How Faculty Use Workplace Experience to Help Students

Dan Hatch, a user experience and web design professor at Utah Valley University, has spent seven summers externing at technology companies to brush up on industry-specific skills that will give his students a leg up when they join the workforce. He enters each two-week externship with a similar mission: to understand how students get into the industry, how they gain experience and how they can get a job right out of college.

But this year, while spending a week in May at JobNimbus and a week in June at Awardco, something else was top of mind: How will students need to understand, work with and utilize artificial intelligence?

AI use in the workplace is booming. In April, Gallup found that 13 percent of American employees use AI daily in their jobs—up from 8 percent about a year prior—and 50 percent of employees use AI at least a few times per year. Meanwhile, AI’s capabilities are growing at breakneck speed. At this rate, the versions of ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude that students become familiar with during their freshman year will be very different from the AI models available when they graduate.

Colleges are grappling with the task of preparing students for increasingly AI-integrated careers. At some institutions, faculty are getting up to speed by stepping out of the classroom and into the workforce.

“We want our faculty to start learning what AI competencies and skills employers are expecting students to show up with,” said Jim McAtee, assistant vice president and executive director for career and professional development at Ball State University.

Ball State offers externships each summer for eight to 10 professors who apply and are selected by faculty mentors, department chairs and college deans. The externs spend 40 hours on-site with a partner company—such as the car-rental company Enterprise or regional airline Republic Airways—and then write a reflection paper and give a formal presentation to the university about the experience. Prior to completing the externships, the faculty members participate in a “skills infusion” program, during which they meet with alumni and industry leaders to integrate workplace skills into the core curriculum, McAtee said. The annual skills infusion program is open to more faculty than the chosen externs—about 60 participate each year, he said.

Ball State introduced faculty externships in 2014 in response to “growing concerns about the value of a degree, workforce readiness and the perceived skills gap between graduates and employer expectations,” McAtee said. “We wanted a program that would bring together faculty and employers and alumni in career services to intentionally connect course outcomes with what we were seeing in the workplace.”

The program is centered around the eight National Association of Colleges and Employers career-readiness competencies. Ball State officials are talking about adding a ninth competency related to AI.

‘Win-Win-Win’ Programs

This summer, the University of Connecticut College of Engineering debuted its faculty-to-industry fellow program and placed six inaugural fellows at companies including aerospace manufacturer Pratt & Whitney, submarine builder General Dynamics Electric Boat, and medical equipment manufacturer Nextern. JC Zhao, dean of the college, said he’s working on placing six more faculty members in internships this cycle.

Real-world experience is invaluable, he said. Many professors follow a “school to school to school” path, and they “don’t really have the experience of appreciating what the industry is like.” Hatch agreed; he spent about 25 years working in UX and web design before becoming a professor, and many of his colleagues have never spent time in business, he said.

But while faculty are learning what their students will need to understand about AI for specific industry jobs, they can also bring their expertise to the businesses they’re working with, Zhao said. The UConn program got off the ground in part because so many businesses were interested in working with faculty experts. He considers the program a win-win-win—beneficial to faculty, students and businesses.

“If the faculty member’s research and their work gets used by the industry to make an impact in the real world—that’s one of the key things I’m trying to achieve,” Zhao said. “We have a lot of expertise; we have a lot of technologies. How do we transition that to the industry?”

At Ball State, the externships have had real impacts on the curriculum, McAtee said.

“Faculty will come back and say, ‘Because of this experience, it’s really changed my pedagogy. It’s made me really think about my course outcomes and my assignments,’ and some of them have redone their entire course around this,” McAtee said. “We know that there are certain competencies that our students outperform the nation in. When you tie that back to how many classes have embedded those competencies, you can see a correlation.”

AI is “literally changing by the day. Agentic AI is going to make such a difference in industry,” Zhao said. College graduates typically get their foot in the door through junior-level positions that involve a lot of grunt work, Hatch explained. But now, “AI can eat that stuff for breakfast,” he added.

“The big dilemma we have, then, is how do students break into the business if there’s no longer junior-level jobs? They almost have to go from college to midlevel,” Hatch said.

After spending time at Awardco and JobNimbus, Hatch believes the companies will need “more people, not less,” even as they embrace AI. Job roles are getting broader and companies are getting more ambitious as AI improves efficiency, he explained. Staying up-to-date on their plans is essential for his students.

“If I could get everybody in my department to do [an externship], I would,” he said.