The purpose of this session is to expose career services professionals to strategies that can be useful to create pedagogically sound, relevant, and successful short-term career development courses. Questions related to career development courses are frequently asked via the NACE Community, particularly as institutions identify models of presenting these courses in a post-pandemic world and employers identify ways in which they can engage institutions to support their efforts. Thus, we believe that this topic is both timely and important. Both presenters have approximately 10 years’ experience teaching undergraduate and graduate students, with at least three+ years in career development instruction. They have spearheaded continuous development and revision of their current required, undergraduate career development course, offered in-person, online, and in three-, five-, and 10-week formats. Improvements are regularly made based on employer partner feedback and emergent instructional best practices.
The key elements involved in this presentation are based on published and recognized literature related to Quality Matters course design standards, rapport building between teachers and students (Glazier, 2021), and even online course development (Darby & Lang, 2019).
Using a required undergraduate career development course at the University of Louisville’s College of Business as a model, we intend to share lessons we learned about how we improved the course and identified effective strategies.
We also plan to engage audience members in reflecting on key elements that go into designing a good course, such as human, time, and tech resources, course objectives vis-à-vis term length, available internal and external partners who can support course development efforts, and elements related to diversity and inclusion (e.g., accessibility, diverse content and examples, assignment choice, etc.). Our goal is to model different ways of engaging audience members so they can use such strategies as they develop their own courses.
Following this program, you will be able to:
Visit the professional development FAQ page, or contact the NACE Professional Development Team via e-mail or phone, 610.625.1026.