CASE STUDY 9
A core product of the
Employability Skills
Forum, National
Business and
Education Centre
Program
College
Date Established
1997
Contact
Ms. Pam Racher-Lester
Manager, Career Services
Mount Royal College
4825 Richard Road S.W.
Calgary, Alberta
T3E 6K6
Tel: (403) 240-6111
Fax: (403) 240-6655
[email protected]
Mr. Jim Zimmer
Curriculum
Development Coordinator, Academic
Development Centre
Mount Royal College
Mount Royal College
4825 Richard Road S.W.
Calgary, Alberta
T3E 6K6
Tel: (403) 240-7204
Fax: (403) 240-6709
[email protected]
Name of Program
Mount Royal College’s
College-Wide Learning
Outcomes Initiative
Skills Developed
•Academic
•Personal
Management
•Teamwork
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The Conference Board
of Canada
Assessing and developing community college and university
transfer students’ employability skills
M OUNT R OYAL C OLLEGE ’ S C OLLEGE W IDE L EARNING O UTCOMES I NITIATIVE
Developing Transferable Skills for Workplace
Success and Continuous Learning
BY KURTIS KITAGAWA
Mount Royal College is preparing
its graduates for workplace success
and lifelong learning by developing
their generic employability skills.
Overview
Mount Royal College is dedicated
to preparing its graduates for lifelong
learning and equipping them with the
employability skills they will need to
succeed in the 21st century workplace.
The college is integrating employability
skills development into all its programs
to ensure that its graduates acquire the
generic skills needed to prosper in the
world of work and to engage in continuous learning.
The college, whose student body
includes many university transfer students, offers a wide range of occupational
programs including four-year applied
degrees, two-year diplomas and one-year
certificates. The applied degree programs
include mandatory work terms, which are
operated like co-op programs.
Mount Royal’s president, Tom Wood,
regularly underlines the importance of
developing employability skills in his
addresses to college audiences and in
public speeches. The College also encourages its faculty members to develop
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The Conference Board of Canada
August 1998
students’ generic employability skills while
they deliver subject-specific curricula.
In addition, the Career Services office
at Mount Royal College uses the Conference Board’s Employability Skills Profile
in a variety of ways to help students
prepare for postgraduation employment.
Career Services focuses on raising students’ awareness of the importance of
developing their personal management
and teamwork skills, while the professors
concentrate on enhancing students’
academic skills. Importantly, Career
Services also teaches students how to
think strategically about preparing
themselves to enter the workforce. Students are encouraged to identify their
current skills and to augment these with
others that employers look for.
As well, proposed college-wide learning
outcomes describe the transferable skills
essential to continuous learning and
workplace success; all students will have to
demonstrate these skills before graduating.
The context for all of these development initiatives is Mount Royal’s Vision
2005 document containing the College’s
mission statement and outlining its
strategic priorities. Employability skills
development lies at the heart of the
mission statement: it is the link that
connects the College’s commitment to
meeting students’ and the community’s
Education Centre (NBEC)
Director:
MaryAnn McLaughlin
Research Associates:
Michael Bloom
Kurtis Kitagawa
Joeanne Mahoney
Douglas Watt
Awards Co-ordinator:
Linda Scott
Program and Research Assistant:
Jean Smith
NBEC Mission
We help business and
education leaders work
collaboratively to promote
the development of a learning
society that will prepare
Canada‘s young people for
a changing world.
Visit us on the Web:
www.conferenceboard.ca/nbec
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National Business and
changing needs for “personal, intellectual
and social education” with the College’s
mandate to provide applied education
and training to meet changing market
needs. An emphasis on employability
skills is precisely what develops individuals, the community and the economy.
Groups Served
• Students, employers, society and the
public at large.
Objectives
• Have faculty articulate how they
develop employability skills in pamphlets describing college programs, in
individual course syllabi and in the
college calendar.
• Introduce regular assessment of
college-wide learning outcomes.
• Enhance students’ understanding of
employability skills.
• Raise students’ awareness of the
importance to employers of good
generic academic, personal management and teamwork skills.
• Encourage students to think strategically about developing their employability skills.
• Show students how to assess their
current skill levels, how to develop skill
areas in which they are deficient and
how to demonstrate specific employability skills to prospective employers.
• Make employability skills a common
standard for employers when they
evaluate the performance of their coop and applied degree students.
• Operationalize the Conference Board’s
Employability Skills Profile by specifying demonstrable criteria to help
employers assess students’ performance on co-op placements and to
underline for students the skill areas
where they need to improve.
Activities
Mount Royal College achieves its
objectives relating to co-operative education
and applied degrees by having students
assess themselves, getting college work
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The Conference Board of Canada
term co-ordinators to evaluate students’ job
search readiness before they have co-op
placements, and requiring employers to
evaluate their co-op students’ job performance after their work terms.
Careers Services has introduced a suite
of products and services relating to
employability skills development, including a self-assessment and skill building
tool for all students and a second tool
designed specifically for student leaders.
The tools ask students to:
• rate their skill level in all generic skill
areas on a scale of one to five, from
“little/no skill” to “highly skilled,”
• provide titles of stories they might
tell to illustrate their level of skill
development in each area,
• make a note of the evidence they can
produce to show their level of skill
development in these areas, and
• identify skill deficits that require
students to take remedial action.
Building and using career portfolios
has captured the interest of students
and faculty alike. Portfolios are a tangible product of the skills assessment
process. Students learn to collect evidence to demonstrate the full range of
their academic skills, teamwork experience and personal management skills.
They prepare portfolios to meet a
variety of course requirements and
to secure employment.
Mount Royal’s most ambitious development activity derives from the work
of the Faculty Curriculum Group. This
multidisciplinary faculty committee
manages the College’s curriculum renewal initiative, whose purpose is to
reshape college curricula on an outcomesbased model. Programs will also articulate outcomes, which will enable faculty
to tailor the individual courses so that
they contribute to realizing the overall
objectives of the programs: producing
graduates with predetermined characteristics, abilities and knowledge.
When the committee completes its
work, all the College’s courses will have
outcomes associated with them. As a
This study was made possible
through funding by members of
the Employability Skills Forum.
Forum Members
Alberta Advanced Education and
Career Development
Alberta Education
Alberta Vocational College
Association of Canadian Community
Colleges
Bank of Montreal
Canada Post Corporation
Canadian Labour Force
Development Board
CORCAN
Department of National Defence
Dofasco Inc.
Dufferin-Peel Roman Catholic
Separate School Board (Ontario)
Human Resources Development Canada
Imperial Oil
McGraw-Hill Ryerson Limited
Mount Royal College
New Brunswick Department of Education
Noranda Forest Inc.
Ontario Ministry of Education
and Training
Royal Bank of Canada
Seneca College of Applied Arts
and Technology
Simon Fraser University
Southwest Regional School Board
(Nova Scotia)
Statistics Canada
Syncrude Canada Ltd.
Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat
University of Alberta
University of Guelph
Forum Manager: Michael R. Bloom
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The Employability Skills
Forum Mission
We are committed to
improving the productivity and
quality of life for individuals,
organizations and society by
enhancing the employability
skills of the current and future
workforce of Canada.
result, students will be fully aware of
what they are expected to learn and able
to participate actively in achieving the
stipulated outcomes.
Finally, the committee will identify
college-wide outcomes—generic skills
that all students should acquire and
develop during their time at Mount Royal
College. One or more of these generic
skills will be integrated and assessed in
all courses offered at the College.
To identify college-wide learning
outcomes, the committee consulted with
faculty and other stakeholders. It also
analysed influential surveys of generic
skill requirements in an age of global
finance, high-speed communications and
new technologies (one of these surveys
was the Conference Board’s Employability Skills Profile). The skills common to
all five surveys included an emphasis on
communications, problem solving, use of
current technology, strong ethics and
initiative, and the skills needed to work
with others.
After identifying the most widely
recognized generic skills, the College
underlined the most pressing issues relating to skill possession, assessment and
development. These issues centred on:
• the need to include faculty in the
process of defining generic skills—
college faculty tend to regard existing generic skill definitions as
having been developed by business
without enough consultation with
academia,
• the need for objective measures,
• the need to open a dialogue on the
possibilities of teaching and assessing
skills in the context of their use, often
a workplace setting,
• students’ needs for formal instruction
in certain skill areas before they can
be expected to demonstrate them—
for example, students learn teamwork skills best when taught in
advance about the art of facilitation,
the need to establish lines of accountability and when to strike a team in
the first place.
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The Conference Board of Canada
In 1997–98, the committee is consulting
with all major stakeholders, including
college advisory committees, faculty,
senior students, graduates and administrators to identify core skills that all Mount
Royal graduates should develop while at
the College. It will take three to five years
to embed generic skills development and
assessment in every course. Not every
course will address every core skill, but all
courses will emphasize at least one.
Resources Required
To finance its curriculum renewal
initiative, Mount Royal College will be
spending approximately $600,000 over
four years on teaching release time, site
visits, conferences, retreats and training,
programming and desktop publishing,
administrative support and photocopying and supplies.
Career Services has also reallocated
personnel resources and dedicated desktop and print budgets to this initiative.
Achievements/Outcomes
In April 1998, Mount Royal College
published for discussion a set of collegewide learning outcomes, including
research, thinking, ethical reasoning,
communications, group effectiveness
and computer literacy skills.
The development of skills portfolios as
part of classroom instruction is a tangible
end product of the skills assessment process.
Benefits
Students
• Opportunity to participate in learning
employability skills taught at Mount
Royal College.
• Appreciate, acquire and develop the
employability skills they need to
succeed in the workplace and to
engage in continuous learning.
• Opportunity to assess their skills,
develop skills portfolios and prepare
for generating job leads, writing
résumés and covering letters, and
selling themselves at interviews.
The Conference Board, Inc.
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Tel: (212) 759-0900
Fax: (212) 980-7014
Internet:
http://www.conference-board.org
The Conference Board Europe
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B-1000 Brussels, Belgium
Tel: (32) 2.675 54 05
Fax: (32) 2.675 03 95
Our grateful thanks to our
interviewees and to others
who provided comment,
including:
Alan Dyment
Linda Havers
Judith Lathrop
Pam Racher-Lester
Jim Zimmer
©1998 The Conference
Board of Canada*
Printed in Canada
All rights reserved
ISSN 1205-1675
*Incorporated as AERIC Inc.
Recycled paper
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The Conference Board
of Canada
255 Smyth Road
Ottawa, Ontario K1H 8M7
Canada
Tel: (613) 526-3280
Fax: (613) 526-4857
Internet:
http://www.conferenceboard.ca
Educators
• Receive guidance about teaching
toward desired outcomes.
• Appreciate the importance of developing
their students’ employability skills.
Employers
• Draw from a talent pool enriched by
highly skilled graduates.
• Learn from working with co-op and
applied degree students about strategic employability skills assessment
and development that are applicable
to all employees.
Innovation
The most innovative features of Mount
Royal’s College-Wide Learning Outcomes
Initiative are:
• the planned list of core skills that all
Mount Royal’s students should
acquire and develop during their time
at the College, and
• the guidance it gives faculty about
consciously teaching these skills and
the guidance it gives students about
actively learning them.
Key Requirements
• College commitment to consult and
collaborate with faculty and students,
who must co-operate with other institutional stakeholders to implement any
employability skills development strategy.
• The diligence of the Career Services
office in stressing the importance of
acquiring generic employability skills
in addition to academic preparation in
a chosen discipline(s).
Greatest Challenges
Seventy per cent of college programming already incorporates a work-based
experiential component. But while the
institution as a whole is friendly to experiential education, it is still a struggle to
create a workplace component in every
program. It may be that a field component
as distinct from a work component might
be more appropriate for certain courses.
Some employability skills might best be
taught collaboratively by Counselling
Services, Career Services and individual
course instructors. The possibility of collaborative curricula design and delivery relating
to employability skills development should
be explored further with faculty and program chairs across the College.
Another challenge will be to encourage
faculty to “teach with the end in mind,” that
is, to identify the learning outcomes they are
striving to produce in a particular course,
program, or in the course of delivering a
college education, and to develop curricula
consistent with that vision. Related to this
challenge is the need to encourage faculty to
view transferable higher learning and
employability skills as important outcomes
of the courses they teach. Patience and
persistence will be required to gradually
integrate teaching and assessment of generic
skills across the College.
NBEC Publications Relating to Employability Skills Development and Assessment
Employability Skills Profile
Science Literacy for the World of Work
Linking Teachers, Science, Technology and Research:
Business and Education Collaborations That Work,
144-95 Report.
Best Practices in Assessing and Developing
Employability Skills—20 Case Studies (Sept. 98)
1998 100-Best Partnerships IdeaBook
The Economic Benefits of Improving Literacy in
the Workplace, 206-97 Report.
Enhancing Employability Skills: Innovative
Partnerships, Projects and Programs, 118-94 Report.
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The Conference Board of Canada
1997 100-Best Partnerships IdeaBook
1996 100-Best Partnerships IdeaBook