construction, health care and engineering, where there is local demand for skills.

Alcalde said a competency-based curriculum and links with industry were behind the success of Duoc UC. It was not simply vocational education, but included other softer skills. “We’ve used models from Australia and from India,” he said, referring to the Tata institutes in India.

“First we define the profile of the [ideal] graduate with the help of industry. The link-up with institutions of higher education is critical for companies, so that training requirements can be identified and the former can be informed of companies’ state-of-the-art developments,” Alcalde said.