The College Corporate Gap

I hear it over and over again in the corporate world; “don’t they teach anything in college”. This challenge would be easily resolved if colleges and corporate organizations could sit down and come to an understanding. But since they chose not to, both will keep suffering from each intransigence. Unfortunately, corporate organizations end up with the short end of the stick. However, there a colleges and corporate that are beginning to appreciate this gap and create programs that are not just educative but transformative in nature.

Colleges give introduction, corporate want production. Colleges teach theory, corporate want application. Colleges have a syllabus to cover, corporate have a system to run. However the point is not to focus on the differences but to work out how these parallel processes can be integrated to create value for (and in) the corporate world. Since this is where corporate draw their human resources.

The induction of college graduates to the corporate world demands that they quickly get to appreciate what the corporate world wants from them and not only what it is willing to give in exchange. There is a glaring shift from the college (and schooling) culture of learning and preparing to doing and producing. College demands receptacle cognitive skills like knowledge, recall and comprehension the corporation demands productive competencies like understanding, initiative and creativity. These later competencies have to be learned just as the competencies that guaranteed one success in college had to be mastered.  The difference in these approaches is the difference between “learning” and “training”.

While colleges require intellect to facilitate learning and skill acquisition, corporations require three other competencies in equal measure initiative (leadership), enterprise (innovation) and employment (productivity). College students are not a natural fit in corporate structure and rarely do academicians make good corporate leaders. However, corporate executives provide excellent case study material for student development.  While college emphasizes knowing, corporations demand know-how. 

An evaluation of the college corporate gap gives you a first line assessment and a birds eye view of the challenge of molding an effective corporate executive out of an outstanding student. Large corporations have their own training schools that covert and shift employee thinking to align it with the organizations programs, others have two or three year management trainee program that serve to facilitate this transformation while the basic minimum is an employee induction program that helps the employee appreciate the goals and objectives of the corporation and how to realize and materialize them.

Allan Bukusi,

Director NGCL Program