Career skills: Our process and where we are today

Feedback from employers, internship supervisors, and graduate schools tells us that we are doing a good job of teaching students academically/technically, but our graduates require greater training in communications, critical thinking/ problem solving, and leadership/management. Because of their long-term importance to our graduates, we call these “career skills.’’ To address this issue a task force was established, and over a 2-year period, this group defined the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences [CALS (University of Arizona, Tucson)] Students Career Skills Competencies and vetted them through college faculty and more than 50 companies. We divided the CALS Student Career Skills Competencies into three categories: 1) communication skills, 2) critical thinking/problem solving skills, and 3) leadership/management skills. We are currently asking each degree-granting unit in the college how they do, or will, incorporate these competencies into their curricula, with the idea of incorporating the competencies into existing courses first, to avoid increasing the number of required credit hours for graduation and time to degree. Our goal is that by graduation, each student should have had multiple opportunities to hone each of these competencies.