Career Skills: Our Process and Where We Are Today

Although our college graduates are technically competent, there is concern that they are insufficiently trained in some broader skills required for career success.  This concern comes from feedback from employers, internship supervisors, and graduate programs.  Basically, we are doing a good job of teaching/training students academically/technically, but our graduates require greater training in communications, critical thinking/problem solving, and leadership/management.  These are often called ‘soft skills,’ but we felt that because their long-term importance, these are “career skills.” 

The College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS) has tackled this problem. During 2014 and 2015 a faculty task force defined competencies for our graduates and vetted them through College faculty and more than 50 companies.  Currently each degree-granting unit in the college is working to determine how these competencies can be incorporated into our curricula. Our approach is to incorporate competencies into existing courses (or replace existing courses with new ones) so as to avoid increasing the number of required credit hours for graduation and time to degree.  We are asking each department to do so in a way to give students multiple opportunities to hone each of the competencies (i.e., incorporate skills into two or more courses).

The CALS Student Career Skills Competencies are divided into three categories: (1) Communication Skills, (2) Critical Thinking/Problem Solving Skills, and (3) Leadership/Management Skills.  Each category may have sub-categories, for instance, Communications Skills are divided into (1) Written and Electronic Competencies, (2) Verbal Competencies, and (3) Integrated Competencies.   

As an example of competencies, under our Problem Solving/Critical Thinking category, we want students to be able to: (1) Define the Problem, (2) Gather Relevant Information, (3) Formulate a Solution, (4) Take Action, and (5) Reflect and Evaluate, with a focus on learning and improvement.  Under each competency we define what we think an Unacceptable Level, our target Exit Level, and an Advanced Level for achieving the competency. 

We are presently compiling information on how students are given opportunities to develop these competencies both inside and outside of the classroom.  The idea is that not every course or club or activity must cover all of these competencies, but that students have opportunities over their College career to achieve all of these competencies.