Career Readiness
The College of Liberal Arts (CLA) at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities is leading the nation in liberal arts career readiness with our focus on engaging faculty to help undergraduates develop and express a set of core career competencies.
Leveraging the Liberal Arts Advantage
Championed by the dean with one of the four strategic CLA Roadmap goals being Readiness, developing our students' career readiness is situated as the work of everyone in the college. Responsibility is shared between student services units and academic units, as CLA faculty are key participants in the Career Readiness Initiative working to embed the framework of the Core Competencies into the classroom. This integrated model bridges both the curricular and co-curricular experiences of students.
Faculty Development
Engaging students in a consistent conversation that helps them realize and fully utilize the breadth of their liberal arts education ultimately needs to happen in the classroom. With 500 tenured faculty and 300+ instructors in the College of Liberal Arts, providing opportunities for them to engage in calling out the liberal arts advantage for their students and to think differently about their teaching has become a central focus of the Career Readiness effort in the college.
Join Our Efforts
CLA's innovation in career readiness for undergraduate liberal arts students has been faculty-led curriculum integration that scales up our ability to help every student express the relevance of the ten Core Competencies they gain as outcomes of their CLA education. We are now positioned to share with other institutions a framework specifically for liberal arts colleges.
