Key points:
- Faculty play a critical role in students’ connections to careers
- How higher ed can meet workforce needs
- Immersive tech, AI, and polytechnic education at scale
- For more on career readiness, visit eCN’s Teaching & Learning hub
Higher-ed faculty play a pivotal and unique role in student learning and development and are instrumental in students’ career readiness and professional development, according to a new report.
The report, Faculty Attitudes and Behaviors: The Integration of Career Readiness Into the Curriculum, spotlights how faculty can support career readiness among students and offers recommendations around the ways institutions and faculty and staff can collaborate to support faculty’s deeper engagement in career development and, by those actions, student outcomes.
The National Association of College and Employers (NACE) partnered with the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) and the Society for Experiential Education (SEE) to survey college faculty about their engagement in career preparation and development.
A large majority of faculty surveyed in the report (92 percent) say students in their disciplinary area asked them for career advice in the past year. That figure is echoed by NACE’s 2023 Student Survey Report, which reveals that 86 percent of students said they were comfortable discussing their academic or career plans with a faculty member. Fifty-seven percent of students in that report also said they used faculty as a job-search resource.
Sixty-three percent of faculty say that over the past year, alumni have reached out to them for career advice.
Students also tend to ask faculty for more realistic and actionable advice, such as what kind of work or internship opportunities are available to them, versus questions about resume building, etc. Advice students might solicit includes finding jobs within their major (64 percent), input on graduate school (56 percent), and internships (55 percent).
Alumni ask faculty for help with graduate school applications (56 percent), help with professional connections (51 percent), and navigating workplace dynamics (38 percent).
Faculty integrate career readiness into their courses by aligning course assignments with career readiness skills and competencies to help students identify and translate skills (58 percent), aligning course outcomes with career readiness skills and competencies to help students identify and translate skills (55 percent), bringing in guest speakers from professional and career fields (52 percent), having students complete a career-related project (39 percent), and using career-related reflection in an assignment (38 percent).
Overall, 80 percent of faculty say they integrate career readiness and career information into their classroom, that integration fluctuates, however, depending on discipline–87 percent of business faculty said they have integrated careers into their curriculum compared to 71 percent of STEM faculty–and by faculty rank, with the percentage reporting this increasing as their rank decreases.
Access the full report here.
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