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Students need our help. The current job market for recent college graduates is one of the most challenging in more than a decade. Applicants need to find more and unique ways to stand out from the crowd. They’ve taken the classes, completed internships and co-ops, participated in co-curricular activities … now what? Students also need to articulate the ways their skills and experiences can transfer into the attributes that employers are looking for in their new hires.
Among the top skills that employers continue to look for are the ability to work in teams and solve problems. When students are asked in an interview to “tell me about your leadership experience in a team situation,” it’s no longer enough to respond with “I was a captain on the tennis team and we won our division.”
Students now need to be prepared for initial and follow-up questions that reveal what they actually did to work in a team and solve problems and how those experiences equipped them with transferable skills to take to the workplace. Many of the skills from their classes are directly relevant to their future careers, yet we have noticed that our students sometimes aren’t able to articulate this well.
In this article, we offer teaching faculty and career development staff six suggestions for how we can help our students improve the ways they discuss the skills they have acquired during their time in college. This will make them more competitive when they are applying and interviewing for their first professional job.
- Assign team projects in your classes. Our experience shows that at least some faculty members avoid assigning team projects. But employers continue to look for teamwork skills and problem-solving skills when they are hiring college graduates. If we are going to help our students develop the skills they need to succeed, the first thing we can do is to make sure that they have the experiences that will help them develop those skills. A well-designed team project—one where students have to work together collaboratively to solve a real-world problem—can provide students with opportunities to build both teamwork and problem-solving skills.
- Incorporate ongoing reflections. When asking students for updates on their team projects, have them think about not only where they stand but also how well they have worked together. Have each team member articulate their progress to the rest of the team and then have the teams report their progress to the class. Encourage students to use “teamspeak,” which means that they are using “we” rather than “I” to discuss the team project. They should only use “I” when describing their individual contributions.
- Take advantage of opportunities to remind students of how the work they do in their courses can make for great posts for their LinkedIn profiles and talking points in interviews. For example, students in our group dynamics class complete some portion of their team project while working face-to-face. They do other tasks while working remotely. Students may not realize that knowing how to accomplish a task with an online team has become a key skill in today’s workplace, where they often will be working with remote team members from all over the globe. We can incorporate brief discussions during the course of the project where we remind students of these kinds of skills that they are developing.
- Have students discuss their experience with the project and role-play with each other how they would discuss it in a real job interview. They can do this within their own teams, or they can move to another team to get feedback from an outsider’s perspective. If there is no class time for this, encourage students to ask for help articulating their experiences at the college career center. Career counselors are experienced at role-playing with students and providing feedback.
- Include a short section in the final project deliverable in which the team completes a reflection describing the skills they learned. In this self-evaluation, team members can be asked to describe the project and their role in preparation for a LinkedIn post. One way we have accomplished this is to have students create a top 10 list of things they learned from working together. A reflection like this, completed after the project concludes, can help team members develop their metacognitive framework. They not only see what they learned, but also can start to see how what they learned directly transfers to their future.
- Encourage students to record themselves and conduct a self-evaluation. They can do this on their phones, first with audio so they can hear how they might sound in a phone interview. Then they can do it again with video, so that they are prepared for Zoom or face-to-face interviews. This can help them attend both to the big things, such as the language they use to describe their accomplishments, as well as little things that do matter, such as how to look at the camera when speaking in order to simulate eye contact, and how to avoid using filler words such as “um,” “like” and “ya know.” They can even ask professors, friends or parents and relatives for feedback about how they can improve these videos. Then they can practice some more. Our advice is always to practice, practice, practice!
Our students don’t always see how the problem-solving skills they take from a team project can be used in their interviews. As professors, we can do a better job of helping our students to prepare. By incorporating some simple activities, we can help our students connect their classroom experiences to the work they might do beyond their college years. Once they start to notice these connections, they will be more prepared to present themselves as professionals and as workplace ready.
