How Queens College CUNY is revolutionizing career plans with Pathways
To provide augmented guidance to students on the connection between the classroom experience, career skills, and the job market, Queens College CUNY is developing an integrated academic and career learning environment with CSM Pathways. The Hire QC Pathways project launched in Spring 2019 and currently being piloted by 295 students.
CSM Pathways allows students to explore and develop career competencies gathered from career educators and faculty, engage with employers, understand the skills and career competencies associated with academic majors, and build their own career maps. Five career educators and five peer mentors are working with Queens College students as they navigate CSM Pathways, utilize services, and attend events on career readiness. To enroll, some students attended an orientation, and others watched an instructional video.
Participating students are engaging, documenting, and tracking their experiences as acquired from career services, workshops, classes, events, co-curricular experiential learning, and/or work. Students are reflecting on their emerging career readiness competencies and choosing from a menu of options for growing their skillset, including activities on career education, networking, internship application, training and conference participation. In-demand skills training are also available on topics such as communication, digital literacy, and team building.
Five faculty advisors—from Art, Computer Science, Economics, Psychology, and Secondary Education—identified career readiness skills in existing courses, which in a future phase of the project will be presented to students as academic-and-career program maps. Student participants have received incentives such as priority registration and admission to employer events, gift cards, t-shirts, and mobile accessories. Students who successfully complete the Pathways learning modules will receive a certificate. The school is collecting student narratives and tracking their activities in the project. Slightly over 17% of student participants have completed at least 25% of the learning modules; over 65% have completed at least one activity; 39% of students have submitted resumes in the system for review; 12% attended the Career Fair, and 9% attended communications or digital training.
The HireQC Pathways project is currently a finalist for the 2019 Career Innovation Showcase hosted The Career Leadership Collective. Watch the video below to learn more about their story:
