Career Readiness Curriculum Initiative: The Groundwork and Expanding our Community
Outreach
McKenna Moran, Campus Compact AmeriCorps Member serving at North Central College, Naperville, IL
Background
In 2020, North Central began the steps to implement a campus
wide career readiness initiative requirement. Through research
and the creation of a Career Readiness task force a proposal
was created. This proposal was presented to the APPC and
approved in March of 2021. This requirement would include two
sections: A two-credit hour minimum career readiness
preparation course taken simultaneously with a two-credit hour
career readiness experiential course. North Central College has
also struggled with maintaining a directory of past and current
community partners. Through my service year I have been
assisting the Engaged Learning Facilitators with engaging
community partners and creating an informational directory.
Anti-Poverty: Career readiness
The role of the VISTA has been to be an advocate for the
First Gen/Low Income students. This has included research
for opportunities to give all students equal career
opportunities and pay no matter what obstacles they may
have (international, financial, etc.)
Capacity Building Career readiness
The VISTA collected data from students and alumni
reviewing the proposal of our project and what they would
have benefited from as a student looking for career
assistance. This data has been organized in a way for us to
know what to prioritize while creating the framework for the
course as well as on campus opportunities.
Data Collected From Community Partners
Data Collection from NCC Alumni and
Students
We decided to initially interview NCC Alum to gain honest opinion about how
effective career readiness was and what their opinions would be about attempting
to expand our reach and make this a requirement.
These are some of the things that I learned and will take into creating the initial
skeleton’s for the project:
● 95% of the Alum interviewed did not feel that NCC best prepared
them or could improve their career readiness initiatives
● We need to be able to understand the barriers each individual student
has (first-gen, low income, full-time job, international, etc.)
● Time flexibility is key in creating a career readiness experiential
course
● For the career readiness course, students want to hear about options
outside of grad school (service years, and entering the job market)
Challenges and Recommendations
Initial challenges to look towards:
Capacity Building for Community outreach: ● Equal opportunity for all students.
● The timeline and requirements are accessible to all
This semester, the Engaged Learning Office has taken ahold of our
students
community engagement. This has included reaching out to our
● Engagement with community partners.
community partners and potential partners to collect data about thow
they want to be involved with our students. I have created a
spreadsheet in what type of work the organization has volunteers work
I recommend for the next year that I work closely with departments on
campus including First Gen, Premier Scholars, Students who work
on as well as what type of volunteering they are looking for (short-term
full-time and International Office to gain an understanding of what each
one time instances, vs. long-term service opportunities (internships).
unique group on campus would need to succeed within this career
Not only will this assist in building our community partner engagement
requirement. We need to make sure the timeline and the requirements
and scope, but also gives us the opportunity to work more closely with
are accessible to all students and that students do not need to be
community partners to create internships that NCC students can take a
financially set back to participate in this opportunity. I also recommend
part of, intersecting our work in career readiness.
working with organizations most interested in working with college
students to create career readiness opportunities.