NACE Career Readiness: Faculty Resource for Course Syllabi
This resource guides faculty in incorporating career readiness competencies into their syllabi. Developed by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), these competencies represent the essential skills and attributes students need for success in today’s workforce. Faculty can use this framework to help students bridge academic learning with professional skill development, enhancing their readiness for post-graduation career paths.
SPRING 2025: IMPLEMENTATION
Faculty teaching CSC 252, 335, 345, 352, and 380 syllabi must feature at least 3-4 or more competencies
under the "Transferable Career Skills" section in their Spring 2025 course syllabi.
What is Career Readiness:
Career readiness is a foundation from which to demonstrate requisite core competencies that broadly prepare the college-educated for success in the workplace and lifelong career management. - National Association for Colleges and Employers, 2024
Outlined below are the eight career competencies identified by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE). These are essential skills that today’s employers are actively seeking in our graduating students. Including and highlighting these transferable career skills/competencies in your course syllabi can help students recognize how they are developing these valuable skills for industry/or professional school.
- Career & Self-Development: Proactively develop oneself and one's career through continual personal and professional learning, awareness of one's strengths and weaknesses, navigation of career opportunities, and networking to build relationships within and without one's organization.
- Communication: Clearly and effectively exchange information, ideas, facts, and perspectives with persons inside and outside of an organization.
- Critical Thinking: Identify and respond to needs based upon an understanding of situational context and logical analysis of relevant information.
- Equity & Inclusion: Demonstrate the awareness, attitude, knowledge, and skills required to equitably engage and include people from different cultures and backgrounds. Engage in anti-oppressive practices that actively challenge the systems, structures, and policies of racism and inequity.
- Leadership: Recognize and capitalize on personal and team strengths to achieve organizational goals.
- Professionalism: Knowing work environments differ greatly, understanding and demonstrate effective work habits, and act in the interest if the larger community and workplace.
- Teamwork: Build and maintain collaborative relationships to work effectively toward common goals, while appreciating diverse viewpoints and shared responsibilities.
- Technology: Understand and leverage technologies ethically to enhance efficiencies, complete tasks, and accomplish goals.
Below are examples and additional resources.
With faculty support, reviewing the department curriculum through a career-readiness perspective—leveraging existing content in syllabi—can be highly valuable for students, enabling them to better understand how their academic skills align with and translate to career-related competencies.
The department encourages faculty to develop unique integrations within syllabi rather than repurposing the examples provided.
CSC 252: Computer Organization
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Teamwork: Students are encouraged to collaborate in teams during class, working together to strengthen their teamwork skills and enhance overall collaboration.
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Technology: Students will use technology to understand how computers are made of integers and how data types are organized in memory, while visualizing programs as a sequence of simple operations that enable complex calculations
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Career & Self Development: Students will practice Career & Self Development by adhering to deadlines throughout the semester to secure a passing grade.
CSC 335: Object-Oriented Programming and Design
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Technology: Students will use technology to investigate design principles like inheritance and polymorphism, employing Unified Modeling Language (UML) to create effective software designs.
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Teamwork: The course will include lectures, in-class discussions, and activities, with a strong emphasis on teamwork through group work that requires collaboration with other students both during and outside of class.
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Communication: Students are encouraged to emphasize communication by interacting with teaching assistants and using various channels, such as D2L, email, class discussions, and Piazza, to stay updated on course materials.