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Thankful For Early Work Experience

The holiday season prompts reflection about the things for which we're thankful. This year my reflection is a bit different from years past.

I recently had a discussion with a colleague about what employers expect of our graduates. The next day I happened across a promotional piece that asked, "Would You Hire You?" The question provoked some thoughts about what is really important in today's workplace and how I may have acquired some of the skills that might actually result in me "hiring myself.”

Most employers want their employees to be hard workers, reliable, ethical, and willing to respect, serve and connect with others. Over the past decade, colleges have increasingly taken on the task of educating students – formally and informally – to gain these and other essential skills. The fact is that, not so many years ago, these skills were most commonly taught at home. I am most certainly thankful for learning the importance of these skills from my parents and am also thankful for the opportunity to apply them at a fairly young age.

As a teenager, I had the good fortune to work in the pro shop of the public golf course in my hometown. The golf pro, Denis Husse, who is still there all these years later, was a fantastic person who knew the importance of setting high expectations. He modeled the way, creating a vibrant workplace that made me want to be there. He used to tell us that the way we treated our customers could give our course the feel of belonging to an expensive private country club. We worked hard to learn golfers' names, showing interest in hearing about their round of golf (no matter the score!). We went the extra mile to show we appreciated them. We hustled to serve and make each golfer feel important. Denis also reinforced his belief that treating each other respectfully and professionally would translate into how we treated our guests. So we did, and it did.

I worked three summers there – opening the shop some mornings at 5:30 a.m. and/or closing at 9:30 p.m. – at times working as many as 70 hours in a week – and was rewarded way beyond my $3.50 hourly wage. I was educated by a great leader who didn't ask us to do anything he wouldn't do himself. The emotional intelligence he displayed so effortlessly back then is what I work on every day now – because I know how he made me and all my co-workers at the golf course feel. Thinking back now, it was a great initial experience for my working career.

I wonder, if I had not had the opportunity to work in that pro shop all those years ago, whether I'd be as willing to hire myself today ... and I'm thankful – to Denis and that old job – that I'll never have to answer that question.

To share an insight or thankful experience, please contact me at presblog@mvcc.edu.

5 Myths About MVCC

Educational Tsunami Approaching

Sometimes the changes in our society feel like a hurricane with swirling winds changing the way we live and work. As enrollment growth tapers off at community colleges around the country, the brief breath is less the eye of a hurricane and quite possibly more like the beginning of a tsunami – where the tide rushes out to sea before it comes crashing ashore and changes the landscape forever.

I recently read an article in Time Magazine that opened my eyes to MOOCs – massive open online courses. It is education at scale. We have heard for years that top-tier universities like Stanford, MIT, and others were putting their best courses from their best faculty on the Internet for free. It has finally happened – and in a big way. Leading professors are taking the best of what they know in brain research and how people learn and are integrating it with what they know about instructional course design and assessment.

Three major ventures are leading the way. The for-profit Coursera is the largest, with 198 courses already offered with resources from 33 colleges like Princeton, Stanford, Duke and others. Udacity is also a for-profit that has 14 courses offered while EDX is a non-profit led by MIT, Harvard, Texas and Cal-Berkeley. The courses are free and gaining in popularity. More than 640,000 students enrolled in the first 13 courses and now more than 1.4 million students have taken courses from Coursera – that’s a lot of papers to grade.

I learned more about how these MOOCs are designed when I later came across a TED talk from one of the co-founders of Coursera. Here I learned that MOOCs utilize peer and self-grading and found that they are highly correlated with faculty grading. The courses start on a given day with real homework and real deadlines. They receive a certificate of completion at the end of the course, but not college credit as we know it today. A week after I read the Time article, I read an article that said Antioch University had signed a license agreement with Coursera to use their MOOCs to build new bachelor degree programs.

MOOCs aren’t likely to replace college as we know it in our lifetime. Rather, they are likely to very quickly become the next component in an increasingly diverse portfolio of community college enrollment. Just like online courses have carved out a 10 percent to 25 percent share of community college enrollments in the last 15 years, MOOCs and the certification of their competencies toward degrees are likely to do the same in half that time. We already certify previous student learning through AP credit, SAT, ACT, Credit for Prior Learning, ACE-DANTES and other means. Community colleges had best start thinking about MOOCs as well – for the wave will be crashing ashore before we know it.

If you have any questions or comments on this post, please contact me at presblog@mvcc.edu.