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If it were easy everyone would do it, right?  

First, an admission. Faculty believes faculty. I know. I know: we are the experts in career. But often we simply must grant that we do not have the same type of  credibility because we are administrators. And so, we do have a faculty director. She “gets” us and, of course, she knows how to engage with her faculty colleagues.  It is, truly, a win-win situation.  

And, so many people, so many departments, so many administrators were so enthusiastic about this and put in time and thought.  

From the get-go, we wanted to make sure that faculty did not get frustrated with us. We had to (appear) organized. And we had to have all the requisite resources and tools in place. To that end, we tried to consider everything that faculty would want.  And we tried to think of every barrier that needed to be removed to make faculty do this.  And so, we built a toolkit.  

The most important element was designed by our faculty director. It has the list of NACE competencies and an exhaustive list of classroom activities and experiential learning projects. All the faculty member has to do is identify the course activities and, literally, move it to the competency. It can be imported to a syllabus or to the course technology platform. When it is demonstrated to faculty, it is always met with “Wow! We can definitely use this!” 

In addition, the all-important assessment component was designed. For that, we looked to our Center for Teaching. Matrices for each NACE competency were developed. For the competencies that disciplines want to include for their specific majors, a template was created. Assessment takes place in the first-year seminar (awareness learning outcome), in one of the core major courses designated by the department (connection), and in the e-portfolio statistics (demonstration).  Faculty does not have to spend hours and hours reviewing, evaluating, and sending in reports.  

An entire series of exemplars—faculty who had designed and/or were doing career readiness activities in their courses—were described so that other faculty could understand, in faculty language, what were talking about. It also gave faculty who were interested someone to talk with about their ideas.  

A separate webpage was established for all things college to career. It includes the entire toolkit as well as alignment to majors, and links to our partners.  

It takes time.  But it is so worth it to look credible, to have the appropriate information, and to make it happen when you are ready.  

Takeaways:

• Structure your initiative so that each major feels it is fully valued and its specific standards are addressed. Ensure there is space for each major—maybe even each faculty member—to designate what competencies make their students career ready. 
• Prepare all the resources that your faculty will need. Figure out where to have them readily available. 
• Don’t do this by yourself.
• Be patient. That’s really hard, I know.