When students participate in experiential or service learning through Career Connect, they have the opportunity to produce evidence of and demonstrate proficiency in one or more of eight marketable skills. These Career Connect skills are written and oral communication, teamwork, critical thinking, leadership, social responsibility, personal responsibility, and empirical and quantitative skills, and they are assessed with UNT core and American Association of Colleges and Universities rubrics. Career Connect adapted these rubrics to make them more user-friendly for UNT faculty and staff. See rubrics here.

Career Connect’s evidence-based assessment is designed to evaluate and showcase UNT students’ marketable skills and guide UNT’s actions for improving them. This type of assessment benefits the UNT community by: 

• providing UNT students with opportunities to receive marketable skills badges and credentials and showcase them in their ePortfolios and UNT transcripts
• developing a database of student artifacts and evaluation ratings—for participating UNT courses or programs—that can be used to help demonstrate teaching or program effectiveness or develop UNT faculty or staff research projects and publication submissions
• requiring students’ to use UNT’s ePortfolio and reflection as high impact practices within courses or programs across UNT
• helping to address a national higher-education concern about the pervasive lack of individual-level student evidence and rigor for student-awarded credentials
• helping UNT identify and establish benchmarks for its core skills (that is, communication, teamwork, and critical thinking) among UNT students and departments that can be compared to other universities across the country

Using Career Connect Rubrics

Faculty and staff, who participate in Career Connect by integrating experiential or service-learning into their course or program, will rate their students using one or more of the eight Career Connect rubrics. Career Connect will work with faculty and staff to identify and collect student-level evidence or artefacts that they can review and are appropriate for any of Career Connect’s eight marketable skills rubrics. Learn more about collaborating with Career Connect.

How do I Receive Training on how to Assess the Eight Skills with Career Connect Rubrics?

Career Connect offers one-on-one and online rubric training each semester or group training upon request. In addition, Career Connect offers step-by-step instructions (with screenshots) on how to assess the skills here. For further assistance contact Melanie Mitchell (faculty and staff) or UNTcareerconnect@unt.edu.