More than any other type of connecting activity, those involving career assistance for students were consistently shown in our surveys to be more prevalent than activities on our other three domains. Career assistance can take a variety of forms, ranging from simply talking with students about their career concerns, to finding out what skills employers are looking for in new hires, to directly placing students into jobs. Our survey and case study evidence suggests a high degree of connectivity among vocational faculty on these dimensions. For example, faculty talk with students regularly about their work and career options (Table 6, items a and b).[18] In terms of acquiring labor market information from employers (Table 5, items a, b, and c), vocational faculty appear to be very active. More than three-quarters of full-time vocational faculty had sought such information. Most encouraging in the context of rapidly changing labor market skills is that 87% of full time vocational instructors had asked an employer about the kinds of skills they needed in new hires (Table 7, item a).
As with CP measures, there are strong differences between academic and vocational and full- and part-time faculty. For example, in sharp contrast, fewer than one-third of academic faculty had undertaken the various types of career assistance noted above. On the one hand, the paucity of such activities among academic faculty might be considered a surprising result in light of the widespread attention given to the low academic standards of new high school students, and the emphasis over the past few years on the integration of academic and vocational curricula. On the other hand, there is evidence that the integration of academic and vocational curricula in community colleges is proceeding slowly, and that the impetus for integration comes from the vocational not the academic side. Further, school-to-work reforms which stress this integration represent only one of many competing "reform" movements in community colleges.
Faculty's labor market linkages play a vital role in helping students find jobs in their chosen fields, but our site visits revealed that this assistance is typically informal and ad hoc. Almost all the vocational faculty with whom we spoke at our four institutions periodically receive calls from employers about job openings, which they pass on to students as well as providing informal career counseling to them. Many call employers to recommend their top students. Finally, in our interviews, faculty in programs that include internships, clinical practica, or apprenticeships noted that these training placements lead to job offers for many students.
On each campus we visited, job placement is a major criterion for evaluating program and institutional success. Thus, faculty in vocational areas have strong motivation to obtain complete information about students' employment outcomes.[19] All four institutions visited report high placement rates (75% or more of graduates employed in their field of study within one year). Such statistics can be misleading, however, because they typically do not include students who drop out prior to completing their program. They also may not indicate the level at which students are employed. Also, some students are seeking to advance with a current employer rather than seek new employment, and the manner in which schools track these students' career outcomes vary.
The degree to which faculty are involved in career counseling and placement also appeared in our site visits to be related to the characteristics of local labor markets. One of the institutions we visited is located in a fairly depressed economy; another in a rural area with limited employment options; and a third in a region with many employers and a rapidly changing labor market. Faculty in each of these face difficulties providing career assistance to students, although their motivation to do so is high. In the fourth institution, located in a region with a relatively strong and stable economy, faculty are better able to develop enduring ties to local employers, and faculty are more involved in referring students to employers and vice versa.
[19]To achieve this, in some cases the responsibility for job placement is centralized in institutional career centers. Thus, when employers inform faculty of job opportunities or when faculty help students find jobs, they are expected to convey this information to the career center. In this way, individual faculty members' connections to employers may become institutionalized.