Many community college technician programs teach professional skills such as communication, teamwork, work ethic, and openness to lifelong learning by briefly discussing them in one course or offering students a couple of meetings with a career coach before they graduate. However, employers consistently report that too many recent college graduates arrive in the workplace underperforming such professional skills. Such professional performance gaps have persistent negative effects on the employability of graduates of community college technician programs, limiting their success in getting jobs, keeping them, and advancing in their careers.

Project GOALS (Greater Opportunities to Advance Lifelong Success), an NSF Advanced Technological Education targeted research project, brought together researchers and community college educators from 2020 through 2024 to co-develop, test, package, and distribute resources for developing technicians' professional skills. Through this work, the team discovered the barriers that hinder both instructors and students from connecting around professional skills development. To address these barriers, the Project GOALS team developed an instructional framework grounded in research that integrates focused low-stakes activities into classes as students work toward their technical certificates. Based on our research, we believe Project GOALS provides ways for students to improve their professional self-awareness and for technical instructors to build their confidence and strategies for developing the career readiness of students.

Broader Impacts: Based on design and testing that involved 8 core instructors, 9 courses, and more than 170 students, Project GOALS produced a set of instructional resources that educators may download through a website. These resources include two handbooks, two rubrics, and a set of reflection tools delivered via mobile application.

The Project GOALS curriculum begins by having instructors define professional skills, provide testimonies about the importance of these skills in workplace success, and frame professional skills not as fixed personality traits, but as skills and mindsets that can improve through reflective practice. The Project GOALS curriculum then engages students in periodic reflections about their professional skills following team-based technical labs. These reflections contribute to professional skills stories that students collect in a portfolio during their courses. At the end of their certificate program, students can use these stories to compose resumes and prepare more effectively for job interviews.

Intellectual Merit: In a research brief, the team describes how the Project GOALS collaboration revealed the supports that technical instructors need to develop the professional awareness and reflection habits of students. Project GOALS began with instructors asking researchers to design professional skills assessments and rubrics. After the researchers developed a rubric and three reflection tools (self-reflection, peer reflection, and instructor reflection), they tested them for validity and reliability and studied the patterns and contrasts in the ratings of students and instructors.

We found that students and instructors consistently differed in their ratings of student professional skills, with students rating themselves and their peers a point higher on a scale than their instructors did. While the differences were not statistically significant, the disagreement pattern was consistent across all courses and all participants. Such findings align with past research that has found the personal biases and concerns of students about social desirability distort their self-assessments. By studying these differences, the Project GOALS team also discovered the challenges that prevent many instructors from sharing their honest assessments of the professional skills of their students. We found that instructors could easily rate individual students using reflection tools because, in fact, they were implicitly assessing the professional skills of their students all the time, but they had avoided sharing those assessments directly with students based on their own concerns about social desirability and institutional dynamics.

To navigate such barriers, Project GOALS explored how low-stakes reflection tools could help students develop professional self-awareness and help instructors provide transparent and constructive feedback. For students, Project GOALS developed self-rating activities linked to specific team roles, rubrics, and practices for telling stories about their professional skills. For instructors, Project GOALS developed tools to document their ratings of the professional skills of their students and then share the results in a low-risk, supportive way.

Last Modified: 08/01/2024
Modified by: Louise Yarnall