Natural Language Processing of Supervising Manager and College Intern Explanations of Work Ethic and Professionalism

Less than a decade ago, the National Association of Colleges and Employers rolled out their eight career competencies, identified as: leadership, communication, critical thinking, teamwork, professionalism/ethics, technical savviness, equity and inclusion, and career and self-development (NACE, 2016). An outpouring of time, money, and teaching resources continues by the higher education field, government, and the private employment sectors in hopes of increasing college student career readiness (Angel, 1995). However, after almost ten years of seeing the phrase “career competencies” transcend national conversations, (Human Resources-UNL, 2017, p. 1), supervising managers and college students still rate proficiency levels for competencies very differently. As Koncz and Gray point out, “in terms of graduates’ level of proficiency in the competencies, employers and college students expressed very different opinions” (2022, p. 1). Pointedly, there continues to be a concerning gap in how recent college graduates and supervising managers learn, perceive, and describe career readiness. Detecting and identifying such a language gap through direct examination of language used by graduates and supervising managers may require unrealistically large labelling efforts by researchers. Natural language processing (NLP) methods can help bridge this gap by algorithmically finding topics that may constitute such “articulation gaps.”