A few days ago, someone asked me how institutions, in practice, are supposed to go about trying to anticipate market demand when coming up with new courses.  Since this is something we at HESA Towers does for a number of clients, I thought the answer to this question would make for a pretty good blog.  So here we go:

The first thing one needs to be clear about is what market you want to satisfy.  On the one hand, everyone pays obeisance to “what the labour market wants” because everyone wants to be seen to be a good community actor.  The problem here is i) no one knows what “the labour market wants” more than about 6 months out and ii) “the labour market” doesn’t pay tuition fees: students do.  And what students want does not line up neatly with what employers want.   So, listening to market signals is a balancing act between listening to two different sets of signals.

There are ways to listen to both signals.  Let’s start with the student side.  One way is to try to survey students about their ideas of what would interest them in post-secondary education: this is unfortunately kind of tricky because 16-17 year-olds aren’t, as a rule, included in the big population survey panels which are the basis of the modern survey industry.  You can try to do focus groups, but this probably only works for very specific programs with specific pathways (e.g. Fine Art Schools).  Usually, what you do is a lot of horizon-scanning: what new programs are other institutions introducing, how are their enrolments going, etc.? If you are lucky, you pick up a trend happening in other parts of the country or in the US before anyone else in the area does and you get to be known as a local leader in the field (in the last year or two, e-sports management has been that program). 

That’s if you’re looking to create new programs: if you are looking to refresh old ones, a reasonable course of action is to ask alumni what they thought about the program – what they appreciated most, what they used the least, what skills they now wish they had which they didn’t get during the program.  This should be normal practice for program renewal, but you’d be surprised by how few programs do this systemically.

What about the labour market side?  Well, there’s a few ways to at least attempt to work out what might be needed.  You can talk to employers about how they think their businesses will evolve and what skills they will be hiring for in 2-5 years’ time.  The challenge is a) businesses typically have no idea what business conditions will be like in 2-5 years’ time and b) even then, what you often get back is “we need more X”, where X is engineers, nurses, whatever, without necessarily being able to tell you much about what kinds of specialties are needed.  Indeed, I think most of the time employers do not care about specialties – what they want are people who can adjust and adapt to different kinds of problems and conditions, which implies fewer specializations with more transversal skills, but at least in universities these are harder to design as a program.

(A small tangent here: someone wise once observed that there’s this weird triangle going on in the world of skills where universities and colleges talk about degrees/diplomas, governments talk about jobs, and businesses talk about tasks or work, and they all think they are talking about the same thing but they aren’t.  Post-secondary education as a whole would probably be better-off doing less to match programs and degrees/diplomas to tasks, because that’s a mug’s game, but doing more to try to orient skills outcomes within degrees/diplomas to tasks.  But perhaps that’s just me.)

The are two other ways of looking at labour market demand.  First is to look at various types of government labour market projection (e.g. the Government of Canada’s COPS system, or provincial equivalents thereof), but these can be somewhat flaky, and again occupations and degrees don’t map onto each other very easily.  And the second is to look at changing skill profiles within certain jobs, using program like Burning Glass.  That’s not a terrible way to go (we’ve used Burning Glass in the past) but from a higher education perspective its Canadian database can tell you a lot about changes in skills demand within occupational categories over time – which mainly yields the insight that a lot more jobs these days have some kind of coding/programming/data analysis component – but very little if you’re trying to look at changes over time for recent graduates, because very few Canadian job ads specify 0-2 years of experience in their job ads.  Basically, Burning Glass does give you a sense of what the financial industry is looking for in terms of skills.  It just doesn’t have much data to look at changes in what it is looking for out of new graduates because it’s sample just isn’t good enough.  Better than nothing, but definitely not a panacea.

(Again, a digression: when companies are asked what kinds of skills they are hiring for, they will give you very precise answers about skills.  But what they mean by this term is mainly skills which arise from experience, not skills gained as a curriculum outcome.  So, when companies talk about a skills gap, they aren’t talking about problems with recent graduates, they are saying that the talent pipeline of ten years ago was not wide enough.  It’s not a problem quickly solved through expansion of post-secondary programming.)

A final question that rises when thinking about demand – regardless of whether we are talking student-side or labour-market side – is the geographic boundaries one sets.  In big cities, this is not a major issue – in Canada, at least, most students in big city schools either come from said big city or intend to remain there afterwards, so it’s easy enough to just look at the surrounding 30km or so.  But it’s an issue in places which take students from big cities, and which also send students back to big cities.  Let’s take an example completely at random, say….Laurentian.  This is a university that really needs to pay attention to student demand, because its applications and intake is down by 40% or so from a few years ago.  But where are they going to get these students from?  Not Sudbury: the big losses in student numbers over the last couple of years, I am fairly certain, are from the GTA and Ottawa.  And similarly, Sudbury has not been the long-term destination for many of its graduates – roughly half, if memory serves, tended to de-camp for Ottawa or the GTA.  So, when thinking about “markets”, does it make more sense for Laurentian to focus on what’s going on in the GTA or in Sudbury?   My guess is an exclusive focus on the latter, and in particular on really narrow specialities like “mining” are a route to long-term irrelevance in terms of undergraduate programming (though it may be a different story if we are talking about graduate studies and research). There is no right or wrong answer here, really, but one needs to be aware of the implications of tilting one way or the other.

Anyways, these are the basics of trying to keep up with market demand.  It’s not a science, by any means.  And as an art, I would say that it is gravely held back by academic conservatism; more specifically, the disdain in some quarters for anything that examines the world through lenses other than that of existing academic disciplines.  But that’s a discussion for another day.