Teamwork and Professionalism: Two Development Gaps Institutions Can't Document Their Way Out Of
Edition 48 | Institutional Effectiveness Weekly
Two Gaps, One Question
NACE’s most recent competency research draws on its 2024 Student Survey, completed by more than 20,000 students, paired with the Job Outlook 2025 employer survey. Across most competencies, students and employers broadly agree on importance. Where they diverge sharply is proficiency. For professionalism and leadership, the gap between how students rate their own proficiency and how employers rate it exceeds or approaches 30 percentage points; for critical thinking and communication, the gap runs closer to 25 points (National Association of Colleges and Employers [NACE], 2025a).
Teamwork is the useful control case here. In the same data, student and employer assessments of teamwork proficiency are close to aligned, and employers rate new graduates as comparatively strong on it (NACE, 2025a). That contrast sharpens the picture rather than complicating it. This is not a story about blanket employer skepticism toward graduates across every competency. It is concentrated in professionalism and leadership specifically, competencies that are harder to practice inside a classroom and easier to misjudge from the inside.
A second, newer data point adds a complication of its own. Cengage Group’s fifth annual Graduate Employability Report, published in September 2025 from a survey of 865 hiring managers, 971 recent graduates, and, for the first time, nearly 700 postsecondary instructors, found that educators and employers rank workforce-skill priorities in close to opposite order. Employers rank job-specific technical ability first; instructors rank it last, prioritizing critical thinking and problem-solving instead (Cengage Group, 2025). The same report found that half of educators devote 20 percent or less of curriculum time to workforce skills of any kind (Cengage Group, 2025).
Two data sets, one underlying question. When students rate themselves higher than employers rate them, and when institutions report prioritizing skills that employers say they are not seeing, is the gap a demonstration problem, competency that exists but is not being surfaced or communicated in a form employers recognize, or a skill gap, competency that was never fully built in the first place? The two explanations call for different responses. A demonstration problem is solved with better evidence: transcripts, portfolios, learner records. A skill gap is solved with better instruction. Diagnosing it as the wrong one means investing in the wrong fix.
This newsletter’s demonstration gap framework, introduced in Edition 24, has generally treated employer skepticism as a visibility problem: institutions produce evidence of learning that never reaches the audiences who need it (Rudawsky, 2026a). Edition 34 argued that ASLO infrastructure already generates evidence adequate to close much of that gap (Rudawsky, 2026c), and Edition 27 extended the same logic to Comprehensive Learner Records and credential design (Rudawsky, 2026b). Teamwork and professionalism test the limits of that framework. The data above, together with what typically happens inside a team-based course assignment, points toward a skill gap more than a demonstration gap for these two competencies specifically. Better transcripts, better rubrics, and better learner records cannot certify a skill that a student never had the structured opportunity to develop. The rest of this edition makes that case and considers what follows from it.
Assignment ≠ Instruction
Every team-based course project has two layers. One is the content: the specific deliverable, tied to the subject matter of the course, that the group produces and the instructor grades. The other is the process: the collaboration itself, the skill of working effectively with other people toward a shared outcome. In most team-based assignments across higher education, the content is taught and assessed in detail. The process, teamwork as a skill in its own right, frequently is neither taught nor meaningfully assessed. Where it is assessed, it is often no more than a light-touch check intended to confirm that every student contributed something, not a structured evaluation of how well the group actually collaborated.
This is the mechanism behind the perception gap described above. Assigning a group project and grading the output does not teach teamwork any more than assigning a research paper teaches research methods without any instruction in how to conduct research. Sixty-five percent of students report receiving no training at all in how to make team-based projects effective, and another 22 percent report receiving only a few minutes of guidance (Mashek, 2021), a pattern more recent peer-reviewed research confirms has not resolved itself (Campbell et al., 2025).
Institutions that want a starting point do not need to build a teamwork or professionalism curriculum from nothing. The AAC&U Teamwork VALUE rubric is explicit that it is designed to measure the quality of a process, rather than the quality of an end product, precisely the distinction this section is making, and it is written to be adapted at the course, program, or institutional level (Association of American Colleges and Universities, n.d.). On the professionalism side, NACE’s Competency Assessment Tool, issued in 2024, is a rubric-based instrument covering all eight NACE career readiness competencies, including professionalism, with parallel student self-assessment and observer versions designed to be completed and then discussed together, not just scored. NACE’s technical documentation reports the tool’s content validity, usability, and reliability evidence (NACE, 2025b). And for teamwork specifically, a 2025 pilot study across universities in the United States and Malaysia tested a structured protocol combining a team charter, staged deliverables, peer evaluation through the widely used CATME system, and guided reflection built into the project timeline. Instructors using the protocol reported significant reductions in social loafing and interpersonal conflict, along with measurable gains in students’ teamwork competencies, without adding meaningful workload to the course (Campbell et al., 2025). None of these three tools requires an institution to invent an assessment approach from scratch. They require choosing to use one, and treating it as part of the course rather than an add-on to it.
What changes an assignment into instruction is specific and well documented beyond these formal tools as well. Halonen and Dunn (2021), writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, describe a set of concrete interventions that convert a content-focused group project into a vehicle for actually teaching the process underneath it: structured peer feedback built into the project timeline, rotating leadership roles so every student practices directing as well as contributing, equity reviews that surface uneven effort before it becomes a source of resentment, and guided self-assessment that asks students to name specific teamwork skills they are working to improve. None of these require redesigning the course content. They require treating the process as something with its own learning objectives, separate from whatever the group happens to be producing.
This distinction gives institutions a genuinely useful diagnostic. Before concluding that a perceived competency gap is a demonstration problem, meaning the evidence exists but is not being surfaced, it is worth asking a simpler question first: was the process ever taught and assessed on its own terms, apart from the content deliverable it was embedded in? If the answer is no, no amount of better documentation will close the gap, because there is no competency yet to document.
Shared Responsibility, Divided
Edition 27 laid out a shared-responsibility framework for closing the demonstration gap, distributing the work across students, institutions, and employers rather than assigning it to any single party (Rudawsky, 2026b). That framework needs a more specific answer here, because the Cengage data complicates a simple institutional-responsibility narrative. Instructors in that survey report prioritizing soft skills already. The disconnect is not primarily a matter of institutions declining to teach professionalism and teamwork. It is a matter of what counts as teaching them being different on each side of the gap.
Once institutions recognize the content and process distinction from the previous section, their obligation becomes concrete rather than aspirational. It is explicit instruction and assessment of teamwork and professionalism within the content-specific courses where these skills are already being asked of students, not a separate soft-skills curriculum bolted onto the degree. A rubric like AAC&U’s Teamwork VALUE rubric or NACE’s Competency Assessment Tool does this work inside an existing course. It does not require a new course, a new office, or students spending additional credit hours on a stand-alone requirement. It requires instructors treating the process as graded content in the courses that already ask students to collaborate.
For employers, the obligation is a corresponding one: participating in defining what professionalism and teamwork look like in practice, whether through structured feedback during internships, campus recruiting conversations that go beyond listing the competency as a requirement, or direct engagement with the rubrics and assessment tools institutions already use. NACE’s Competency Assessment Tool exists in part for this purpose, but its value depends on employer participation in calibrating what proficiency actually looks like, not just naming it as a priority.
For students, the obligation is to treat structured feedback opportunities, when they are offered, as more than a grading formality. Structured self-assessment only closes the gap if students engage with it as a diagnostic tool rather than an administrative step to clear.
None of these three obligations is heavier than the others, and none absolves the institution of the curricular design work described above. But naming them separately makes clear that a persistent perception gap, even after instructors report prioritizing the relevant skills, is evidence that the current division of labor across all three parties is not working as intended.
From Competency to Evidence
Once teamwork and professionalism are genuinely taught, with structured feedback and process-level assessment built into the course design described above, the demonstration infrastructure this newsletter has previously examined becomes relevant again. ASLO systems can capture evidence of these competencies the same way they capture evidence of any other learning outcome, provided the underlying skill was actually assessed and not just assumed (Rudawsky, 2026c). Comprehensive Learner Records can carry that evidence to employers in a form that travels beyond the transcript (Rudawsky, 2026b).
The sequencing matters. Building demonstration infrastructure around a competency that was never taught does not close the gap. It documents the gap more convincingly, producing a credential that claims proficiency the underlying instruction never built. The order has to run the other way: instruction and structured assessment first, documentation and portability second.
Not every gap between what employers report and what institutions believe they are producing is a demonstration failure. Treating all of them as visibility problems, solvable through better transcripts, rubrics, or learner records, risks building increasingly sophisticated documentation around competencies that were never actually developed. Teamwork and professionalism are the clearest current examples of gaps that require instruction before they require infrastructure. The distinction is worth institutions making explicit, competency by competency, before deciding where to invest.
References
Association of American Colleges and Universities. (n.d.). Teamwork VALUE rubric. https://www.aacu.org/value/rubrics/value-rubrics-teamwork
Campbell, C. G., Babik, I., & Crowley, S. J. (2025). Teaching of transferable teamwork competencies in higher education: Development of the TWC Training Protocol©. Frontiers in Education, 10, Article 1637203. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2025.1637203
Cengage Group. (2025, September 9). Cengage Group’s 2025 employability report reveals growing gap between education and employment [Press release]. https://www.cengagegroup.com/news/press-releases/2025/cengage-group-2025-employability-report/
Halonen, J. S., & Dunn, D. S. (2021, November 15). Why and how to teach teamwork. The Chronicle of Higher Education. https://www.chronicle.com/article/why-and-how-to-teach-teamwork
Mashek, D. (2021, June 23). Opinion: College graduates lack preparation in the skill most valued by employers — collaboration. The Hechinger Report. https://hechingerreport.org/opinion-college-graduates-lack-preparation-in-the-skill-most-valued-by-employers-collaboration/
National Association of Colleges and Employers. (2025a). The gap in perceptions of new grads’ competency proficiency and resources to shrink it. https://www.naceweb.org/career-readiness/competencies/the-gap-in-perceptions-of-new-grads-competency-proficiency-and-resources-to-shrink-it
National Association of Colleges and Employers. (2025b, December). NACE career readiness competencies: Technical document. https://www.naceweb.org/docs/default-source/default-document-library/2025/career-readiness/nace-career-readiness-competencies-technical-document-december-2025.pdf
Rudawsky, D. (2026a). The demonstration gap: Why higher education struggles to show its value. Institutional Effectiveness Weekly, Edition 24. https://donrudawsky.substack.com/p/the-demonstration-gapwhy-higher-education
Rudawsky, D. (2026b). The ROI Paradox Part 3: Making credentials demonstrate competence. Institutional Effectiveness Weekly, Edition 27. https://donrudawsky.substack.com/p/the-roi-paradox-part-3-making-credentials
Rudawsky, D. (2026c). The infrastructure is already there: ASLO as a demonstration tool. Institutional Effectiveness Weekly, Edition 34. https://donrudawsky.substack.com/p/the-infrastructure-is-already-there
Don Rudawsky, Ph.D. is the Founder of Dynalytic Solutions and former Vice President for Institutional Effectiveness at Nova Southeastern University. Through Institutional Effectiveness Weekly he provides evidence-based analysis for higher education leaders on analytics, strategy, and student outcomes. New editions publish Tuesdays at 9am.
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