Find out today how an education at TCTC will get you ready for an immediate career path.
With dozens of clubs and organizations here, we make it easy to get involved!
Find out today how an education at TCTC will get you ready for an immediate career path.
With dozens of clubs and organizations here, we make it easy to get involved!
Skills for Careers, Skills for Life
COMMUNICATE EFFECTIVELY
Deliver and receive a message with clarity to reach mutual understanding.
THINK CRITICALLY
Use logical reasoning to achieve a conclusion or outcome.
CONNECT INTENTIONALLY
Connect prior knowledge, skills, and experiences to current circumstances in order to build relationships and promote success in the workplace.
Why the Change? Why Now?
SACS-COC has a standard that requires all of our associate degree graduates to acquire something called “general education outcomes,” which are set of universal, transferable skills independent of a student’s particular major. These are skills that are infused throughout a student’s college experience beyond the 15 credits of general education courses they generally take from the Arts & Sciences Division, such as English and math. As a college we get to choose what those specific skills are and we measure how well our students achieve them and report that assessment data to SACS.
Since 2016, we chose to call those outcomes “21st Century Skills” and they included the following six skills: written communication, oral communication, collaboration, digital literacy, problem-solving, and integrative learning. There was a 21st Century Skills committee that worked to help faculty embed these skills into their courses and assess how well students were achieving them. However, this work was put on hold when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and the College needed to shift its attention to responding to the crisis.
As we began to emerge from the pandemic crisis, we knew we had to restart embedding and assessing these skills. However, through the 21st Century Skills committee’s work, including a campus-wide listening tour with faculty, we learned that embedding these skills into the curriculum was an overly cumbersome task and we could do better. Meanwhile, through our discussions with business and industry partners, we learned more about what skills our local employers were looking for in our graduates. A project team, with broad-based faculty and staff input, began the work of streamlining these skills to make them both easier to embed and assess and to better meet the needs of our community.
Let's Do Less, Better!
Knowing that TCTC’s approach to 21st Century Skills prior to the pandemic just wasn’t working effectively, a project team dug in to find out why. By drawing on earlier research performed by the 21st Century Skills Committee, researching best practices in the literature, talking with local business and industry partners, and conducting numerous focus groups with faculty and student engagement staff, the team learned that “more” wasn’t always “better” when it came to embedding and assessing these universal, transferable skills across the curriculum.
The team then set to work to streamline the skills and assessment rubrics for faculty. The skills were vetted by a sampling of TCTC Advisory Committees and the rubrics were field-tested by faculty representatives from each division. The philosophy became “let’s do less, better” in order to make it easier for faculty, staff and students while responding to the needs of the community.
The existing six 21st Century Skills were rolled up into just three skills, which we are now calling, simply, “Workplace Skills.” The skills are Communicate Effectively, Think Critically and Connect Intentionally. Or as we like to call them: (T)“CTC”! These three skills hold all of the other skills, while being easy to remember and relevant to today’s workplace.
Workplace Skills and the Student Experience
Workplace Skills are one of several building blocks that prepare students for the workplace – either right away in a career or technical field, or once they graduate from a senior institution. This diagram, which we adapted from the US Department of Labor, illustrates all of the building blocks and where Workplace Skills fits into the entire TCTC learning experience.
While we hope that students come in ready with the Foundational Skills they need for the college experience, we recognize that they often don’t and we provide a number of interventions to help, such as College Skills course, Skillshops, and more. The Collegiate Skills represent the general education courses students enrolled in associate degree programs take in English, math, science, social sciences, and the humanities that help students become well-rounded, educated individuals ready for a lifetime of engagement in their communities, further education, and careers. The Technical Skills are those skills they gain in their program of study, or major – everything from computer programming to medical assisting. The Workplace Skills, then, provide universal, transferable skills needed by everyone to be effective in the modern workplace, no matter what position they hold or what sector they work in. These are skills that employers routinely seek and that help employees progress in their careers over time.