A new collaboration between the Career Leadership Collective and the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE) will expand higher education faculty and career counselors’ capacity to successfully integrate career education and preparation into the essence of a student’s entire learning experience.
The partnership between the two organizations comes as employers increasingly seek out graduates who are able to demonstrate the hard and soft skills cultivated from their academic endeavors. Faculty and career leaders from the Collective’s member institutions will now have the opportunity to participate in a credit-bearing course focused on career guidance and readiness competencies in addition to ACUE’s Effective Practice Framework.
“What we have found is there’s quite a bit of difference between, for example, assigning group work – which we know employers like because group work and teamwork is so prized in the workplace – and having the pedagogical skills to help students effectively manage a group, manage group dynamics, share responsibility [and] know how to professionally engage challenges when you’re in a group,” said Dr. Jonathan Gyurko, chief executive officer of ACUE. “So, our work is taking something like group work to that next level of detail so that it’s not nearly a group assignment, but a well-structured, well-facilitated experience.”
To ensure that all of the professionals on a campus can be “part and parcel” of the work of preparing students for fulfilling lives and careers, ACUE and the Collective will build on each organization’s respective strengths to offer a course consisting of online and face-to-face seminars. The course will lead to an American Council on Education-endorsed ACUE Certificate in Effective College Instruction with a concentration in Career Guidance and Readiness.
The organizations worked closely with faculty while developing their joint course to make certain that the teaching approaches and career orientation were “deeply respectful” of a professor’s discipline and research interests, Gyurko said.
Currently, more than 500 faculty and career leaders from 26 member institutions of the Collective have enrolled in the course, which is being delivered through the Council of Independent Colleges.
“The data from that implementation are very strong,” Gyurko said. “Faculty do see students making connections that they had not before, and they’re seeing the relevance of the humanities, the relevance of the sciences, the relevance of, perhaps, their general education requirements to post-graduation. We know that when students are able to make those connections, it is highly motivating.”
