Saturday, December 22, 2018

Illinois Tech’s Kaplan Institute Aims to Educate a More Valuable and Employable Workforce


Illinois Tech’s Kaplan Institute Aims to Educate a More Valuable and Employable Workforce
Howard Tullman, university professor and executive director of The Ed Kaplan Family Institute for Innovation and Tech Entrepreneurship, Illinois Institute of Technology

During my time leading 1871, Chicago’s largest tech hub, which was recently named the Number 1 university-affiliated incubator in the world, I found myself constantly having conversations with business owners who were yearning for more diverse technical talent equipped with the skills necessary for tomorrow’s jobs. It wasn’t exactly a surprise. With dozens of major corporate headquarters, countless startups, tech giants like Google, Salesforce, Facebook expanding major operations in the city, Chicago has become a world-class tech ecosystem and a center for the development of new and disruptive technologies, human-centered designs, and multi-disciplinary innovation.

Few other cities across the country have combined industry, education and technology into civic initiatives, training programs and attractive and lucrative investment environments as successfully as Chicago which has particularly exploited and capitalized on its wealth of colleges and universities. In fact, only Boston has more institutions of higher learning than Chicago and only a fraction of those are as directly engaged as we see in Chicago in the kinds of new talent development programs which have been spawned here.

But it’s still worth asking whether the city’s pool of technical talent is keeping up with the rapid growth in the overall demand. And are we developing the “new collar” skills in our students that they will need to be successful in the globally-competitive employment marketplaces of the future?  Finally, are our colleges and universities doing enough to ensure that those students who do graduate and enter the workforce are ready to hit the ground running and make an immediate impact? In today’s competitive hiring environments, even with the growing needs, you rarely get a second chance to make a first impression.

Recent surveys suggest that the students themselves aren’t quite convinced that we’re doing the work necessary to properly prepare them. A 2017 poll released by Gallup and Strada Education Network showed that only a third of student participants believed they would graduate with the skills and knowledge to be successful in the job market/workplace (34%-36%) while just half (53%) believe their major will lead to a good job.

Given the enormous value of and clear requirement for critical thinkers and problem solvers in business today, any college or university which isn’t stepping up to the challenge of educating students in new ways as well as radically re-envisioning their old methodologies is falling behind. Gone are the days when classroom-style lectures and rote textbook learning were enough. Many higher education institutions are putting every student through some type of innovation and entrepreneurship course, regardless of their departmental majors, in order to try to graduate highly qualified and instantly employable students.

But far too many of these attempts lack serious and practical content, strong scholarship and applied wisdom, and, above all, experienced and interactive instructors who have been practitioners as well as educators throughout their own careers. They are “me-too” efforts driven more by a desire for the schools to check the appropriate boxes and satisfy their various constituencies than by a substantial commitment to real change and improvement backed by concrete actions.

On the other hand, when institutions do make a long-term investment in their students’ futures, rather than mere lip service, the differences are readily apparent. The Illinois Institute of Technology, located just 10 minutes south of Chicago’s Loop on the Red Line, is a solid part of the new leadership in this area and we’ve put a giant stake in the ground with the recent opening of the Ed Kaplan Family Institute for Innovation and Tech Entrepreneurship.

At the Kaplan Institute, we’re focused on turning out graduates who are well-suited for jobs that haven’t been invented yet; well-trained to use technologies that we’re inventing in order to address challenges which we are just learning are going to be problems.

How are we accomplishing this?

Among other things, the Kaplan Institute will serve as the new home for our InterProfessional Projects Program (IPRO) where multi-disciplinary teams (a chemical engineer, an architect, a business major or two and more) will work together to solve social, technical or business problems. Unique to Illinois Tech for decades, every student on campus spends two semesters taking IPRO classes, regardless of their major. Through IPRO, students are tackling issues like agriculture in an urban environment by applying robotics to vertical farming; using data to improve first responder responsiveness; generating interfaces that bridge the foreign language gap and improves trust and communication between families and the Chicago Public Schools; and more.

And, because the Kaplan Institute provides a new 72,000 sq. ft. campus home for these classes, the instruction, interaction and innovations no longer take place in the traditional silos – standard classrooms with desks and walls and barriers – or exclusively in a single school at the university. The only way to solve the cross-disciplinary problems of the future which cross every kind of boundary, schools like IIT need to invest in and build new physical environments like the Kaplan Institute.

Its sheer size will allow the university to have all the IPRO classes held in a single, centrally-located, collaborative space. Hundreds of student teams, focused on dynamic problem-solving projects, will have the unfettered opportunity to work together, learn from each other, and share resources and ideas. Students will literally collide with each other in ways that enhance learning, problem solving and teamwork.

Less focused than others on “start-ups” and business plan competitions, we take a hands-on approach to problem-solving with active projects, collaborations, and actual commercial outcomes and products. Working on these projects with corporate partners and industry sponsors, provides unique experiences and exposes our students to a broad pool of future employers across every sector which sets them up for successful opportunities when they graduate.

Total Pageviews

GOOGLE ANALYTICS

Blog Archive