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Work Readiness, soft skills, professional development for students (Savannah State University-2024)

Strategy/Project Name: 
Work Readiness, soft skills, professional development for students
Momentum Area: 
Purpose
Category: 
Career/Major Exploration
Faculty Development
High Impact Practices
Other/Undefined
Strategy/Project Description: 

This project aims to equip students with the soft skills (super skills) needed to succeed in the workplace. Savannah State University (SSU) will implement trainings, activities, and programming to teach and reinforce soft skills development

Activity Status: 
Scaling
Evaluation/Assessment plan: 

KPIs:

  1. Participation/Satisfaction rates - Number/percentage of faculty, staff, and students participating in training sessions, workshops, activities, (with High Impact Practices [HIPS] such as guest speakers) etc.
  2. Skills Assessments - Pre- and post-measures to gauge skills growth
  3. Soft Skills (Super Skills) Expressed Examples - Samples of student work showcasing applied skills, like presentations, multi-disciplinary projects, case studies as special targeted projects
  4. Online Program Recognition – with SSU Super Skills for students, certificate awards for short course completion
Progress and Adjustments: 
  1. In 2023-2024 The Center for Professional Excellence targeted faculty and staff (130 faculty and 230 Staff members) with the SSU Super Skills Campaign. During this time, we had one Super Skill released every Monday for faculty and staff to review. We took regular surveys every 6 weeks to see if faculty and staff were reading our vignettes.  These emails described a career ready super skill, attached the super skill to a historic African American, and challenged the reader to develop the super skill in their own life career. This campaign yielded 11,520 impact touches/instances.  Also, we presented this SSU Super Skill Campaign at numerous conferences to gather feedback from outside institutions. To date, we have several short surveys that were conducted about every 6 weeks. Our data shows that about 60% of our faculty and staff sees the weekly email but only 29% reads the informational narratives. For the year 2024-2025 we are duplicating this work to our student body.
  2. We will work on strengthening our faculty/student engagement with this project by working on a classroom implementation of Pre and Post lesson measures for several courses:
    • HUMN 1201
    • ENGL 1101
    • ENGL 1102
    • AFRS 2000
  3. We will be looking to our faculty champions in the courses above for help with both classroom implementation and student artifacts collection in the Spring 2025.
  4. The CPE will create a full-scale incentive with a recognition certification for a completion of a D2L Brightspace course on SSU Super Skills. Students may earn a certification upon course completion with the following deliverables:
    • Pre, Self -Assessment
    • Written Reflection
    • Knowledge Quiz passed by 80%
    • Implementation Artifact (sample)
    • Post, Self- Assessment
Plan for the Year Ahead: 
  1. Upscale engagement of faculty in supper skill activities beyond the four courses mentioned above.
  2. Comprehensive tracking of how many faculty integrate super skill activities in their courses, and participate in training workshops.
  3. Identify a platform with IRPA and career placement office for data collection of High impact practices/career placement Rates
Challenges and Support: 
  1. Support of D2L Brightspace short course on SSU Super Skills (tech support if needed.
  2. Develop platform to collect student involvement with HIPS such as internships and career readiness
Contact email: 
Lindenn@savannah.edu
Primary Contact: 
Nancy Linden (Center for Professional Excellence)