Photo by Dom Fou on Unsplash

What if your learnings from school perfectly aligned with the skills you needed in your career? Have you ever taken classes outside your major to get experience and exposure for your next career transition? As it stands, academia and industry are not well integrated with each other. That is, not all things we learn as university students translate into the appropriate skills and competencies needed to succeed in the workforce. Solving specific problems are required in the industry, but academia emphasizes broad problem-solving approaches that are more theoretical than practical. At the same time, while academics are motivated by publications, industry is motivated by profits and competitive edge. These differing values lead to a division between the two sides, which results in graduates who are ill-equipped to thrive in the vocational-specific economy and contributes to rising underemployment, underpaid internships, and delayed entry into what many consider a path to middle-class status. Higher education needs to be reimagined such that industry and academia both benefit. Industry needs graduates who are vocationally competent and academia needs to train and educate students with industrially relevant skills that prepare them for vocation. Read the full article here.