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Educating the Educators: Preparing Faculty to Teach Career Readiness: A Review of the Literature

Abstract

Higher education institutions have witnessed recent changes surrounding career readiness. Assumptions can be made as to why that is perhaps due to residual effects from the COVID-19 pandemic or the 2008 financial crisis and although the rationale could be varied, the next steps are quite clear: universities must pivot and identify innovative ways to engage students for their career readiness. As such, a team comprised of administrative and academic faculty at a large, public, urban, R1 university collaborated to produce a faculty development for career readiness course. The asynchronous, web-based career readiness course provides insight and practice materials for the campus regarding six major career competencies (i.e., as identified by the national association of colleges and employers): Leadership, communication, cultural intelligence, emotional intelligence, problem solving and critical thinking, as well as professionalism. This program’s aim is to not only assist higher education professionals on how to effectively develop a practical course for academic faculty, but also to help support career competency-learning and therefore, potential scaffolded teaching of such integral topics in the classroom, to in turn highlight a “collective responsibility” for undergraduates’ career readiness. Bobbie Barnes, Joanne Ullman, Jenna Heath*, Melikabella Shenouda

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