Community College Instructor Experiences with Employability Skills Curricula: A Phenomenological Study.
For years United States employers have reported encountering a critical skills gap in the recruitment of work-ready employees. Specifically, hiring managers indicate difficulty finding job candidates who have requisite employability skills (sometimes termed soft skills), such as the ability to communicate effectively and perform team-based work. At the same time, and against a backdrop of record unemployment levels, recent studies have determined that many occupations will become automated over the next decade. Workforce development through higher education is seen by policymakers as a way to counter these trends and meet employer needs. Community colleges are legally designated providers of workforce education within North Carolina. In conjunction with this responsibility, the North Carolina Community College System (NCCCS) supports federal and state-funded initiatives that focus on job readiness. Employability skills curricula created and purchased with workforce development monies, and provided by community colleges throughout the state, include the SkillsUSA Framework, Charlotte Works’ Working Smart, and the NC-NET Employability Skills Resource Toolkit. Faculty and instructional staff at the state’s two-year public postsecondary institutions are charged with use of these teaching resources. Given the main role that educators play in implementing curricula, surprisingly no studies have centered on the perceptions of community college instructors who are teaching employability skills related courses. The purpose of this qualitative study was therefore to address a lack of insight on how North Carolina community college educators experience employability skills curricular instruction. Through use of a transcendental phenomenological approach, this dissertation explored instructor engagement and the elements that were described as helping or hindering use of an employability skills curriculum. Ten participants were selected from nine North Carolina community colleges. Multiple interviews with these current and former instructors yielded rich descriptive data and thematic findings which suggested implications for research, theory, practice, and policy. Ryan and Deci’s Self-Determination Theory (SDT; 2000) of motivation provided a lens through which to view study results and identify social and environmental supports for educators’ feelings of competence, autonomy, and relatedness. Key findings reveal that educators were highly invested in their work with employability skills curricula, as their instructional experiences were portrayed in personal, urgent, and emotive terms. For study participants, employability skills curricular instruction was perceived as a social endeavor that benefitted from connections with students and teaching colleagues. In addition, a lack of institutional encouragement or pedagogical tools was indicated as hampering wider adoption or professionalization of employability skills curricular efforts. A shared model of leadership is recommended for community colleges as a means to capitalize on the expertise and enthusiasm of grassroots instructional leaders such as the participants in this study (Kezar & Lester, 2011). These findings are of value to higher education policymakers and institutional leaders implementing faculty-driven initiatives. This research sheds light on the crucial but understudied experience of community college educators who teach using employability skills curricula. As two-year public colleges consider adopting or mandating employability skills workforce education, instructor-led curricular reform efforts stand to benefit from this qualitative phenomenological study.
