Quality Enhancement Plan – QEP

Our QEP, Foundation for Your Future, equips students with a comprehensive approach to making career choices. These choices begin with an inward assessment of skills, interests, values and attributes, and ends by connecting these traits to a broad range of career options for which they are most suited, embedded in an engaging, hands-on education that prepares students for success in their chosen careers.

Phase One: Foundations

Goal: To provide students with a solid career foundation as they begin college.

In phase one, students will take career-orientation courses that introduce them to two primary or foundational components of success as it pertains to career readiness:

1. In select career-orientation or introductory courses, students will explore their own skills, interests, personal traits and values/rewards systems that may contribute to suitability or fit in various careers.
2. In these classes, students will explore career options in industries or fields that align with their skills and interests.

Phase Two: Framework

Goal: To build upon this solid foundation with a framework that provides students with the skills, content and competencies for a successful future.

The purpose of phase two is to imbed students vigorously into their career classes so they can begin to refine skills, knowledge and competencies. Some students will develop a heightened sense of tenacity to work beyond what they previously thought capable. In some cases, however, some students may conclude that they have made the wrong career decision. In these scenarios, a secondary purpose of phase two is to help students identify new, previously unexplored career options based on new experiences that reveal new interests and possible career options.

Phase Three: Capstone

Goal: To launch students successfully into their careers with a capstone experience as a synthesis of prior learning.

The purpose of phase three is to ease the awkward transition some students commonly experience between college and career. Phase three provides the culmination of students' collegiate work, as the synthesis of prior skills and knowledge, and as direct application in job-imbedded experiences. In phase three, students will participate in capstone experiences including clinical, student teaching and short-and long-term internships.

Phase One: Foundations Student Learning Outcomes

• Students will align their values, interests and personal strengths (VIPRESS) to a potential career path or field of study.
• Students will describe career options of interest to them, aligned with the results from their career suitability survey, and including at least one previously unexplored career option through an in-class assignment.

Phase Two: Framework Student Learning Outcomes

• Students will develop their values, interests, personal strengths (VIPRESS) and career readiness through practical, integrated assignments
• Students will identify and describe at least one new or previously unexplored career option based on newly identified interests or skills through completion of in-class assignments and participation in campus-wide activities and external (off-campus) projects.

Phase Three: Capstone Student Learning Outcomes

• Students will apply prior learning related to career readiness through completion of a capstone experience