Watching my son graduate from the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa was a proud moment indeed. It wasn’t the first time I had celebrated such an accomplishment or heralded a new era for one of my children but it was a different celebration. The discussion at graduation revolved around the lack of opportunities and the economic outlook for the future.
Today’s job market is difficult to navigate and prospects for the inexperienced limited – kind of a Catch-22 for graduates. They need experience to get a job and they need a job to gain experience (not to mention other factors like student loans and health insurance).
The field of Communications is in a state of evolution. The days of communicators as content creators whose writing skills are preeminent in their toolkit are gone. Communicators in the business world are being asked to interface between departments, advise leadership on employee communications to ensure bad news is delivered in a manner which mitigates fear and encourages productivity. Communicators struggle to manage content from many sources, position the message without controlling and to understand the impact of social media on the enterprise.
Intranet management should be a discipline taught within our universities but there are few professors schooled in social media, intranet governance and web content management. Review the curriculums of major universities and you will see a smattering of social media courses, courses on the implications of the 2008 Presidential campaign and references to digital media. Universities struggle to achieve effective on-line communications strategies within their own realms. Their intranets have not fared much better than those of the typical enterprise. Searching the web for examples of forward thinking Universities I was able to discover two that looked promising – Gonzaga and John Hopkins. Both seem to be transforming their curriculums to highlight the shift to digital communications.
The primary value of a new Communications graduate could be their fundamental acceptance of the digital world combined with the understanding of basic communication processes. Big C, little c may no longer be relevant but perhaps digital C is. What do you think? More importantly at the moment, does anyone have a job for Max?
