Undergraduate degree no guarantee of a job

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Educators, employment counsellors and executives have been heard to say the past few years that a lot of employers are not only willing to hire Native people for management positions but are actively seeking them and are unable to find them.

So, are Native students leaving school with the right kind of education to get them into top management positions?

A college diploma or undergraduate humanities degree can get you a job, but it may not be enough to set you on the fast track to upper management positions, according to some authorities. Not only that, but you don't become a CEO overnight. It can take several years to move into management, depending on the field and industry demand as well as individual abilities, they say.

Kathleen Macela, director of the University of Saskatchewan's Aboriginal Student's Centre at Saskatoon, says there is definitely a demand for Aboriginal people to fill top management slots, but increasingly she feels that a second degree is called for-a master's or doctorate.

"A lot of the people coming out with undergraduate degrees, often they are in the soft sciences, like Native studies or psychology, and I don't think with that alone you're able to apply for a managerial position," says Macela.

Milton Tootoosis, 37, graduated with a bachelor degree in Native studies in 1986. He's now national director of human resource strategies for the Aboriginal Human Resource Development Council of Canada. Tootoosis says he got his job by being in the right place at the right time, but he points out their president has a master's of business administration degree (MBA).

According to Tootoosis, the formula for success includes continuing to learn from people after you graduate, seeking out mentors, "common sense," and carrying an attitude of hope and possibility instead of negativity. A liberal arts graduate needs some administrative experience or knowledge he says. More important, if you aspire to high administrative positions, you have to be willing to take risks and be ready to tap into opportunities in "the larger (non-Native) society."

He says the corporate sector tells him they would hire more Aboriginal people for managerial streams if they could find them. But Tootoosis says they need a computer or commerce background.

"There's an outcry now for investment bankers," he says, "but we just don't have that many. We don't have a lot of people with undergraduate degrees or graduate (degrees) in computer science, for example. Something you need if you want to be a head of a high tech firm." He says managers must keep up with rapidly changing computer software too.

Macela doesn't want to see entrance requirements lowered just to get more Aboriginal people into schools of higher learning.

"When it comes down to the qualifications," she says, "we don't want them to lessen the qualifications for Aboriginal people, but we need to make sure when Aboriginal students leave university they're able to meet (high) standards."

Before Macela took her present job, she worked at the Native Law Centre for six years, where she met people who typically had acquired a three-year law degree following their undergraduate degree. "When you have an academic background like that," she says, "you're able to apply for these upper management-type programs. But I think if you just have an undergraduate degree, and especially if it's not in an honors category-if you haven't done a thesis-then you really need to, I think, go back to school, which of course, sometimes bands can't afford that, since there's so many people just trying to get into the undergraduate progams."

"We know a couple of things for sure," said Tootoosis. "The workforce is aging, and the typical senior manager is a white male, 50 years old. They're getting a little nervous. We also know Caucasian women are next in line for a lot of those senior management jobs. They've been in the system far ahead of us.

"We also know some of the top-notch Aboriginal people w have, with the commerce background, you know, the relevant academic training, are very sought after and they basically have a ticket to freedom and sucess. They can basically work where they want," he said. Tootoosis says a qualified employee, "If he is a good marketer, a self-promoter and is doing a good job" will be recruited by firms other than the one that just hired him. He'll have a good chance of being moved up the ladder faster than if he had stayed with the original firm."

Tootoosis adds there are currently so few Aboriginal graduates with a commerce background that if they don't get treated right in one firm, they'll have no problem changing jobs.

"We also know many of the cream-of-the-crop graduates are going back to their tribal councils or to their bands or an Aboriginal organization because they feel there's that social responsibility," Tootoosis says. But he says research by the FSIN shows "70 per cent of First Nations people will have to find work with non-Native organizations." Tootoosis observes that Oriental people, for example, have no trouble keeping their cultural identity while working in mainstream society and he believes Aboriginal people can do the same.