Abstract:

Over the past few decades, higher education institutions (HEIs) have sought new ways to make their courses more rewarding for their students and more relevant for the industries in which they aim to work. In the past, students went to school, chose an area of specialization, and found a job in that area of expertise. They learned the subject-specific skills and any other skills necessary on the job. More recently, however, there has been a shift to learning beyond book smarts by interacting with, even solving, real-world problems. Student polyvalence has replaced the hard skills, many of which can be learned in the workplace. Thus, research on employability skills for the 21st century has abounded, with academics making recommendations on how HEI courses and curricula could be adapted to reflect the real-world issues that young graduates will face. Some of these suggestions include co-creating a curriculum with external stakeholders, increasing work placements or work experience, developing projects between industry and HEI, or inviting external experts into the classroom to speak about the reality of their job. Of the recommendations made by academia for making courses more relevant, many HEIs have opted for the latter, i.e., inviting industry experts to speak in their courses. In some cases, this has been an informal talk during class time; in other cases, it is a panel where numerous professionals speak on a given and known topic. HEI faculty may occasionally ask external experts to judge student work or participate in final presentations. In our HEI, external experts are solicited to mandate and assist in business projects students work on to complete their studies. Generally, these roles have been met with much enthusiasm but (at times) much less professionalism. The experts certainly know their role in business, but further aid is needed to translate their business acumen into effective dissemination of knowledge in the classroom. For example, experienced experts may tell stories that, while interesting, do not link to the course's learning objectives. Certain experts may have spoken brilliantly in a conference setting only to go jelly in front of HEI students. Faculty have watched (painfully and helplessly) as students disengaged with the less confident speakers. These observations and a genuine belief that we could help them to improve led to the creation of an innovative program that aims to train non-teachers and provide them with the basic teaching skills to become effective disseminators of knowledge. This program is part of our Graduate Institute for Teacher and Executive Development (GIFTED) whose main role is to help industry experts to become competent educators. After all, the goal is to bridge the gap between HEIs and the workplace and this could be the first step in doing so. We will discuss our philosophy and the rationalization for our choices. We began by searching for comparable programs and, to our surprise, found none that offer what we are providing. In this paper, the initial steps of the program creation will be presented up to the first cohort's starting point.

Keywords:

Executive Education, Lifelong learning, Knowledge dissemination, Higher Education Institutions (HEI).