Graduates fail to make job grade, complain bosses - The Standard

Graduates fail to make job grade, complain bosses - The Standard:

How many obscure titles do you need in a cabinet, and why?

Yesterday I was talking to my friend, a former student of mine at CityU, about her life after graduation. Her experience is exemplary, a good case of success. On the other hand, she shared the stories her classmates shared when they met for the CityU graduation ceremony a few weeks ago. Some students had already changed jobs twice since finishing their studies! Most discussed work only in terms of the salary, and the workload. In general, they weren't handling life outside the university ecosystem well. Small wonder this Standard article resonated with me: I heard all this the night before!

Is this obscure practice helping students to adjust well in the workforce? This is hard to answer not least because it is difficult to determine the extent to which this obscure practice influences students' practice in the workforce. If I were to guess, all this fantasy world practice influences students significantly in the workforce -- and that is a problem.

I mentioned this obscure practice to my co-supervisor a few days ago. He said this obscure practice was a dimension of society's influence on schooling and vice versa. That is a valid, broad perspective, I believe. To be sure, I see continuity in the practice of a very narrow stratum of society from one level of schooling to another. I see the continuity of big-time tutorial schools and sports days practice at the secondary level in student union society practice at the tertiary level.

My students and I were discussing the obscure practice in class yesterday. One student said these students did all this to form an identity and to create a sense of belonging. I hadn't thought about that; and that student's thought resonated well with me and with the class. In answering the question, "Who are you?"a student can pridefully answer, "I'm an SU cabinet member!" I sense an orphan spirit and now I sense that strongly in these students. These students haven't had a chance to form themselves well, to know who they are, and to whom they belong until this point (whereas, I think the identity formation for teenagers in other countries may begin so soon as middle school because of an individualistic world view in their societies). Hong Kong certainly doesn't help in their identity formation in formal schooling what with the absence of explicit Cantonese language teaching and the absence of significant content on Hong Kong history in the history curriculum. In sum, this obscure practice could be the forming of a non-transferable identity for students at the tertiary-level. 

I liked the solution to the new graduate malaise mentioned in this article not least because I have been a proponent of it as well. Students need mentorship. They need authentic, meaningful mentorship not only at their first job but also before they graduate! We need adults to care pastorally about students at the university level. I've observed some of that genuine (and contrived) pastoral care at the secondary and primary levels. At the university level, there may be some assumption that students can take care of themselves well but I think, ultimately, they just take care of themselves to varying degrees of success. In forming their own, obscure identities at this tertiary level, students, in fact, disconnect from reality, that is, society. They could grow more professionally and socially if they had more older, wiser people actively participate in their lives. They would perhaps integrate more effectively into society if there were a generational connection made at the university level.

Finally, a few thoughts to improve the research and the reporting in this article:

• Although we don't know the most specific details of the sample, the companies represented were most likely from the manufacturing industry. Breakdowns of industries represented would improve the application of the results.
• Blanket statements were made for all new graduates: we don't know to what percentage of new graduates we can apply these executives' statements; having a percentage would also give us the extent to which we shouldn't apply these statements to new graduates.