Abstract:

During the impacts of COVID 19, most of the universities career offices have closed and decided to sustain their activities online. However, the implications have resulted mega challenges for the employment particularly for the new graduates and the students who could find internships while studying. On the other hand, new technologies such Artificial Intelligence (AI), Cyber-security, cloud computing, algorithms, automation, and digital transformation have disrupted the existing ones and highly qualified employment has needed to deal with all these emerging next generation technologies. Hence, the roles of the career centers at the universities have been dramatically increased in order to skill up the next generation and to make them ready for the future of work.
In order to analyze critically how the impacts of career centers of the universities on the skill up of the next generation and how to make them ready for the future of work, the qualitative research had been strategically developed. The primary goal of the qualitative data is to deeply understand how the career centers of the universities on the skill up of the next generation and how to make them ready for the future of work by taking into account 10 different career centers of the best universities (4 career centers from the US, 2 from Canada, 2 from Canada, and 2 from Turkey) in the world. The participants who are managers and students have actively participated in the focus groups through Zoom meetings. The collected data from the semi structured questionnaires were analyzed by using the NVivo.
The analyses clearly show that even the best universities of the career centers are not ready for the coming requirements of the job market. More importantly, most of the career counselors who have to integrate career and mental health counseling interventions in their work are not ready to sustain the students’ general happiness and achievements affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. It is no doubt that there is a marked increased need for career development professionals who are proficient in trauma-informed care to establishing an environment of trust and safety, to develop healthy coping strategies, and to promote lifelong career adaptability while skilling up the students’ talents, competencies, and skills for the next generation work force.
Even though most of the best universities have the most advanced curricula, not all the departments are ready to meet the requirements. Hence, the students who are participated from the technology based departments have clarified that they are struggling to find an adequate number of qualified employees for the jobs in the new age. However, those students who are coming particularly from liberal art based departments where they offer generally outdated curricula for the new technologies, could not find proper jobs in the new areas or they earn much less than the others. The participants of the career centers have also pointed out the inequality in the workforce which have been increasing rather than decreasing. Even though the students are studying from the same universities, racial, ethnic, gender, and social class differences play important roles. Some of the advantageous ones could find better remote work opportunities, while those from disadvantageous groups could find in essential services, such as sanitation and grocery supply (Lowrey, 2020), which create mental health problems. Consequently, the career centers should be more active.

Keywords:

Career Counseling, Career Centers, Universities, Skill up, Next Generation, Future of Work, AI