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Facilitating Discussion Around the NACE Career Competencies
Stage: Build your own Work+
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Audience: Students & Supervisors
Summary
Discussing the NACE (National Association of Colleges and Employers) career competencies is crucial for students' career readiness and success. These competencies provide a framework for students to develop and demonstrate essential skills that employers value. By discussing these competencies, students can gain a better understanding of the skills and attributes they need to succeed in the workplace. This discussion can also help students identify areas where they may need to improve and take proactive steps to develop these skills. Northern Arizona University has created the following tool to help their student employees to think more deeply and reflect on their current experience with each of the competencies. Their supervisor then uses this as a discussion tool and an opportunity to identify action items, opportunities for growth and experiences that can support the student within their student employment role.
How to use this resource
- Provide a hard or digital copy to your student employee and provide a deadline of when you would like them to have the reflection column completed. Ask them to consider the questions in the discussion question column and record their responses in the reflection column.
- Set up a time to conduct a 1:1 with the student to review their thoughts, share your feedback and develop an action plan. Note those action items or follow-up in the final column.
- Ensure both of you retain a copy and revisit it in subsequent 1:1’s or whenever you touch base.
Do you have a large volume of working learners? It may not seem feasible or may be too time consuming to meet with every working learner you supervise to review and discuss this tool individually. In that case, think about how you might facilitate this as a group activity - maybe during a team meeting. Leveraging a group setting for these discussions can be an excellent opportunity for additional feedback and ideas generated amongst the working learners. You may also want to consider leveraging a peer to peer meeting model. In this scenario, you could pair up a working learner with a more experienced or advanced working learner for them to review thoughts and share ideas. Plus, this scenario can often feel less intimidating to working learners who may be newer to their role.
Creator: Arizona State University Work+ This work is licensed under the Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA License.