Steps Departments Can Take

While UO has numerous opportunities for supporting student career readiness, the students who benefit the most may be the least likely to seek out development opportunities. The best way to ensure every student leaves UO with the career competencies to help them succeed is to build these opportunities directly into the curriculum. Below are some steps departments can take to help embed career readiness into every student's academic experience. For additional questions or support, contact tep@uoregon.edu. 

Many of the career competencies overlap with the foundation of a liberal arts education and many are likely already taught in your majors. Consider using a department meeting or faculty retreat to broaden your unit's understanding of the career competencies and discuss which are most important for your students and what coursework and experiences in our major are most important for preparing students for careers.

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Adopting a career-focused learning objective in your major helps move beyond individual course experiences. It supports alignment and coordination of career-focused transferrable skills across the curriculum. Sample outcomes could include:

• Students will be able to identify and communicate their competencies relevant to their future career paths.
• Students will be able to explore career paths and translate how their own skills and interests match a chosen major/career path.
• Students will be able to write professional documents (resume, cover letter, thank you letter, and elevator pitch) to use for jobs, internships and post-graduate program applications.
• Students will develop a mentoring network that provides insights and connections to help them make their career goals a reality.

Adopting a specific career readiness outcomes paves the way for the next steps for your department, mapping how students develop that career competency through the curriculum, and providing an opportunity to assess how well your department is meeting its objective. 

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• Find out what your department is already doing to develop career ready students. Survey faculty or students to find which competencies are focused on in your curriculum, in which courses, and to what extent. For example, many competencies are practiced in courses but students may not be able to name them or articulate how they are relevant to their careers. 
• Build in earlier opportunities for students. Early experiences with career readiness help students prepare for their career journey throughout their UO experience instead of at the end when they prepare to graduate. Embedding career readiness assignments earlier in your major curriculum can help students see the relevance of more courses to their future careers, can help students take advantage of other resources at UO that can help prepare them for their careers, and can help them choose other courses that can develop the skills they want to be successful in their careers. For example
  • are there entry-level courses where your unit can embed career relevant assignments and reflections? 
  • can you have students create a handshake account to explore careers or explore offerings in LinkedIn learning in an existing course?
• Map your curriculum. How do the career readiness experiences students have in your courses build upon each other as students progress through the courses in your major? Are there gaps in which competencies students develop? Use a curriculum mapping process to identify where students are developing competencies and how those experiences may build on each other from one course to the next. 

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Some departments have course offerings to help identify and build upon the career competencies developed in their major or to offer credit-bearing courses tied to supporting student learning associated with internships. Consider adding a career-related course if your department does not already have one. For example, the Geography Department offers one example of a career-focused course in "GEOG 419: The Professional Geographer," taught by Dr. Leslie McLees.

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Your department can use the annual assessment process to focus on career preparation for your majors. The steps highlighted above are all examples of valuable assessment work that your unit could do embed career preparation experiences into multiple points of your curriculum and could be highlighted in annual assessment reports. The next step of the assessment cycle is to collect more evidence of whether students are meeting the career readiness goals you have set for them. This process could draw from multiple sources including: 

• Direct evidence from student coursework: Are there specific assignments where students can demonstrate the goals you have set for them? Examples might include students writing for an external audience, student presentations, or students preparing resumes or other application materials.
• Indirect evidence from student surveys or focus groups asking students which competencies they develop, which are most relevant, and which are missing from their experiences. 
• Using existing data sources, such as the Post-Secondary Employment Outcomes (PSEO), which displays earnings outcomes and employment flows for UO graduates compared to other Oregon institutions and from 22 other states. 

If your department is interested in focusing on career preparation, contact us at tep@uoregon.edu for support and resources. 

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