Employers ‘must accept’ graduates are not ‘finished product’

Employers in the Arab region increasingly expect graduates to be “the finished product”, but universities need to push back against this and place more responsibility for skill development on industry, a conference was told.

Speaking at the Times Higher Education Arab Universities Summit, Yusra Mouzughi, provost at the University of Birmingham Dubai, described an increasingly fraught relationship with recruiters, telling delegates: “We need to manage expectations with employers.”

“Graduates are not the finished product. They are not going to be ready to land into a job and operate at 100 per cent. No university is able to do that,” she explained.

Even junior doctors, who have several years of vocational hospital work experience, will “not be left alone with patients”, she added.

In recent years, there has been “more and more” expectation from employers, who expect universities to produce “these fantastic graduates who are just going to come in and lead the department”.

“But that’s not going to happen,” Professor Mouzughi continued. “We also need to contextualise some of that expectation that the role of universities is to create critical independent thinkers. That’s as far as we’re going to get, and we’d do really well if we do that.”

Graduates in the workplace still need to adapt to new organisational cultures and politics, which is the responsibility of employers to oversee, she said.

Professor Mouzughi was speaking in the context of the region’s youth unemployment crisis and skills gap, which emerged as a key theme throughout the conference at the University of Dubai, as between 25 per cent and 30 per cent of the region’s young people do not have jobs.

Cameron Mirza, chief of party for Jordan’s Early Grades Education Activity International Research and Exchanges Board, stressed that solving the region’s wider skills gap was not the responsibility of universities alone, and that there needed to be greater cooperation to address the situation.

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“I think it’s very unfair that we put all of this on the higher education sector,” Mr Mirza said.

“The reality is we need to think about it as a system, and we need to move towards a system and competency-based education. And that starts from developing the critical social-emotional learning from the early grades, as well as building all the other personal characteristics from the school system. You need to think about it from a systemic perspective.”

Universities should focus on developing graduates who have “a thirst for knowledge and skill development” because “we really are in an era of lifelong learning”, he continued.

“The reality is that upskilling, reskilling and unlearning now must be the mantra for countries in the region as we move into a new era of work, of technology and disruption,” Mr Mirza added.

juliette.rowsell@timeshighereducation.com