Student career readiness

A tool to help students recognize the transferable skills and career competencies they're developing during their studies

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Six yellow icons representing career-readiness competencies

Being “career-ready” means that students have developed a range of skills that they can transfer to different settings once they graduate.

Students are often unsure or unaware of the many career readiness skills they are developing during their university studies. While we, as faculty, may be deft at highlighting the disciplinary knowledge and subject-specific skills students have developed, we often forget to make transparent the transferable, "career-ready" skills that are embedded in our courses. 

We encourage you to think of highlighting career-ready skills as foundational to your curriculum and to the "whole person" education we offer our students.

Grounded in the latest National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) competencies and aligned with Seattle University’s mission and student learning outcomes, the Center for Faculty Development and Career Engagement have developed a revised Career Readiness Inventory.

This tool is designed for faculty to integrate at the program or course level and for students to assess their skills, track their experiences, and reflect on their professional growth.

Through ongoing refinement, the inventory has evolved into its current form to effectively support our students' career readiness. 

Explore studentCareer competencies

Career readiness skills and descriptions

Critical inquiry

Identify the assumptions underlying information and ideas, analyzing them for accuracy, validity, relevance, and limitations.

Information literacy & critique

Evaluate sources of information, including identifying misinformation, using judgment, and weighing sources.

Data literacy

Use data-informed reasoning to propose and evaluate solutions.

Curiosity

Value and learn from diverse cultures, races, ages, genders, sexual orientations, religions, and other human differences. 

Problem-solving

Use logic and reasoning to evaluate alternative solutions, conclusions, or approaches.

Evaluation

Consider the relative virtues and drawbacks of potential actions to choose and justify a contextually appropriate decision.

Adaptability & flexibility 

Adapt to differing contexts, personalities, and tasks.  

Originality & creative thinking 

Devise unique, unusual, or imaginative ideas and interpretations on a topic or situation.

Imagination 

Challenge existing methods, norms, structures with constructive alternatives.

Relationship-building  

Build mutually rewarding relationships with colleagues and partners to work effectively toward common goals. 

Social perceptiveness 

Attend to others' reactions and adapt your behavior in response. 

Open-mindedness  

Demonstrate openness and humility in interacting across cultural, demographic, and positional differences. 

Question-asking  

Fully attend to what others say, reflect on points or on critical feedback, and ask questions as appropriate. 

Care & compassion 

Exercise sensitivity to others and facilitate their processing of thoughts to devise their own solutions.  

Compromise 

Present your most constructive, open-minded self in group settings in order to reach a common goal. 

Conflict management & resolution 

Employ healthy responses (such as active listening, perspective-taking, and inclusion of opposing views) to actively seek resolution that works for all parties involved. 

Dependability 

Fulfill obligations by being reliable, responsible, and dependable, offering help as needed to achieve team goals. 

Reflection 

Make meaning out of experiences, ideas, and contexts through thoughtful consideration, self-exploration, and discernment. 

Values articulation 

Show awareness of own values and articulate why they matter to you.

Integrity  

Act responsibly and consistently with the interests of the larger community in mind. 

Self-motivation 

Take responsibility for your own learning with little supervision. 

Self-regulation 

Be aware of and express emotions in ways that invite yourself and others to entertain alternative perspectives. 

Goal-setting & action planning  

Manage your own time to align with priorities. 

Persistence & responsiveness 

Adapt to experience of difficulty or critical feedback by reflecting carefully and making appropriate behavioral adjustments. 

Stress management 

Be aware of stressors and areas of concern and demonstrate appropriate help-seeking behavior. 

Passion & pride in work 

Review, revise, and complete tasks thoroughly and carefully, with a high level of dedication toward your work. 

Lifelong learning 

Actively seek and embrace development opportunities. 

Community-building & sustainable change 

Engage with community members in the shared responsibility for social change. 

Trustworthiness 

Demonstrate humility and awareness of the impact of one’s own power, privilege, and positionality.   

Cultural humility 

Seek global cross-cultural interactions and experiences that enhance one’s understanding of people from different backgrounds and that lead to personal growth. 

Advocacy 

Acknowledge the harm of systemic and personal racism, affirm the experiences of marginalized communities, and act to dismantle racist systems and practices. 

Recognition of racist behaviors & systems 

Recognize systems of privilege and inequity that limit opportunities for members of historically marginalized communities; understand how these systems came to be and the conditions that have maintained them. 

Constructive engagement around race & racism  

Engage in anti-racist practices that actively challenge racist systems, structures, and policies; identify resources and eliminate barriers resulting from individual and systemic racism, inequities, and biases. 

Verbal communication 

Present to or talk with others to convey information as appropriate for the needs of the audience. 

Written communication

Communicate effectively in writing as appropriate for the needs of the audience. 

Persuasion 

Present evidence and argumentation to encourage others to consider alternative positions.

Negotiation & facilitation 

Facilitate dialogue to reconcile differences. 

Instruction & learning 

Select and use learning methods and procedures appropriate for the situation when learning or teaching new things. 

Transfer of learning 

Integrate new information with prior knowledge and experience and transfer it to new realms. 

Guidance for faculty

Keep it manageable

You should not expect students to be practicing ALL the skills in every course! They have a years-long education with both curricular and co-curricular activities, all of which provide opportunities to develop and hone these skills. You are not responsible for this on your own.

At the course level

  • NACE recommends that in our syllabi, we highlight two or three competencies per course that students will practice, rather than individual transferable skills.

At the assignment level

  • CFD and CEO recommend that in each assignment briefing, we highlight up to six transferable skills that students will be practicing in that assignment. 
  • If you are using the TILT model (Transparency in Learning & Teaching) for assignment design, where you detail the Purpose, Task, and Criteria for the assignment, you can list these skills as in the "Purpose" section.

Re-framing what's already happening in your courses

In all likelihood, students are already practicing many skills in your course, so the purpose of this project is to make this work transparent to students, not to create additional work for faculty.

  1. Download the Career readiness course-level inventory for faculty (Word document) for faculty.
  2. So that you have a good overall picture of the inventory, read through the descriptions of the competencies and their related skills before you rate anything.
  3. For each of your courses, rate the extent to which students will be able to demonstrate their abilities for each transferable skill in the inventory, using the following scoring key:
      2 = Students will receive a grade related to this skill   
      1 = Students will practice this skill, but are not graded on it
      0 = Students are unlikely to practice this skill
  4. If it is helpful, make notes in the “examples” column on the right to remind yourself of when and how students demonstrate the skills in the course.
  5. If you’re thinking of sharing this document with students, then consider shading in the cells, as well as numbering. 
  6. Once you have completed the inventory for a course, consider how you will make your students' development of these skills more apparent to them. One good way to do this is by using the Transparency in Learning and Teaching (TILT) model for your assignment design. Contact us for further details on TILT.

If you and your colleagues in your program decide to work on career readiness at the program level, you can complete this Career readiness program-level map (Word template to follow) to create a bird's-eye view. Here are some suggestions on how to go about that:

  1. Remember only to compile data for the required courses in your major so that you can be sure that it applies to all students on your program.
    If your program is primarily made up of electives, contact us at faculty-development@seattleu.edu, and we can get together to think through how to adapt the format to your program.
  2. Be sure to include the name of the instructor for each of the courses. Clearly, a course is not always going to be taught by the same person, and different faculty members’ versions of a course will develop slightly different skills. The purpose of the program map is to give students a sense of what they can expect – it’s not a contract.
  3. If you find there are skill gaps in the program, discuss as a team whether these are skills that could be met through minor changes to individual courses, or whether they lie outside your major. If you decide the latter, then think about how what co-curricular activities might help students develop those skills.
  4. Consider putting this information on your program's website in a section on Careers. 

History of the Career Readiness project

In fall of 2019, Holly Slay Ferraro (CFD/Management) and David Green (CFD/International Studies) created a pilot version of the Career Readiness Inventory, drawing on the World Economic Forum’s The Future of Jobs 2018, the National Association of Colleges and Employers’ 2019 graduate competencies list, as well as Seattle University’s own outcomes and mission. These sources were used at the advice of the Career Engagement Office (CEO). Early conversations with CEO colleagues and with Katherine Raichle (CFD/Psychology) led to further refinements. 

We worked with faculty in International Studies (INST) to create a program-level career readiness map to test the inventory and to use in future workshops and consultations with individual faculty and program teams.

Using the pilot inventory and the INST example, CFD ran faculty workshops on how to highlight career readiness skills in existing curricula in Winter Quarter 2020, and offered individual and group consultations on the topic. 

Documentation related to the project included:

  • A course-level inventory and scoring system for individual faculty to complete
  • A template program-level map
  • An example program-level map for International Studies (see below)
  • An explanatory document to share with students 

Image of full career readiness program map for International Studies

In 2021-23, Melissa Minato (Career Engagement) convened a new Leadership & Career Competencies Working Group and led the process of expanding and revising the model so that it could be used for co-curricular activity, as well as for academic programs. The working group comprised representatives from (in alphabetical order):

  • Career Engagement Office
  • Center for Faculty Development
  • Center for Jesuit Education
  • Center for Student Involvement
  • Education Abroad
  • Housing & Residence Life
  • Student Academic Advising
  • Student Engagement
  • University Core Curriculum

The group's work led to the creation of a final Leadership & Career Competencies document, listing broader skills and example action verbs.

Documentation included:

  • A list of competency definitions and examples of associated skills 

In 2024-25, Carol Lwali (CEO) and David Green (CFD) reviewed both the 2019 and 2023 models and the latest Career Competencies documentation from NACE to create a revised format for career readiness. This model uses "competencies" headings close to the 2023 version, plus the more detailed descriptors from the 2019 version so that they can be used more readily by faculty at the course and program level.