By Scott Shireman, Global Head of Coursera for Campus
University students today are graduating into a new labor market reshaped by automation and the pandemic that demands new skills. According to the ILO, the global youth employment rate fell by more than twice as much as the rate among adults in 2020. The changing skills landscape is creating workforce opportunities, with 149 million new digital jobs expected to be added to the global economy by 2025. However, employers and students alike feel there is a mismatch between the skills students are graduating with and the skills required in the workplace.
The Campus Skills Report 2022, published today, explores skill trends among student learners across the globe and identifies key steps that higher education institutions can take to better align with industry, improve student employability, and increase student enrollments.
Drawing from Coursera’s 3.8 million registered student learners across 3,700 free and paid campus customers, the Campus Skills Report 2022 measures the skill proficiencies of campus learners for 5 emerging roles, provides skill-to-job pathways for 10 academic disciplines, and highlights learner skill trends for 9 countries. Importantly, while certain students use self-guided online learning to acquire skills on their own, others are guided by curated programs implemented by their higher education institutions in partnership with Coursera.
Our skills trends analysis of students on Cousera reveals the following insights:
The jobs of the future that students want, according to their major
- The top jobs by student demand are data scientist, data analyst, software engineer, machine learning engineer, and marketing specialist. For example, in India, roughly 18% of Coursera for Campus students surveyed want to be software engineers, while 15% want to be data scientists.
- While students around the world have made some progress in obtaining baseline proficiency in job-relevant skills, the majority have yet to meet the target proficiency needed to transition into these jobs.
- Arts and humanities students who aspire to become professors and K-12 teachers are prioritizing communication, research, and writing skills.
- Business students express similar levels of interest in data analysis and financial analysis as they do in marketing and consulting. To build data fluency, they are seeking out computer programming and machine learning skills.
- Engineering students’ top jobs are software engineer and data scientist, so they are prioritizing core skills like mathematics, statistical programming, and computer programming.
- Data scientist is a preferred job for health sciences students, who are acquiring data analysis, data management, and general statistics skills that can help them contribute to healthcare technology.
- Social sciences students’ top job choices are researcher, data analyst, and economist. To complement their research skills, they are developing statistical programming and business analysis skills.
The skills students are prioritizing to prepare for jobs in countries around the world
- To prepare for jobs in a fast-growing digital economy, students in India are seeking out foundational and emerging digital skills, from C programming to cloud computing.
- The majority of students on Coursera in the Philippines are women: a trend that higher education leaders can seize to close gender-based skills gaps in STEM fields.
- Students in Egypt gravitate towards technology skills like software architecture, software testing, and software engineering in preparation for launching their own ventures in the country’s growing startup scene.
- To thrive in the face of rapid technological change, students in the United States are pairing technology skills with human skills, such as decision making and change management.
- A high number of students in Colombia are learning programming, software, and data analysis skills: a promising trend as the country prioritizes technology-driven endeavors.
To compete amid rapid transformation, higher education institutions are increasingly connecting skills-based learning to skills-based hiring and, in doing so, preparing their students to enter high-growth digital jobs.
To download the full report and explore insights, visit coursera.org/skills-reports/campus.