Future Ready Fellows: Linking Course Learning Experiences and Career Competencies

Call for Proposals - Overview

Are you interested in helping your students connect their learning experiences with real-world workforce and life-time skills? By helping students reflect on how they can apply course activities in the context of how they can leverage their experiences after your course and after their time in college, we can guide students to becoming more future-ready.

We are looking for faculty to be a part of a cohort to work together to explore multiple methods for supporting students in making connections between their coursework and the skills they can use after college. Students regularly engage in coursework that helps prepare them for life after college. Our challenge lies in equipping students with the vocabulary to articulate the connections between these experiences and the skills and competencies that will help them succeed both in the job market and with their passions they pursue. Interested faculty will work with support from the Career Planning and Networking and the Faculty Center.

The National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) is a professional association of college career service professionals. They use a framework of eight competencies and behaviors for addressing career-related goals, which they define as “a foundation from which to demonstrate requisite core competencies that broadly prepare the college educated for success in the workplace and lifelong career management.” The eight career readiness competencies identified by NACE are:

• Professionalism
• Communication
• Critical Thinking
• Teamwork
• Technology
• Leadership
• Equity & Inclusion
• Career & Self Development

As our campus considers expanding access to experiential learning opportunities, aligning these experiences with the NACE Competencies gives us a framework and uniform language to empower students to talk about their experiences. Multiple offices, including the Career Planning and Networking Center and Student Life, already use these eight competencies as a framework for connecting college work with career development.

A recently released a report called, “Integrating Academic and Career Development: Strategies to Scale Experiential Learning and Reflection Across the Curriculum,” identified practices that encourage ongoing reflection and narration for students. This helps them transition from “I took” and “I learned” statements towards “I did" and "I can do” assertions. Faculty members in this cohort will be integrating teaching practices that encourage students to reflect and assist them with incorporating course competencies into the development of their professional persona. Throughout students’ SUNY Oneonta experience they collect artifacts, experiences, and new competencies; one of the goals of this project is to help students articulate how they will be able to leverage their experience to themselves and others. Students could be saving class artifacts in a portfolio to share later, taking time in the moment to reflect on growth and goals, or doing mock interviews and practicing how they will talk about connecting their classwork with skills for a potential job.

You do not need to have any previous experience integrating career competencies to participate in the funding opportunity. This grant is focused on embedding future-ready reflections early in students' educational experience, integrating into 1000, 2000, and potentially 3000 level classes. We are looking for professors who are interested in working within a cohort model to explore how these competencies could be incorporated into a wide-range of disciplines and who would be willing to share their findings with others.