Challenges to the utility of Humanities education have become louder and more frequent. The declining number of Humanities majors and the increasing number of applied or professional majors, only reinforces what some critics consider the “useless Humanities degree”, disciplines with little to recommend it in terms of workforce-ready skills. Career services on college campuses have expertise to help students into their post-graduate lives, but faculty also have a crucial opportunity in their courses to support their students in reflecting on and translating their curricular and co-curricular experiences.
Even though some faculty may express concerns about losing class time devoted to content to career-focused issues, to do so does not require faculty to completely create new assignments or carve out time from Humanities content for career-focused conversation. Rather, faculty can adapt in- and out-of-class work they already employ in order to draw attention to the knowledge, skills, and personal characteristics embedded in these assignments and that are directly translatable to post-graduate careers. This approach does not simply add-on to what is often an already-packed scheduled of readings and projects, but does, in fact, unpack academic work to recognize the skills, competencies, and personal qualities embedded in the learning outcomes and projects in the class already.
I’ve developed a four-step process to help faculty support their students in understanding how their Humanities experiences can be translated from the language of academic work to the language of career. Just like language translation, the work of translating college experiences to career responsibilities and requirements is thinking work that occurs alone and together, and is practiced in discussion and writing. And it’s applicable across all disciplines.
Step 1: Understand Your Students to Support Career Readiness
Faculty first need to know their audience—students—in their institutional context. I’ve come to realize that my more advanced students struggle with sustaining a critical conversation in small groups, even though they usually already know each other from previous classes. As a result, many of the translation reflections and exercises I build into these courses are done verbally in groups, with me supplying prompts periodically to keep them talking.
My first- and second-year students, alternatively, can often struggle with expressing their thoughts in writing, so these reflections often include a written component so students can think and then write. Students are widely varied in their experiences, knowledge, skills, and competencies, so faculty should provide several opportunities with each of these categories over the semester for students to engage with something that is a positive for them.
Step 2: Identify Transferable Career Skills Within Your Coursework
Once faculty have identified the relevant characteristics of their audience, then determine which of the key skills, competencies, experiences or personal qualities you’ll emphasize in a particular class or assignment. I’ve developed a set of knowledge, skills, and personal qualities employers are seeking that align with learning objectives in literature courses. I’ve drawn these from the list of high impact practices of the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), the career competencies detailed by National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), the United Nations (UN) core competencies, and the numerous research studies that have pinpointed those skills and experiences most desirable for entry-level hiring. These are skills, competencies, and experiences such as the ability to apply knowledge or to innovate, practiced collaboration and teamwork or digital and technological skills, and personal characteristics such as professionalism and work ethic or ethical judgment and integrity.
I then peg one of these skills, competencies or characteristics to my assignments so that I can periodically help students unpack their class work applies beyond college. Faculty can include these competencies on their syllabi, or just with assignments or exercises. These categories are broad enough to allow for more pointed foci in them–“digital and technological knowledge and skills” is expansive enough to now include AI. “Professionalism and work ethic” is expansive enough to include attention to class preparation, assignment deadlines, and revision.
Step 3: Use Reflection to Help Students Recognize Their Career Competencies
Build in focused and reflective prompts to existing class work and assignments, highlighting a particular skill or competency. Faculty do need to connect categories and components to specific classes and assignments. Here are some examples from my classes:
Graphic Narratives: How did the final project of creating your own graphic narrative help you both apply knowledge you’ve learning in this class and innovate? Modern & Contemporary American Literature: What specific knowledge and skills did you develop for the small group presentation project about sub-movements in Modernism? Illness & Narrative: What ethical judgment and integrity did you exercise during this course?
The prompts are linked to learning outcomes for the course and for the assignment. Not every literature class I teach, for example, will foreground ethical decision-making like my course Illness & Narrative. I specifically use that personal quality in that upper-level course since students are asked to wrestle with implicit bias and ethical decision-making in storytelling about illness.
It’s also worth reminding students that their co-curricular activities and experiential learning also can align with their courses. Faculty can build in focused and reflective prompts for these learning experiences, such as student publications, arts performances, volunteerism, internships, or peer tutoring. Questions can include:
Describe what you did by breaking down the task into specific components. Explain why you chose this experience? Looking back on this experience, name anything you learned from it, describe any way in which you have changed as a result of it, explain anything you gained from having this experience. What experiences and skills translate into competencies essential for post-graduate success?
Step 4: Help Students Translate Humanities Learning Into Career Expectations
Culminating experiences in the major also are opportunities for focused translation of a Humanities education into career expectations. Faculty who teach senior capstone experiences that expect students to engage in their own independent scholarship are already effective in breaking down what can seem, initially, like an overwhelming project for students into smaller related parts. Other departments may have a set of upper-level courses for students to select among, and these, too, given the heightened expectations for advanced work, are ideal places to engage in the purposeful practice of translation of college knowledge, skills, and experiences to career expectations. In these culminating academic experiences, faculty can prompt students to reflect on these types of questions:
Describe a class that was interesting and made you want to learn more. Describe the biggest challenge you’ve faced in your major. Describe the most satisfying experience you had in your major. Thinking about the work you’ve been asked to do in courses in your major, identify the habits of mind, knowledge and skills, and personal qualities you were asked to demonstrate. Would you choose this major again? Why? What knowledge and skills, competencies and experiences, and personal qualities translate directly into career expectations?
If faculty want to take this a step farther, students can work through an entry-level job ad so they can see how their college experiences are embedded in the responsibilities and requirements of the job, and so that they can realize how far and wide their experiences can translate. One tip is to deliberately select an entry level job ad that seems unrelated to the major since it will stretch students to understand how broadly their experiences can apply; for my English classes, for example, I don’t select an entry-level job of editor or writer.
Faculty have a role to play in supporting Humanities students translate their college experiences to career success by helping students recognize the aspects of their college education that employers find valuable. Breaking apart coursework into its component parts and offering a few focused moments for reflection can encourage students to realize and then express what they gained from their experiences. And can help students understand how their academic skills and experiences translate directly to their professional lives beyond college.
Laura L. Behling, PhD, is a Professor of English at University of Puget Sound, with teaching and scholarly interests in 20th-21st-century U.S. literature and culture, as well as health humanities and journalism. As a Fulbright Scholar, she taught at Palacky University in Olomouc, Czech Republic (2003), and served as a Fulbright Senior Specialist at the American University of Bulgaria in Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria (2018). Her scholarly publications include: Gross Anatomies: Fictions of the Physical in American Literature (Susquehanna University Press/Associated University Presses, 2008) and The Masculine Woman in America, 1890-1935 (University of Illinois Press, 2001). In addition, she edited Reading, Writing, and Research: Undergraduate Students as Scholars in Literary Studies (CUR [Council on Undergraduate Research], 2010) and The Resource Handbook for Academic Deans (Jossey-Bass, 2014).
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