Surveys of U.S. employers across multiple industrial sectors indicate that students entering the technical workforce continue to lack critical "employability skills" (also referred to as "soft skills," "workforce-readiness skills," "professional skills," "21st-century skills," "non-cognitive skills," etc.), such as teamwork, problem-solving, and communication. This project will engage teams of community college faculty and employers representing two important, growing fields of technology -- cybersecurity and mechatronics -- in jointly developing curriculum modules that integrate technical content with employability skills. Instead of developing stand-alone courses covering employability skills in isolation from technical content, the project will integrate employability skills within existing technical courses and will use authentic workplace scenarios to prepare students for the day-to-day situations they will encounter in the workplace. The project will benefit other fields of technological education by producing a faculty implementation guide and by offering workshops on how to collaborate with local employers to replicate the project's integrated curriculum design process. Ultimately, the project aims to develop technicians who are more effective on the job, whether in a team environment or working individually -- workers who are better problem-solvers, have improved communication skills (written and verbal), and can efficiently utilize and manage workplace resources.
In this project, the Center for Occupational Research and Development (CORD) will collaborate with three NSF Advanced Technological Education (ATE) centers -- the Center for Systems Security and Information Assurance (CSSIA), the Florida Advanced Technological Education Center (FLATE), and the South Carolina Advanced Technological Education Center (SC ATE) -- as well as employers in cybersecurity and mechatronics across the country. The project will develop, pilot, and revise instructional materials that integrate sector-specific technical skills and employability skills within a continuum of coursework, from foundational to advanced specialty courses, in associate degree programs in cybersecurity and mechatronics. This approach of integrating employability skills across a whole program of study is novel. The following six major categories of employability skills, which have been repeatedly mentioned in surveys and reports, will serve as the focus of the integrated curriculum: (1) teamwork, (2) problem solving, (3) verbal communication, (4) written communication, (5) dependability/work ethic, and (6) planning and organizing. Teams of faculty and employers will develop six integrated curriculum projects for each sector (cybersecurity and mechatronics), using a common instructional design template. Once drafted, each of the 12 integrated projects will be piloted by at least three community colleges using a common evaluation rubric to provide feedback to the project team, which will then revise the curricula. The work of the project team and evaluator will also help contribute to the overall knowledge base regarding the circumstances that govern successful embedding of employability skills within curricula in advanced technology and the audiences for whom such approaches prove effective.
