The Value of Faculty Connecting Classroom Lessons to Career Success

With an evolving job market and institutions facing declining enrollment and budget cuts, California State University, Los Angeles (Cal State LA) has identified career-engaged teaching using the NACE career readiness competencies as a way to heighten the preparation of students for their careers while boosting student retention.

Cal State LA’s Center for Effective Teaching and Learning’s (CETL’s) Career-Engaged Departments Program is a yearlong faculty learning community that supports departments to embed career readiness into their curriculum.

This past year, 70 faculty—some working individually and others as part of 10 department teams—worked to incorporate career readiness skills into their classrooms, impacting 2,800 students. Overall, 167 faculty and 22 departments have completed the Career-Engaged Departments Program since its launch in 2022.

Review of Curriculum Leads to Inclusion of Competencies

Krishna Foster, Ph.D., chair and professor in Cal State LA’s Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, says that collaboration with CETL on a review of the department’s curriculum sparked its implementation of the NACE career readiness competencies in the classroom.

“We just completed a map with the guidance of our Center for Effective Teaching and Learning to have an honest look at our curriculum and what we emphasize,” Dr. Foster says.

“Communication, critical thinking, and teamwork are three of the NACE competencies that really stand out for our discipline, but this exercise showed us that some of the others are just as important for having people see themselves as scientists. For instance, career and self-development and equity and inclusion are important for retention in science.”

She believes the competencies are an effective tool for those trying to do better by students and faculty.

“Higher education is at a crossroads, so we need to make some decisions to ensure we're meeting the needs of a changing society and our modern students we're here to serve,” Dr. Foster says.

“We need to make sure that we are conscious in our lessons and that we are a beacon for education. Cal State LA is here to educate the people of Los Angeles, who are often first generation. For our graduates to just have a degree that will end up in gainful employment is not a service to our population. We need to give them skills they can carry with them so they can thrive throughout their careers.”

Faculty in the Cal State LA Chemistry Department use the competencies to focus on and communicate that the work they do in the classroom is preparing students for the workforce. Dr. Foster has worked with faculty to include assignments that deal with the career readiness competencies in several classes and an upper division seminar.

“Chemistry is both intellectual fine-tuning and tactile learning,” Dr. Foster explains.

“The technology side of these competencies is built into our curriculum. We communicate across disciplines, across audiences. If you want to talk to a student, that's different than how you talk to a colleague, which is different than the way you communicate with a group of people who are doing the exact same nuanced thing that you are. So there's huge value in communication, both oral and written, which might not be apparent to somebody who doesn't know the molecular sciences.

“People think about us working alone, but teamwork is imperative. Collaborative research is something that is valued because you need to attack these big problems from different angles. And so critical thinking is built in. We deal with abstract thought. We deal with complex problems.”

Helping Students Articulate the Skills They Develop

Kristen Discola, Ph.D., initially became interested in NACE’s career readiness competencies because they provided a shared language for conversations faculty were already having about student preparation, engagement, and professional growth.

She has explicitly embedded career readiness components in several of the sociology courses she teaches at the undergraduate and graduate levels and in Cal State’s LA’s Prison Graduation Initiative program.

“What resonated with me was the opportunity to help students better recognize and articulate the durable skills they were already developing through disciplinary learning,” Dr. Discola says.

She noticed through her own teaching and in conversations with faculty across disciplines that they were already teaching critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and adaptability.

“Often, we just weren’t naming those skills explicitly for students,” she says. “As a result, students would complete meaningful academic work without understanding how those experiences connected to professional contexts or broader forms of civic and intellectual development.”

Dr. Discola notes that the NACE competencies became a useful bridge between academia and career readiness, explaining that they gave faculty a framework for making learning more visible without reducing disciplinary work to a checklist of employability skills.

“At the same time, I’ve tried to approach the competencies critically and intentionally,” she explains.

“Communication looks different in sociology than it does in engineering or nursing. Critical thinking looks different in business than it does in the humanities. So rather than treating the competencies as generic outcomes, I’ve focused on helping faculty translate them into authentic disciplinary practices.”

This work started in her own teaching but has expanded into broader faculty support and curricular conversations across disciplines. She has worked with faculty on:

• Redesigning assignments;
• Embedding competencies into syllabi and Canvas modules;
• Integrating metacognitive reflection activities; and
• Helping students better connect disciplinary learning to professional identity formation.

“Embedding career readiness directly into disciplinary learning rather than treating it as a separate module or add-on allows students to see that the work they’re already doing in the classroom has relevance beyond the course itself,” she says.

“Another area I’ve been focusing on has been making professional communication more explicit. Students often complete presentations, group projects, or written analyses without understanding that these are forms of discipline-specific professional practice. I now spend more time naming those connections directly and helping students develop the language to articulate their abilities with confidence.” 

Dr. Discola also uses career reflection activities that ask students to connect course concepts to real-world contexts. Instead of asking students only what they learned, she asks them how they learned it, why that process matters, and where those skills transfer outside the classroom. For example, she has redesigned assignments so students are not only analyzing social issues but also reflecting on the skills they are using in the process.

“After completing research projects or collaborative work, students engage in metacognitive reflection prompts where they identify how they practiced critical thinking, communication, collaboration, or adaptability,” Dr. Discola explains.

“In the course I’m teaching now in the Prison Graduation Initiative program, I added career competencies to our course outline, so that every week students have a clear understanding of how the material and experiences are helping them practice durable skills.” 

She says the most successful career-engaged assignment she has created so far is a LinkedIn profile activity that helps students translate their academic experiences into a professional narrative.

“Rather than treating LinkedIn simply as a networking platform or job-search tool, the assignment encourages students to reflect on the knowledge, skills, and experiences they have developed through coursework, research, employment, service, leadership roles, internships, and extracurricular involvement,” Dr. Discola says.

“Students identify and articulate discipline-specific examples of critical thinking, communication, collaboration, adaptability, and other career readiness competencies in ways that are meaningful to potential employers and professional communities.” 

She adds that the assignment is also designed to help students understand how different stakeholders may view the same experience from different perspectives.

“In small teams, students take on the perspectives of relevant stakeholders and evaluate one another’s profiles from those viewpoints,” Dr. Discola says.

For example:

• A faculty member may see a research paper as evidence of analytical thinking, information literacy, and written communication;
• An employer may view that same experience as evidence of problem-solving, project management, initiative, and attention to detail;
• A graduate admissions committee may see intellectual curiosity and disciplinary expertise; while
• A community organization may recognize collaboration, leadership, and civic engagement.

“Students are guided in how to adopt these different perspectives, and in doing so, they also learn how to communicate their experiences in ways that resonate with multiple audiences,” Dr. Discola notes.

“One of the reasons I use a LinkedIn profile assignment is that students often have far more experience and skill than they realize, but they struggle to recognize and communicate it. Many students can describe what they did in a course, but they have difficulty explaining what they learned from the experience or how it contributed to their professional development.

Students examine assignments, projects, presentations, research experiences, employment, volunteer work, and leadership roles to identify the durable skills they have developed and the evidence they can use to demonstrate those skills.

“This process,” Dr. Discola says, “helps students connect disciplinary learning to broader professional and civic contexts, while developing greater confidence in their abilities.” 

The assignment also incorporates metacognitive reflection as a final step. Students think about how they have grown as learners, collaborators, communicators, and emerging professionals. They consider all of the feedback they have received from their peers, and establish a plan to improve their professional profile as they grow in their academic career. 

“The assignment helps students see themselves as emerging professionals. It makes durable skills more visible, helps students develop confidence in articulating their strengths and experiences, and provides them with a professional presence that supports networking, career exploration, graduate school applications, internship searches, and long-term professional growth,” Dr. Discola says.

“Rather than simply creating a LinkedIn profile, students learn how to tell the story of their learning in ways that are meaningful to faculty, employers, professional communities, and—perhaps most importantly—to themselves.” 

Showing Students How Academic Knowledge and Skills Are Career Skills

As chair of Cal State LA’s Department of Liberal Studies, Michael Willard, Ph.D., has been working with professors in the B.A. program at the university’s main campus and in California prisons on a number of curriculum design initiatives that integrate and embed career readiness components. 

Dr. Willard says that for the B.A. program courses, faculty created “scripts” that they repeat in class sessions throughout the semester to explain how in-class activities or an assignment relate to student learning outcomes (SLOs) and one or more NACE competencies.

“This helps to make clear the connection between ‘academic’ SLOs and NACE competencies. It helps to make SLOs legible, visible, and explicit as career competencies,” he says.

Dr. Willard explains that the liberal studies B.A. degree is a liberal arts degree that was created in the California State University system under the name of “liberal studies” (LBS) as a teacher preparation degree. At Cal State LA, the degree has teacher preparation options and a general option for students who do not want to become teachers. 

This past spring Dr. Willard and fellow liberal studies professor Claudia Diera, Ph.D., participated in a CETL program to map NACE competencies across the liberal studies degree.

“Our work was a very useful first pass that allowed us to see which NACE competencies LBS courses include and which ones are missing,” he says.

“We could also see that competencies were not consistently covered when two professors taught sections of the same class. The map did confirm that NACE competencies in our lower division courses are at a beginning or intermediate level and in upper division courses, they are at an intermediate or advanced level. So that was reassuring.” 

As part of their work in the degree mapping program, Dr. Willard and Dr. Diera also revised one of the program learning outcomes (PLOs) so that it now names specific NACE competencies:

• Original PLO—Students will develop reflective portfolios with essays, professional materials, and examples of multi-modal communication appropriate for their career goals.
• Revised PLO—Students will develop portfolios with essays, professional materials, and examples of multi-modal communication appropriate for their career goals to apply and reflect on communication, critical thinking, and equity and inclusion career competencies in coursework across the major.

Next fall, he says, all department faculty will work to revise the outcome further or create an additional career-focused, NACE competency PLO—perhaps focused on NACE competencies that are not currently as comprehensively covered across the LBS degree. 

While mapping NACE competencies, Dr. Willard and Dr. Diera realized they needed to account for students developing career competencies in student life, extracurricular activities, and work.

“To bring these other experiences into our assessment of students’ development of NACE competencies, we can identify courses in the major where students can develop an extracurricular resume and/or carry out guided reflections on work [GROW],” he says, adding that the latter is modeled on the University of Iowa's GROW program in which students connect their work experiences to skills and knowledge they are developing in their classes. 

Cal State LA’s Department of Liberal Studies also offers its general option B.A. degree in California prisons, including at the California Institution for Men and the California Institution for Women in Chino, and at the San Quentin Rehabilitation Center.

“Incarcerated students are intently and highly ‘career focused.’ When they start the liberal studies B.A. program after their A.A. degrees, they want to know what a liberal arts degree is good for,” Dr. Willard points out.

“To show them that the degree included competencies that employers want, we realized that we need to show students how SLOs are career competencies, that career-ready skills are ‘baked in’ to the degree and how academic knowledge and skills are career skills. We had to translate academic explanations for skills and competencies to the language of the workforce and careers.” 

Dr. Willard asked faculty who teach at the prisons to go through the CETL career-engaged programming so they can make career readiness explicit when they teach inside. The goal, he says, is for all professors who teach in the university’s prison programs to have CETL career-engaged training. 

For example, he adds, liberal studies courses emphasize “interdisciplinary integration” as a skill. 

“We needed to show students how that skill is advantageous in the workplace, especially in the context of AI,” Dr. Willard explains.

“The human work of the future will include collaboration, negotiation and compromise, and teamwork—things that AI currently cannot do.” 

Professors show students how these skills are needed in the workplace through project-based learning, such as by editing an issue of the journal Words Uncaged that publishes writing by incarcerated individuals or by learning how to curate an art exhibit from working with the director of an art gallery who collaborates with the professor and visits students in their public humanities and community learning and/or public culture classes at the prisons. 

“In terms of workforce development, we show students how skills of interdisciplinary integration translate to workplace collaboration and jobs that increasingly are defined by the necessity of cross-sector collaboration and projects across industry sectors,” says Dr. Willard. 

He emphasizes that a degree like liberal studies is not immediately “career connected or career obvious” for many students and parents as well as for some employers.

“It is not a direct one-to-one, major-to-job or career degree, like nursing, management, or criminal justice degree to career. Making career competencies legible for students and giving them practice to explain them to others is a major improvement,” he says.

He reflects on his own time in college when, as an English major, he believed he would only have three career options: Write literature, teach literature, or publish literature. 

“No one ever showed me how the skills I had from my major were relevant and desired in many other career fields," he says.

"We are starting to develop information and class assignments and activities that take students another step toward a career. We show them first that academic skills are career skills, and now we want to show them the careers and jobs where they can use those skills. Using career readiness gives students a clearer understanding that their degree is valuable and that it is a direct stepping stone to jobs and work they want to do in the future.” 

The Classroom Is a Perfect Venue for Skill Awareness and Development

Beyond her own teaching, Dr. Discola has worked with faculty across disciplines to redesign assignments, revise rubrics, and integrate competencies into Canvas modules and course outcomes. The goal, she explains, is always to keep career readiness grounded in authentic disciplinary work rather than disconnected skill exercises. 

“The classroom is one of the few spaces where students can consistently engage in authentic disciplinary practice with structured support and feedback. Students are not just consuming information in classrooms. Ideally, they are learning how experts within a discipline think, communicate, collaborate, and solve problems. That makes the classroom an incredibly powerful environment for developing both metacognition and discipline-specific career skills,” Dr. Discola says.

“Metacognition is especially important because students often underestimate or overlook their own growth. They may complete a complex collaborative research project without realizing they practiced communication, adaptability, leadership, and analytical reasoning throughout the process. When faculty intentionally build reflection into coursework, students become more aware of how they learn, how they solve problems, and how their skills are developing over time. That awareness improves confidence, transfer of learning, and students’ ability to articulate their experiences in internships, interviews, and professional settings.” 

She adds that classrooms matter because disciplinary learning is contextual. Communication in sociology is not the same as communication in engineering. Students need authentic disciplinary practice, not generic exercises disconnected from content or context. 

“The classroom gives faculty the opportunity to model professional thinking, make disciplinary expectations visible, and help students gradually see themselves as participants in a field rather than outsiders looking in,” Dr. Discola says.

Dr. Foster agrees that the classroom is fertile soil for growing skills.

“The classroom is where people go wide open and are ready for change. There are few times in people’s lives when they’re that ready to receive new information, and the faculty is the person they listen to,” she explains.

“Students are going to face many challenges and will need substantial growth to meet their goals. The process of success is important to build into the classroom, otherwise, students will stay stagnant. We provide them with skills that they can take away and are theirs forever.

“Without knowing what the workforce will look like in 10 years, I think it's really important for students to know their value, what they can do, and what they like and don't like. They don’t know if a job is going to be there, but they know technology, critical thinking, communication, and teamwork because they are a focus of our curriculum.” 

Dr. Discola offers several suggestions for faculty to embed career readiness into their curriculum, including to:

• Start small—Faculty don’t need to redesign an entire curriculum overnight. Often the most meaningful changes begin with one assignment, one reflection activity, or one intentional conversation about disciplinary practice.
• Avoid treating the competencies as generic checklists—Communication, collaboration, and critical thinking are always shaped by disciplinary context. The most effective work happens when faculty identify what those skills actually look like within their fields.
• Make learning visible—Faculty already teach durable skills, but students can’t recognize them unless faculty name them explicitly and create opportunities for reflection. Metacognitive reflection can be especially powerful. Even brief prompts asking students how they approached a problem, collaborated with others, or developed an argument can help students better recognize their own growth.
• Frame career readiness broadly—This work should not reduce higher education to workforce preparation alone. Durable skills support civic engagement, intellectual development, community participation, and lifelong learning in addition to professional growth.
• Institutions should trust faculty expertise—Career readiness works best when it emerges organically from disciplinary learning and authentic practice rather than through top-down mandates or disconnected competency checklists.

Adds Dr. Willard: “New and additional career skills can always be added to courses and degrees, but the first and easiest step is to make the skills that are already baked in visible and legible. Focusing on career skills in no way detracts from or replaces or dilutes traditional academic, disciplinary knowledge and skills.” 

Dr. Discola says that it’s especially important to recognize that this work is fundamentally about student identity formation. 

“When students begin to understand how they think, communicate, collaborate, and contribute within a discipline, they start to see themselves differently. They move from feeling like passive recipients of information toward seeing themselves as emerging professionals and active participants in intellectual communities,” she points out. 

“I believe this approach creates opportunities for more equitable learning experiences. When faculty make disciplinary expectations and professional norms more explicit, students gain greater access to forms of knowledge and participation that might otherwise remain hidden or assumed. 

“At its best, this work helps students understand not only what they are learning, but who they are becoming through that learning.”