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Integrating career into curriculum:
Guiding students to 100% career ready
Since the launch of NAU 2025 Elevating Excellence: A Bold and Boundless Future for All, you may have found motivation to contribute to the 100% Career Ready initiative. You may have asked yourself, “how can I integrate career into my curriculum?” or “how have I already integrated career into my curriculum?” We hope that this webpage can provide you some resources and support as you explore how this initiative works within your course or college. This webpage is a soft launch so come back in August 2023 for more!
What is career readiness?
The National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) states that career readiness is a foundation from which to demonstrate requisite core competencies that broadly prepare the college educated for success in the workplace and lifelong career management. There are eight NACE career readiness competencies, each of which can be demonstrated in a variety of ways. Our goal is to have you connect a few of these competencies in your syllabi and/or implement career-related activities into your course.
Information to help with integrating career into curriculum
Syllabi examples Accordion Open
Basic NACE career readiness implementation
- This example holds a section that you can copy and paste into your syllabi that focuses on the NACE Career Readiness Competencies. After identifying which of the competencies you believe your course connects to predominately, you can list those after each student learning outcomes (SLO).
- The bottom of the page has 2 AST course examples of how to connect the competencies to the SLO.
- This example shows a basic integration of the NACE Career Readiness Competencies and how this professor connected a few of those competencies directly to the course material and context.
- This professor chose 4 competencies and did the work of connecting the coursework/material to each competency.
- This example includes 2 sections that highlight both Career Competencies & Transferable Skills along with Career Disciplinary Skills.
Additional examples:
- ANT 101 Fall 2022 Syllabus
- AST496C.Syllabus (Jan2023)
- 2022_FALL_Art482C_Exhibition_VanNess_David_Syllabus
- This example shows an advanced integration of career readiness into signature assignments and activities ranging from in-class workshops/presentations to career related activities to ensure that students ended the course with clear objectives and takeaways to apply to their future career and opportunities.
- On the bottom of the first page and into the second page, the professor goes into depth on the main SLO and showcases how the completion of that SLO is measured by connecting the signature assignments, presentations, and class activities. Essentially, they connected course objectives to career objectives!
Example activities Accordion Closed
NAU Career Development activities
- Request a workshop or presentation: A team member can come into your classroom and present on career-related materials. Most of our workshops, we can adjust in order to meet the desired time frame of your class.
- If you know that you will be canceling a class due to travel, holiday, etc., let us come present instead of canceling that class!
- Career Steps through Udemy: These online, self-paced modules cover career related topics and link to a student’s NAU Udemy account. You could assign any of our Career Steps lessons to your students and have them submit a screenshot of their screen after they have completed the lesson.
- You can also partner with us to create a learning pathway for one of our badges for your students. Steps to Earning Your Career Readiness Badge
- Career advising appointments: Assign your students to schedule an appointment with us! We have multiple different appointment types including career/major exploration, resume review, cover letter review, internship exploration and resources, job search strategies, and mock interviews.
- If you select this as an assignment, we recommend assigning a deadline for requesting an appointment through Handshake as sometimes we are scheduling up to 2 weeks out.
- Mock Interviews: Mostly offered for senior seminar and capstone courses, these mock interview can be great practice for your students to prepare for internship or job interviews. This would encompass a team member working with you to determine which type of modality might work best for you. You could assign a Mock Interview appointment type so that they would meet 1:1 with a career advisor or set up a panel to take place during class session(s) so that students can learn from each other.
- If you are interested in this option, please send an email to career@nau.edu a semester prior to start this activity in your classroom and to allow for ample timing and scheduling.
- Resume Dropbox: Have your students submit their materials and receive feedback in 3-5 business days as an assignment. Mostly targeted for senior seminar, capstone, and writing courses.
- Career events: Encourage your students to attend our various career fairs and events throughout the semester like the Part-Time Job Fair and our Career and Graduate School Expo.
- Through Udemy, NAU provides the Lumberjack community with additional ways to expand their learning, and elevate their Lumberjack experience. Udemy is a teaching and online learning tool with over 100,000 courses. NAU students, faculty, and staff can access Udemy for free.
Career panels
- Share your network with your students by hosting a career panel during your class period. Identify and recruit alumni and/or professionals from the field to come talk about their experiences with your students. Topics could include their career journeys, their experience with the content that you are covering, Q&A regarding various pathways to success, etc.
Career conversations
- Have your students identify a professional in the field with a career that they are interested in and then reach out to them for a 15-30 minute career conversation regarding that professional’s career journey, what advice they have for individuals entering the field, etc. Materials available upon request.
- These conversations have led to internship and full-time opportunities! An NAU capstone course embedded this into their curriculum and out of the 32 students enrolled, 28 completed the assignment, and half a dozen received jobs and internship opportunities from those conversations.
Potential opportunity identification
- This activity could be adapted for 3 different opportunities that your students might be interested in. Essentially, you have them locate 3-5 opportunities and list the related information so they understand what all might be involved in the future. Materials available upon request.
- Internships
- Graduate schools
- Full-Time jobs
Resources Accordion Closed
- Career readiness competencies, breakdown of each competencies, and downloadable support materials.
Career workshops and presentations: Request a workshop or presentation
- Please submit requests at least 3-4 weeks prior to your preferred presentation date; we will respond within 3-5 business days.
- If you have us listed in your syllabus, please let us know prior to the start of that semester, as soon as possible. We want to ensure that we can accommodate your request.
- If you have an idea for a topic/presentation that you’d like to explore that is not listed on the website, please email us at career@nau.edu and we will connect you to the appropriate members of our team. As a note, new content will be considered based on applicability and may take 4-6 weeks to create due to staff availability and research.
- Career Steps are online, self-paced modules that cover career related topics and link to a student’s NAU Udemy account. Students can log in with their NAU credentials to begin the courses and they can send their faculty a screenshot of their screens after finishing the lesson for verification.
- The Resume Dropbox allows undergraduate students to receive basic feedback on their resumes.
- If you assign this as an assignment, please email career@nau.edu to let us know how many students are in your course and when the assignment is due so that we can ensure the Resume Dropbox is being adequately monitored. Please inform students that it can take up to 5 business days to receive feedback so they will need to be proactive to meet deadlines.
- NAU Career Development offers scheduled appointment types including career/major exploration, resume review, cover letter review, internship exploration and resources, job search strategies, and mock interviews. Students can schedule appointments through Handshake using their NAU credentials.
- If you make this an assignment, please include in your syllabi a deadline for requesting an appointment and completion date as we may book out 2-4 weeks in advance depending on the time of the semester.
What Can I Do With This Major?
- Found on our homepage – bottom right most tile.
- Whether you’re exploring majors or searching for information about your chosen field, this website will help you connect majors to careers. Learn about typical career areas and types of employers that hire people in each major, as well as strategies to make you a more marketable candidate.
- Produced by the University of Tennessee Center for Career Development and accessible from the NAU Career Development homepage.
What can I do with a degree in…?
- Every major provides opportunities for students to develop and enhance skills that employers value. If you are looking for ideas for careers to explore, you will find lists of job titles developed from job postings, college/university surveys of recent graduates, and federal surveys.
- Produced by Portland State University’s University Career Center.