By Sarah R. Predmore, Techniques Contributing Writer
Preparing CTE students for success in today’s workforce means more than just teaching them the technical know-how. They need to be equipped to function in a work environment; they need to learn to be dependable and reliable, to take the initiative, and work well with their fellow employees. In other words, preparing students for success also means teaching them about the importance of having a positive work ethic.
But how exactly do you teach students about initiative, for instance?
Work ethic has been a challenging area to address, admits Roger Hill, an associate professor of occupational studies at the University of Georgia. One main reason, he suggests, “is that teachers don’t necessarily know how to do it or don’t feel equipped.”
“Teachers feel their efforts at teaching work ethic are not effective because they cannot measure or see direct results,” adds Gregory Petty, a professor at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. He points out that, “A positive work ethic is acquired over a long period of time and is often predicated on a student’s readiness to exhibit positive work ethic attributes.”
Unfortunately, this may not occur until maturity kicks in—after the student has left the training program.
Through their research on work ethic, Hill and Petty are helping teachers to understand the topic and better educate their students in it. Hill has developed a curriculum devoted to work ethic that he has been sharing with fellow educators and professionals.
“I get, on average, three to four e-mails a week from people looking for guidance and assistance—a lot of it is from CTE, but also it comes from those in business and industry, human resource development in particular,” he says.
Hill has made it even easier to access some of these materials, including online lessons, by setting up “The Work Ethic Site” at http://www.coe.uga.edu/workethic/. He also offers his more extensive Work Ethic and Employability Skills: A Unit of Instruction in a PDF format upon request (see http://www.coe.uga.edu/workethic/mp.htm for more information).
It is a curriculum that emphasizes student involvement over lecture. For a successful lesson, a teacher needs “to take enough time to have the students engage in some type of discussion or problem solving, or something to help them develop a deeper awareness,” argues Hill.
Teachers need to be patient with the process because the fruits of their labor may take longer than the short period teachers have with students, suggests Petty.
Through the lessons, students are encouraged not only to examine why work ethic is important, but also to carefully gauge their own habits. To this end, Hill provides an electronic version of the Occupational Work Ethic Inventory (OWEI), which was developed by Petty. It is a valuable tool that Petty has also made available to many graduate students and researchers seeking to improve work ethic training and evaluation.
Hill and Petty, along with Ernest Brewer, who is also a professor at UT-Knoxville, presented some of their valuable work ethic research at ACTE’s 2004 Convention.
Petty, who grew up on a farm in Missouri, developed his interest in the work ethic while serving in the Navy during the Vietnam era. While in service, he observed that many young men who had avoided induction into the Army by joining the Navy had a terrible work ethic, which begged the question: why?
A person’s attitude toward work is forged by the impressions they receive from their environment, Petty ascertained. Peer pressure, esprit de corps and other attributes affect attendance, character, teamwork, appearance, attitude, productivity, organizational skills, communication, cooperation and respect. Therefore, poor (or no) experiences, he determined, lead to a poor work ethic.
Hill earned his doctorate from UT-Knoxville, where he worked with Petty in researching work ethic. However, his interest in the topic first began while he was teaching at Hiwassee College in eastern Tennessee. At that time, the college was looking into collaborating with members of business and industry, and he sat on several committees involved in talks with potential corporate clients.
In discussing their potential workforce, recalls Hill, the business representatives would talk about the qualities of workers in a general way. What they were getting at, he explains, was that they needed workers who would show up on time, who could be counted on and who could get along with their fellow employees. In other words, these employers needed a workforce characterized by a strong work ethic.
In fact, for these potential clients, a strong work ethic even trumped technical skills, according to Hill. Essentially, they told the committees that it would be nice if workers had some technical skills, but that they would need to update those skills regardless. These businesses knew how to provide technical training, says Hill, but what they didn’t know was how to deal with issues like dependability or interpersonal skills.
Cooperating with business and industry has allowed Hill to determine which skills really are most valuable in the working world. “My scholarship is based on systematic research and data derived from real working environments,” he explains. “It has a good foundation behind it.”
While the importance of work ethic is not a new topic, the discussion has changed to reflect a new global, information-based economy, according to Hill.
In Vocational Education and the Work Ethic in a Changing Workplace (http://www.ericdigests.org/pre-929/ethic.htm), Michele Naylor writes, “In an attempt to meet increasing foreign competition by improving product quality and productivity, management has begun to encourage and, in many cases, require greater worker participation in decisions affecting both the quality of the work environment and the production process.”
“If you look at the attributes of ‘information age’ jobs, and the kind of work environments we’re in now, there’s a much greater importance placed on people collaborating, sharing ideas and working together in teams,” says Hill. So qualities like initiative and interpersonal skills have been elevated in importance, he explains, and “people who are trying to put together a profitable enterprise have come to value these kinds of attributes heavily.”
Certain work ethic characteristics not only become more valuable over time, but also more valuable depending on the line of work. While all three general work ethic qualities—dependability, initiative and interpersonal skills—are important for most any career, certain jobs require a greater focus on some categories than others, according to Hill.
Instructors in marketing, for example, might want to highlight initiative and interpersonal skills. On the other hand, automotive technicians, who are not going to be interacting with the public as much (although that’s changing more and more, Hill admits), might want to emphasize the area of dependability. “So I think there are varying degrees of emphases within different areas of career and technical education,” he says, “but all three are important in every area to some extent.”
So, are students receiving sufficient instruction in the importance of work ethic? In general, Hill says the answer is, unfortunately, no.
Although almost any school system mentions work ethic somewhere in its standards, academic courses seem to be short on putting work ethic instruction into practice, he notes. It’s a kind of disconnect from the real world, he says, “and that’s been criticized.”
CTE, however, appears to be ahead of the curve when it comes to teaching students about work ethic.
Georgia’s technical colleges are a prime example. The colleges have a statewide, standardized curriculum that emphasizes 10 essential work ethic traits: attendance, character, teamwork, appearance, attitude, productivity, organizational skills, communication, cooperation and respect. Each week is devoted to one of the traits.
These 10 traits were identified by a taskforce commissioned by the Georgia Department of Technical and Adult Education in 1997. The department argued that work ethic instruction was a pressing need, citing a U.S. Department of Labor study that found that 80 percent of workers who lose their jobs do so not because they lack occupational skills, but because they lack proper work habits. The taskforce, which included administrators and instructors as well as members of business and industry, was charged with improving work ethic instruction in Georgia’s technical colleges.
The commissioner appointed three schools to establish a program of instruction based on the taskforce’s findings. For this, the commissioner chose three colleges: East Central Technical College in Fitzgerald, Valdosta Technical College in Valdosta and Southeastern Tech in Vidalia. Together, the colleges’ three presidents developed the program, and then piloted it at each of their schools in 1999. The program was so successful that the State Board of Technical and Adult Education adopted it statewide in 2000.
“Our instructors have always, to some degree, taught work ethic,” says Diane Harper, president of East Central Technical College (http://www.ectcollege.org). “What we have now is a systematic way of focusing on work habits and attitudes and having a way to evaluate students and make them aware of what is required of them,” she explains.
In fact, students at these colleges receive a grade based solely on their work ethic performance. “I’m a firm believer that if you want something to get done, then you measure it, and it will get done,” says Harper. “In our school, it has made a big difference. Students get just as excited or upset about their work ethic grades as their academic grades.”
Perhaps one reason why these students are so concerned with their work ethic grades is that they know potential employers might be looking closely at those grades before they make a hiring decision. As part of the program, the colleges have begun a campaign to encourage employers to ask student job candidates for their transcripts.
“We work with employers to teach them how to read a transcript, we ask them to request it from students when they go for an interview, and we’ve been tracking how many are doing that,” says Harper.
The prospect of handing a transcript over in an interview may sound intimidating for some new students, but with time it helps them to develop self-confidence and confidence in their futures. Dawn Jones, a graduate of East Central Tech, came to the school with trepidation; her early education had left her feeling like a failure.
But for Jones, the school’s work ethic program was life changing. “The biggest thing I learned there was how to relate to people,” says Jones. “I began talking ... I learned how to laugh. I became confident of who I was.”
Now Jones wants to be an educator herself: “I want to be able to help those who have the ability to achieve, but for some reason are locked within themselves. I want to be able to touch lives, like East Central Tech touched mine,” she explains.
The curriculum has proved so effective for students throughout Georgia that, like Hill, Harper receives regular requests from educators and professionals seeking materials and advice. Her latest request came all the way from the Western Cape Education Department in South Africa. “It’s not just a Georgia issue,” she points out. We live in such a global, interconnected world these days that good customer service skills, for instance, are vital to business and industries around the world.
“Concerns about work ethic are universal,” agrees Petty. “I get almost as many requests for information regarding the work ethic from the international community as from the United States.”
As with Petty and Hill, Harper emphasizes student involvement as key to successful work ethic instruction. “In our school, I think students look forward to having the opportunity to talk about these issues,” she says. “We often have students present some of the lessons to other students in the class. Peer evaluation can be critical, and it encourages teamwork.”
But a good work ethic curriculum must permeate all facets of the school, Harper stresses.
“Changing of the college culture must begin with administration modeling commitment to the program,” according to Harper. “This commitment must saturate the mindset of all employees in order to be successful.”
At East Central Tech, this means that students are treated as virtual “employees.” There is continuous evaluation and counseling of students, and if an individual is not performing up to standard, then the instructor works with him or her on improving particular work habits. It’s what Harper describes as a “real-world message.”
This real-world modeling is what some educators refer to as the “hidden curriculum.” In modeling, students learn proper work habits through their relationships with teachers, who serve as authority figures much in the way that future employers will. This modeling is an instrumental part of any work ethic instruction. It would be detrimental to the work ethic curriculum for a teacher to be undependable or fail to exemplify positive work habits, says Hill.
But work ethic instruction can also be particularly powerful outside of the traditional classroom. Some of Petty’s research indicates that extracurricular activities can improve a student’s work ethic.
In CTE especially, co-curricular activities can provide a great opportunity for students to learn good work ethic while being involved in a field that particularly interests them, explains Hill. Through these activities, students can take part in competitions, events that involve public speaking, or other exercises that promote a good work ethic. These activities also provide a great opportunity for modeling, because students often develop close relationships with sponsoring faculty members, he adds.
Effective educators must recognize that there are a variety of opportunities to instill their students with good work habits. Work ethic is an area where actions speak loudly, but so do words, according to the experts. Teaching students how to be successful at work and in life requires a comprehensive education.
And while there are some exceptions, such as in Georgia’s technical colleges, there has been no universal acceptance of standards established regarding appropriate work ethic skills, Petty points out. School administrators usually leave the teaching of the work ethic up to the individual teacher, with mixed results.
Work ethic may strike some teachers as an abstract topic, and therefore difficult to teach. But through their commendable work, educators such as Gregory Petty, Roger Hill, Diane Harper and their colleagues are helping to bring the issue down to earth—and into the classroom.
For more information about his research and work ethic curriculum, you can contact Roger Hill at rbhill@uga.edu.
For more information about his research, you can contact Gregory Petty at gpetty@utk.edu.
For more information about East Central Tech or Georgia’s work ethic curriculum, you can contact Diane Harper at harper@eastcentraltech.edu.
- Techniques March 2005 Issue -
