The Academic Way of Communication Fails to Prepare Students for Private Sector Work

Reading through some of the Master's theses produced by University of Tokyo students, I am struck by just how abstract some of them sound to the layman.  Referring to one obscure study after another, their authors simply assume that whoever that is reading their outputs would simply know by heart all the supposedly groundbreaking studies by famous scholars.  Such careless assumption goes back my previous argument that academics and non-academics simply do not communicate on the same page, leading to academic works not being taken seriously outside the tiny professional academic research community. 

While professional academics might be able to make a living just by getting approvals from their peer scholars, the same cannot be said of Master's students, many of whom will not move on Ph.D. programs or aspire to become professional academics after they graduate.  Instead, they will find jobs in the private sector, where the pace of working and the way of communication will be very different from those found in the academic world, whether as students or professional scholars.  The fact that many Master's students will not have non-academic training is highly concerning for success in the private sector.

Particularly important is being able to communicate well with people from different backgrounds with different skill sets and knowledge base.  In the academic world, students and scholars of a certain field are guaranteed to have received at least the same elementary education in the field, providing them with common knowledge about certain theories, works, and authors.  Given such a situation, it is rather understandable that students, when composing their theses, simply assume that their readers, who are likely well-read scholars from their respective fields, know about the works being referred to in writing.

Making the same kind of assumptions in the private sector simply do not work.  Coworkers even from the same company have different experiences working in different functions and previous firms.  Thus what may be considered basic knowledge for one person can very much be completely unknown to others with whom s/he is expected to work closely.  Making assumptions about what others know when communicating can only lead to misunderstandings and reduction in efficiency of output, as errors resulting from misunderstandings slow down work.

And the possibility of such misunderstandings coming from differences in knowledge backgrounds will only become a bigger problem in the near future as workforce globalization become more commonplace.  Firms operating in any one country will have a greater diversity of employees from different countries, where even the same function in the same industry might be practiced in entirely different ways.  More time will need to be spent among coworkers so that everyone is absolutely on the same page before collaborative work can even start.

Examining how students make assumptions about readers of their reading, it is worrying how underprepared they are for their non-academic careers after graduation.  Their years of immersion in the academic world, while undoubtedly providing valuable critical thinking abilities and concrete skills useful in any workplace, also subject students to simplistic thinking about how the "outside world" of private sector firms operate.  In short, they do not understand that workplace collaboration is much more complex than those among a few scholars working together on research projects.  

A housemate of mine in undergraduate years argued that universities are not technical schools that simply provide skills immediately useful to the workplace, but instead provide students with holistic ways of thinking.  Yet, in some significant ways, universities, in pursuit of giving students a way to think about the world holistically, have given them only a fuzzy and idealistic vision that is far from pragmatic and useful.  Well-rounded thinking became a codeword for overgeneralization, failing to mentally prepare those being educated with difficulties of handling complex office politics.

The first step in changing this unfortunate reality is to bring the classroom to the workplace.  Education should not simply be conducted in the closed environment of the ivory tower but also concurrently through real work experiences in real private sector environments.  Only by bridging the gap between how academic researchers think and how employees in private businesses think can students understand to what degree they can make assumptions in their formal and informal communications with others, both inside and outside the school environment.