A friend of mine asked me a deceptively simple question the other day: “why does Work-Integrated Learning (WIL) work”?”   What are the possible reasons that students with WIL experiences do better than others in common outcomes such as “higher starting salaries” or “faster transition to full-time work” (take your pick)? 

This is a really good question because the answer is nowhere near as straightforward as you might think.

One possible answer – the one that seems to be popular in Ottawa these days – suggests that it is all about “skills”.  Which is to say that over the course of a WIL experience, students pick up some mixture of technical and transversal workplace-related skills, which is then rewarded by the labour market.  This sounds plausible at first blush, but when you start to examine it closely it becomes harder to accept.

Ask yourself: does increasing the number of people with skills from WIL (or any set of skills for that matter) automatically increase the number of jobs available for young people with said skills?  This is often implied in the argument for developing more “German” style of apprenticeships (an obvious form of work-integrated learning).  But it’s hard to bring much evidence to bear for this argument.  Yes, Germany has recently combined low youth unemployment with a lot of work-integrated learning, but apprenticeships were also widespread early in the century when unemployment was three or four times higher than it is today. So even if WIL is a necessary condition for youth employment, it seems hardly a sufficient one.  Maybe at the margin and over the long term relatively inexpensive talent can attract capital to a certain extent, but the term “talent” usually implies higher levels of experience than your typical recent graduate has. 

(The only place I know of where cheap talented graduates are playing a significant role in attracting big companies is western Poland, particularly in places like Lodz and Wroclaw, where cheap talent has attracted a lot of IT and logistics companies to the region).

So, if (for the most part) whatever skills WIL imparts does not significantly increase the aggregate number of “good” graduate jobs in the short or medium-terms, how can WIL work?  Well, presumably it’s a mixture of two things.  The first is that WIL is a sorting mechanism, and students with WIL are simply taking up a greater proportion of a stock of “good” graduate jobs because they have a more attractive skill set.  Under this interpretation, students with WIL certainly benefit from their skills, but students as a whole do not because it’s a zero-sum contest for the “good” jobs.  (Employers still benefit from WIL because their new employees possess a more relevant set of skills).

The second is perhaps more interesting.  Even if WIL is nothing more than a sorting mechanism, it might still be a net benefit to students because it expedites the sorting.  That is to say, its biggest function may be as a matching mechanism, pairing talented individuals with specific jobs so that students spend less time unemployed or semi-employed after graduation.   Having spoken to many people involved in WIL over the years, I have absolutely no doubt this makes up a significant part of WIL benefits, though I obviously can’t say how much.

But think a little bit more about that. It could be a student receives a WIL experience with Employer X, enters the labour market and gets hired by Employer Y based at least in part on said experience.  But this assumes that the majority of WIL students who get quick matches are hired by someone other than their WIL employer.  What if that is not true?  What if, instead, most of the quick matches encouraged by WIL happen with the same employer with which they had their experience?  That is, it works because the employer uses WIL as a talent-scouting function, watching many students and keeping the ones they like (i.e. have usable general and technical skills and integrate well into the corporate culture?)

Now, if it is true that WIL is less about skills than connections, then there are a whole bunch of types of WIL experiences that you may want to re-think.  All those jobs inside universities that people have been rushing to re-classify as WIL over the past few years?  If WIL is about connections rather than skills, those probably provide little in the way of benefits to students apart from the pecuniary ones.

Lack of data forbids me from coming to any strong conclusions here.  But it does seem to me that the plethora of ways in which WIL might affect students’ labour market abilities warrants some investigation.  A WIL that works based primarily on skills acquisition implies very different kinds of program design than a WIL that focuses on forging connections.  You’d think governments, businesses, and institutions currently spending millions of dollars on this might want to know the answer to that question.

More on how to do that tomorrow.