1. Women Have Figured Out Continuing Studies
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 5, 2012
Article originally published on The EvoLLLution at http://www.evolllution.com/featured/women-have-figured-
out-continuing-studies/
By Peter Walton |Associate Director of Lifelong Learning, Simon Fraser University
Every year I interview hundreds of fe-
male applicants for our university’s
Continuing Studies Public Relations,
Digital Communications and New Me-
dia Journalism certificate programs.
These accelerated, full-time, practical
programs attract primarily university or
college-educated women in their 20s
and 30s with an eye on a good career.
I don’t interview many men. In fact less
than 15% of our program’s applicants
are men. It’s as if many men, faced with
a prolonged economic slowdown and
the disappearance of traditional “male”
jobs in manufacturing, have given up
and aren’t interested in going back to
school.
Meanwhile university and college-edu-
cated women are flocking to Continuing
Studies professional programs. In our
complex world, where successful work-
ers will face rapid changes during their
working lives, women have figured out
the importance of lifelong learning. Of
the 30 professions projected to add the
most jobs over the next decade, wom-
en now dominate 20.
As author Hanna Rosin writes in her
book The End of Men, the new econ-
omy is reshaping our culture. The very
things women are often good at—hu-
man contact, interpersonal skills, ver-
bal skills, and creativity—are now more
valued in the workplace than brawn or
strength.
Women like the applicants I interview
have been quicker than men to figure
out that a university or college degree,
while important, is no longer enough.
There are too many B.A.s and M.A.s
struggling to find work or trapped in
low-skilled jobs. According to a recent
Guardian article, more than 35% of UK
university graduates in the previous six
years are employed in lower-skilled oc-
cupations.
In Canada, where the unemployment
rate for 15 to 29 year olds stands at
nearly 12%, having an undergraduate
degree is now “the new high school
diploma;” it is the bare education mini-
mum that doesn’t make job candidates
stand out as it did a generation ago.
Today’s world requires a broad base of
skills, not merely a narrow range of out-
dated technical knowledge. Learning
to write an essay, analyze a poem, in-
terpret a work of art, conduct research,
and argue a point of view are important
skills, but education is also about help-
ing people to find a job, or do their job.
Here’s one suggestion. Continuing
Studies should teach code, the lan-
guage used to create websites. Not just
because there is a worldwide shortage
of computer programmers. Code is one
of the key languages used to communi-
cate in our digital world.
Currently there are few women who
know code. But that will change. This
summer our Continuing Studies pro-
gram sponsored two sold-out training
sessions called Ladies Learning Code,
which taught 80 women how to create
websites. Future sessions have been
scheduled for the fall.
PHOTO BY JASMIN MERDAN
Increasing numbers of women are returning to higher education
institutions to pursuing continuing education, showing a savvy for the
modern-day workforce realities that men don’t seem to have picked up
on.