NACE Career Readiness Competencies

Transitioning from college to one's next steps is very exciting, but can also be rather daunting.  So what is the secret of those new graduates who are able to do so smoothly?  According to NACE, an association derived of both college professionals and employer partners, the secret sauce are the 8 NACE Career Readines competencies.

Career & Self Development

While it is clear all of these comptencies are essential to a new graduate's transition, for the QEP, we have decided to focus specifically on supporting students in developing the 'Career & Self Development' competency.  We know that a liberal arts education at Warren Wilson is unique and affords many opportunities for students to develop this skill. However, we have not capitalized on these opportunities by explicitly naming them, intentionally designing our curriculum so that students gain the most benefit from them and intentionally directing our professional development and structures to support this outcome. All of the NACE competencies will provide an overarching framework to support career readiness skills to be delivered on our campus, however, we will focus our QEP on the first NACE competency (career and self-development) as a primary outcome to measure. We have designed our activities and our evaluation accordingly. Additionally, while our QEP outcomes include a goal of improving our distinction as a Work college, we recognize that an emphasis on career readiness skills delivered within the academic curriculum is where we need to make the most progress and where we can ultimately impact our distinction as a Work college. Therefore, our QEP focuses its inputs within the academic curriculum and specifically on the internship course, which is a new requirement (in 2024) of every major. In support of student career and self-assessment, the QEP also includes professional development initiatives to prepare faculty to foster student career readiness.