Career Ready Fellows: Using Course Learning Experiences to Prepare Students for Careers

Call for 2025-2026 Fellows

Although students regularly engage in curricular and co-curricular experiences that help prepare them for their future endeavors, they are often unable to articulate the connections between their college experiences and the skills and competencies that will help them succeed on the job market and in their chosen careers. We are building a multi-disciplinary cohort of teaching faculty and staff instructors who will work together to explore methods for supporting students in making connections between their Geneseo experiences and their career readiness, vis-à-vis course activities. No prior experience integrating career competencies into coursework is necessary to become a fellow. Supported by Career Design Center and the Center for Integrative Learning, participants will work together over the course of the 2025-2026 academic year and receive a $600 stipend for their participation in the cohort.

Interested in participating? Please read the detailed information below and apply here. Applications are due by March 24, 2025. 

Expectations of Fellows

• Attend an opening workshop (that will be held in August 2025, the week before classes begin) where you will meet the other participants and learn more about Geneseo’s Career Ready initiative.
• Attend monthly meetings throughout the fall and spring semesters to learn about additional resources and receive feedback on your on-going work.
• Submit a course syllabus and career-readiness activity/assignment/project description and instructions by the end of April 2026, ideally to implement in a course by the end of 2026. An additional expectation is the willingness to have these materials be available as an open educational resource (OER).

Benefits of Participation

• Opportunity to develop new course materials that support student needs and interests
• Work with a cohort of faculty and professionals who are interested in connecting course activities with career readiness competencies
• $600 stipend 

Sample Fellowship Outcomes

• Incorporating a new activity that directly connects critical thinking done in a course activity with how the students would use that skill after they leave college.
• A syllabus reorganization or redesign that emphasizes and highlights teamwork and leadership skills that are necessary for successful employment and already a part of your course.
• Designing a mock interview in which students prepare statements on how their coursework prepared them to be more capable in using technology and being more professional.
• Incorporating regular reflections throughout the semester that ask students to make connections between equity and inclusion topics in your coursework and how students could talk about these in job applications and job settings.
• A project that serves a local community or simulates a task someone in a professional career would do that includes a reflection on how the students would talk about this project during an interview.
• A series of guest presentations that explore and connect your course material with professional practice and communication.

NACE Competencies & Behaviors for Addressing Career-Related Goals

The National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) is a professional association of college career service professionals. They use a framework of eight competencies and behaviors for addressing career-related goals, which they define as “a foundation from which to demonstrate requisite core competencies that broadly prepare the college educated for success in the workplace and lifelong career management.” The eight career readiness competencies identified by NACE are:

• Professionalism
• Communication
• Critical Thinking
• Teamwork
• Technology
• Leadership
• Equity & Inclusion
• Career & Self Development

As our campus endeavors to expand student access to experiential learning opportunities, aligning these experiences with the NACE Competencies gives us a framework and uniform language to empower students to talk about their experiences. 

A recently released report called, “Integrating Academic and Career Development: Strategies to Scale Experiential Learning and Reflection Across the Curriculum,” identified practices that encourage ongoing reflection and narration for students. This helps them transition from “I took” and “I learned” statements towards “I did" and "I can do” assertions. Faculty members in this cohort will be integrating teaching practices that encourage students to reflect and assist them with incorporating course competencies into the development of their professional persona. Throughout students’ SUNY Geneseo experience they collect assignments, experiences, and new competencies; one of the goals of this project is to help students articulate how they will be able to leverage their experience to themselves and others. Students could be saving class assignments in a portfolio to share later, taking time in the moment to reflect on growth and goals, or doing mock interviews and practicing how they will talk about connecting their classwork with skills for a potential job.

Apply to Become a Geneseo Career Ready Fellow

Submit the Career Ready Fellowship application by Monday, March 24, 2025.

Please email Melanie Medeiros (medeiros@geneseo.edu), Director of the Center for Integrative Learning, if you have any questions.