Institutionalization of Career Readiness in Lebanese Universities

• In Event: Catalyzing Higher Education Institutions for Economic and Social Change: Global Innovations in Curriculum, Pedagogy, and Community Engagement

Proposal

Lebanon has long enjoyed a reputation of having among the best systems of higher education in the Middle East. However, despite offering high quality traditional academic courses, most universities in Lebanon do not explicitly attend to career readiness skills. The USAID Lebanon Higher Education Capacity Development Program (HECD) recognizes that without a mastery of soft skills such as collaboration, leadership, and career planning, otherwise well-educated university graduates are not fully prepared to be successful in the world of work. This presentation will share how the HECD program engages in a process of institutional capacity strengthening and organizational change that enables 10 universities in Lebanon to deliver in-demand soft skills to students such as workplace behaviors, communications skills, critical problem solving, job seeking skills, teamwork, and leadership to address the career readiness gap


HECD is designed as a higher education institutional capacity development project that is driven by institutional ownership of the organizational change process. Each HEI engages in a participatory Continuous Institutional Maturity Assessment (CIMA) process which guides HECD capacity building interventions by allowing HEIs to identify priority areas across five focal training areas. Because the CIMA is an HEI owned tool and tailored capacity building road map, it enables HEIs to identify and implement organizational changes most relevant and accessible to them. The CIMA capacity assessment process involves an annual assessment process and regular check in sessions with each HEI partner.


Along with the CIMA process, the HECD also engages in extensive training and coaching of faculty and administrators with international experts from EDC and Florida State University (FSU). These include institutional capacity strengthening workshops, webinars, professional development for instructors, technical consultations and coaching. Training content is aligned to two main objectives:.

a) Improve the capacity of post-secondary institutions: International experts from Florida State University deliver institutional strengthening workshops for HEI leadership and staff in the areas of university-employment engagement, career center enhancement, design thinking, alumni tracking, data for decision making, and grant writing.
b) Expand job readiness skills: International experts from EDC provide training of trainer workshops for HEI instructors to enable the delivery of workshops to students on job readiness skills, work-based learning, entrepreneurship and mental health for the workplace.


These institutional strengthening interventions are guided by a standards-based work readiness curriculum, Work Ready Now!, aligned with three internationally recognized work readiness frameworks (Lippman et al., 2015). EDC’s soft skills approach, first developed for Rwanda in 2009 and initially based on US and OECD curricular frameworks, focuses on five soft skills: positive self-concept, self-control, social skills, communication, and higher-order thinking skills (DeJaeghere & Murphy Graham et al. 2021). In addition to this curricular framework, HECD trains university staff and instructors on activity-based teaching and learning to deliver EDC’s Work Ready Now! effectively. To date, HECD has trained over 1,000 HEI staff and instructors from 10 HEIs and 8,300 students have benefited from HECD’s job readiness programs HECD facilitates annual summits and roundtable discussions as important feedback loops used to improve program content and delivery.

Author

• Lubna Souheil, Education Development Center