MISSA joins CMI group sessions
posted 04/10/05
Richard Bruce, CMI’s Dean of Student & Community Services Division, met with MISSA Administrator and Managers to assess the performance of former students and graduates of CMI who are currently employed by MISSA.
For more than a year now, CMI has been exerting extra efforts to maintain full accreditation from the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC). To-date, however, WASC has not yet seen significant improvements to several key areas identified as “below U.S. standards”. One of these areas was CMI’s failure to provide evidence that it has a full understanding of its students’ educational and support needs.
To address this finding, CMI has become very proactive and has created a variety of methods to collect information in order to better assess its programs and services. One of the methods it uses is the “focus group sessions”. This process involves interviews and dialogues between CMI and employers of CMI students and graduates.
The session focuses on four main areas: (1) how effective were the college’s educational training? (2) what areas did it fail to meet the employer’s expectations? (3) how can CMI improve CMI’s educational and support services? (4) what type of training needs would the employer wants the college to offer?
MISSA’s extensive recruitment process, which includes written tests, panel interviews and thorough background checks, enables the Administration to select the best candidate from as many as forty (40) applicants vying for just one position. This is the main reason why the ten (10) graduates of CMI currently working with MISSA have performed satisfactorily and have consistently met their work requirements.
However, the vast majority of applicants who were not qualified (who were also former students and graduates of CMI), were noted to have serious deficiencies in both written and verbal communication skills. This grim reality is very alarming because if they happen to apply for positions outside the Marshall Islands, they will have very little or no chance of being hired.
The presumption that the communication skills deficiency noted from the hundreds of CMI students and graduates who applied for various positions in MISSA should be solely attributed to CMI’s inability to give more focus on key result areas may be inappropriate. As a matter of fact, numerous applicants who have studied off-island also fared poorly in the qualifying written tests by MISSA, because of the same communication skills deficiency.
This chronic issue has been haunting each and every educator in the Marshall Islands since “time in memoria” and more often than not, a finger is pointed to the main root of the problem...the poor elementary and high school background and sub-standard educational system these applicants were exposed to. Without a solid elementary and high school foundation, these students may still lag behind not only in communication skills, but in other academic areas as well, despite CMI’s extra efforts to inculcate them.
Another area that CMI should focus on is “hands-on exposure” to actual tasks relevant to the course taken by students. This can be made possible by requiring all graduating students to undergo on-the-job training (i.e.bookkeeping jobs for Accounting students) for at least 3 months, as part of the school curriculum. This will allow students to obtain first hand experience of what awaits them after graduation.
MISSA believes that CMI is now on the right track and is grateful to say that several of its best performing employees are products of CMI.