Connect to workforce skills in your courses

You are already helping students develop their skills as geoscientists in the courses you teach, but it may not be clear to them how the skills they are developing relate to the skills they see listed in job advertisements or to the work that professionals do. Here are ways you can help students see the connections between the learning outcomes in your courses and the skills that employers are seeking:

Incorporate skills into learning outcomes | Focus on key skills | Simulate the workplace | Address skills throughout the program


Incorporate skills and dispositions into your learning outcomes

Overview

Learning outcomes describe what students will know and be able to do at the end of a unit or your full course and guide your development of assessment and activities. You can incorporate skills and dispositions into your learning outcomes to articulate how students will develop them and how they match or relate to the skills and dispositions that are expected and sought by geoscience employers. For example, you could include a learning outcome like, "Collect and record data using common methods and tools," and introduce students to using the same strategies and processes used by professionals in the field. You can cultivate dispositions in the same way, by including specific guidelines about what you are looking for. Learning outcomes that focus on dispositions might include statements like, "Conduct field work in a professional manner by being prepared and engaging in respectful interactions with others." Assessments can then be structured with rubrics that align with these learning outcomes and describe different levels of achievement.

Why use this strategy

  • Helps students connect learning in your course to potential future jobs and careers.
  • Prompts students to start thinking about work they might do after graduation and the skills they need to build.
  • Helps you reflect on aspects of your course that help prepare for future jobs and careers.
  • Highlights the importance of dispositions (e.g., professionalism, attention to detail) in addition to geoscience skills in the job-seeking process.

Tips for success

  • Make the connections explicit between your learning outcome and the aligned workforce skill through a process that focuses in transparency in your assignments.
  • Put skills and dispositions in plain language so that students can add them to their resume or LinkedIn profile.
  • Use short videos or descriptions from alumni and other professionals describing the work that they do and how they use the skills they developed as students. 
  • Combine with reflection prompts to help students self-regulate their own learning of important workforce skills.

Resources

Transparency in Learning and Teaching (TILT) examples and resources for making learning outcomes explicit

Understanding by Design from the Center for Teaching at Vanderbilt University, about aligning learning outcomes, assessments, and activities


Focus on specific skills that are most desired

Overview

Research on geoscience job advertisements and surveys of employers has identified the most commonly requested skills. You can focus on helping students develop these skills in your courses to better prepare them for the workplace. These skills include written communication, field skills, data collection and interpretation, and planning (Shafer et al., 2023). Including these skills in your learning outcomes, assessments, and activities—and making your reasoning for doing so explicit—can help motivate students.

For example, if you already include written communication in your course, consider using a professional report template or defining the audience for your writing assignments. Other qualifications frequently mentioned in job advertisements are dispositions, like attention to detail, professionalism, and taking initiative. In the writing assignment described above, you could include criteria in your rubric that focus on attention to detail, like well-formatted tables and figures, use of a consistent voice and tone throughout, and details about the data and analysis that are appropriate to the activity.

For skills that you might not already incorporate into your courses, like planning, consider adding opportunities for students to practice this skill by asking them to write a data collection plan for a lab or field activity, or to plan part of a field trip.

Why use this strategy

  • Raises students' awareness of the skills that are most commonly listed in job advertisements.
  • Gives students experience developing the skills and dispositions most commonly requested by geoscience employers.

Tips for success

  • Make the connections explicit between your learning outcome and the aligned workforce skill through a process that focuses in transparency in your assignments.
  • Combine with reflection prompts to help students self-regulate their own learning of important workforce skills.

Resources

Shafer, G. W., Viskupic, K., & Egger, A. E. (2023). Critical workforce skills for bachelor-level geoscientists: An analysis of geoscience job advertisements. Geosphere, 19(2), 628-644. https://doi.org/10.1130/ges02581.1


Simulate the workplace

Overview

Course activities and guidelines can be used to simulate work settings and help students develop and recognize desired workforce skills and dispositions. For example, you might have a limited amount of class time in which students will be challenged to complete the work assigned (e.g., students are expected to collect a significant amount of field data); let students know that you recognize the time constraints and that you expect students to practice planning and prioritizing tasks as part of their work, skills they will be expected to use as working geoscientists. As another example, you could have a class discussion about what professional behavior entails and then ask students to focus on practicing those behaviors throughout the course (e.g., showing up on time and to every class meeting, communicating in advance if additional time is needed to meet a deadline).

Why use this strategy

  • Helps students make connections between course activities or guidelines and their potential future work.
  • Helps students practice and recognize skills and dispositions needed in the workplace.

Tips for success

  • Be explicit about why and how you are simulating the workplace so that students understand your goals.
  • Use class discussions or reflection prompts in assignments to help students reflect on their performance and what they learned with respect to workplace simulations.
  • Bring in stakeholders from regional groups to give feedback to students.

Resources

Engaging stakeholders from the E-STEM project


Address skills and dispositions across the degree program

Overview

Students develop their skills, knowledge, and dispositions across their entire degree program. Not all skills and dispositions need to be practiced in every class, but explicitly connecting to workforce skills and dispositions across several courses in a degree program is more likely to help students prepare for the workforce than doing so in single courses. You can work with your colleagues to evaluate which strategies are being used to connect to workforce skills and dispositions across the curriculum to make sure that students have multiple opportunities to develop key skills. In some cases, it may be helpful to use common strategies across all classes (e.g., the same reflection questions; the same standards for recording data in field notebooks; highlighting geoscientists doing work related to course topics), and in other cases you may want to employ multiple different strategies (e.g., focusing on different aspects of communication in different courses). This is also a good way to evaluate connections between your courses and the ASBOG Fundamentals of Geology exam that can lead to professional licensure.

Why use this strategy

  • Ensures that students have the necessary opportunities to practice to key geoscience workforce skills dispositions as part of their degree program. 
  • Helps instructors be selective in which skills and dispositions to address in their courses, and to be more efficient in their efforts.
  • Brings departments together around job and career goals for their students.
  • Raises awareness in the department about professional licensure and its requirements. 

Tips for success

  • Make use of a department meeting to discuss preparing students for careers through the curriculum. 
  • Use a matrix approach to audit how and in which courses students are explicitly practicing workforce skills and dispositions to identify potential gaps or potential shifts in focus that would be helpful.
  • Share successful approaches you have used.
  • Agree on and use the same language to describe skills and dispositions across multiple courses.
  • Bring in external facilitation through NAGT's Traveling Workshop Program to help you navigate through this work.

Resources

Matrix approach to program and curriculum design from On the Cutting Edge Building Strong Geoscience Departments

Shafer, G.W., Viskupic, K., and Egger, A.E. (2023) Critical workforce skills for bachelor-level geoscientists: An analysis of geoscience job advertisements. Geosphere; 19 (2): 628–644. doi: https://doi.org/10.1130/GES02581.1

Viskupic, K., Egger, A.E., McFadden, R.R., & Schmitz, M.D. (2021) Comparing desired workforce skills and reported teaching practices to model students' experiences in undergraduate geoscience programs, Journal of Geoscience Education, 69:1, 27-42, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/10899995.2020.1779568