Building Geoscience Workforce Skills and Awareness

Karen Viskupic, Boise State University, and Anne Egger, Central Washington University

Why is it important to build workforce skills and awareness?

Preparing undergraduate students for entry and success in the workforce is not the only goal of a degree program, but it is an important goal; most students will seek employment, and society needs a well-trained geoscience workforce. Additionally, raising students' awareness of the great variety of geoscience jobs, and how their curricular and extracurricular activities help them to develop desirable workforce skills, can help students recognize the value of their degree, feel more connected to the discipline, and persist through graduation.

This collection of resources and activities is organized to provide you with background knowledge about the geoscience workforce and desired workforce skills, and then to explore strategies for supporting students in building workforce skills and awareness. Many of the strategies described are things you might already be doing, or could easily incorporate into existing courses or extracurricular program elements.

Getting Started

Start here for background knowledge about geoscience workforce skills and opportunities, and for guidance in thinking about your students and the context in which they will be seeking jobs. With this background knowledge, you can explore and use the strategies and activities in this collection to support your students' workforce readiness.

Strategies

Strategies for helping students build workforce sills and awareness are organized in three categories:

  • Build students' awareness of career opportunities; 
  • Connect to workforce skills in your courses; and 
  • Help students reflect on, plan for, and communicate their workforce readiness. 

All of these strategies are important and work together, but you can use any of them independently. You can also work with colleagues to use different strategies across the curriculum.

Activities

Browse a collection of activities that support the strategies described.

Authorship

The material on these pages were written and assembled by Karen Viskupic and Anne Egger, with input and ideas from participants in our 2023 workshop at the Earth Educators' Rendezvous: Chloe Anderson, Andrea Bair, Christina Belanger, Sharon Cooper, Caitlin Currie, Angela Daneshmand, Abigail Domagall, Martin Farley, Daina Hardisty, Virginia Isava, Katharine Johanesen, Francis Jones, Jabari Jones, Allison Jones, Cody Kirkpatrick, Annie Klyce, Eva Kostyu, Zachary Kovach, Joseph Meert, Craig Nichol, Katherine Ryker, Stephanie Sabatini, Danielle Schmitt, Feride Schroeder, Patrick Shabram, Sarah Bean Sherman, Joyce Smith, Leah Turner, Loretta Williams Gurnell


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