Mary Gatta: Decoding Career Trends Through NACE Research

Mary Gatta, Director of Research and Policy at the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), continues our three-part series exploring the intersection of higher education and industry. Gatta shares up-to-date insights from NACE's latest Job Outlook Survey, highlights the growing importance of experiential learning for the job prospects of new graduates, and discusses the significant shift from GPA-based hiring to skills-based approaches, with two-thirds of employers now implementing skills-based practices. Gatta also emphasizes the critical need for faculty involvement in helping students translate classroom learning into career-ready competencies. The conversation offers valuable research insights for higher education professionals, employers, and students navigating the evolving landscape of college-to-career transitions.

Transcript

Julian Alssid: Welcome to Work Forces. I'm Julian Alssid.

Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with the innovators who shape the future of work and learning. 

Julian Alssid: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained. 

Kaitlin LeMoine: Work Forces is supported by Lumina Foundation. Lumina is an independent, private foundation in Indianapolis that is committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. Let's dive in. 

Welcome to the second interview in our three part mini series with the National Association of Colleges and Employers, or NACE. In our first interview with NACE, President and CEO, Shawn VanDerziel, we discussed the broader landscape surrounding College Career Services and recruiting. Shawn provided an overview of the field and NACE's work, highlighting its central role as a knowledge-based organization with research at its core. Today, we're looking forward to delving deeper into that research with Mary Gatta, who leads NACE's research efforts. 

Julian Alssid: As Director of Research and Policy, Mary brings over 20 years of experience in teaching, research and advocacy on issues of education, employment and retirement, inequity. Her work focuses on evidence based research analysis, developing solutions around economic security, education, and workforce policies. Before joining NACE, she held faculty and research positions at the City University of New York, Gottman Community College, Rutgers, University's Center for Women and Work and Wider Opportunities for Women in Washington, DC, which is, I think, Mary, where we may have actually first met.

Mary Gatta: It was it was where we met, yep. 

Julian Alssid: Indeed. So welcome to Work Forces. Great to have you. 

Mary Gatta: Thank you for having me. 

Kaitlin LeMoine: Yes. So great to be with you today, Mary. Thanks so much for joining us. And as we get going today, can you please tell us more about your background and your role at NACE. 

Mary Gatta: I come out of higher education. For the most part, I spent most of my career in higher ed, in faculty roles. My training is in sociology, so I have a PhD in sociology, and my study, my research, and also a lot of my teaching has really been around work and understanding the impacts of education on labor market rewards, looking at the impacts of systemic inequities and how to mitigate them. So when I joined NACE as our director of research and public policy about four years ago, I was really excited, because the work that we do in terms of our research work at NACE really focuses on how to better understand the outcomes, the career outcomes, of college graduates, how to understand it across lines, levels of equity, and also how to understand the employer side, like, what are employers looking for in recent college grads? So it was a really great opportunity to kind of marry all of that for my own career, and also we know how important evidence-based research is around career outcomes for college graduates and for university recruiters. So that has been, is, really the focus of our research work at NACE. 

Julian Alssid: So tell us a little bit more. I mean, at NACE, you're sitting on a real trove of data. So I know you must be in, you know, in researcher heaven, tell us a little bit about that data that you sit on, and add a little bit more about the types of specifically the types of reports you generate, and who uses them and who they're intended for. 

Mary Gatta: We do a variety of surveys for our research throughout the year, and we in terms of kind of our samples, we are using...we're fortunate that we're able to survey our members, both our higher education members, who mostl