Career Connect

Career Connect is UNT's Quality Enhancement Plan that enhances, assesses, and showcases UNT students' marketable skills by engaging them in high-impact, experiential learning, reflection, and ePortfolio activities that are provided through UNT courses and activities. Career Connect is a campus-wide initiative that works with every UNT department and community partners to improve UNT students' written and oral communication, teamwork, and critical thinking skills by providing real-world, career experiences and asking students to document their learnings through ePortfolio and reflection activities.

Connect provides students with opportunities to “connect”, showcase, and transform their in and out of classroom learning experiences into marketable skills. We work with UNT faculty, staff and community partners to identify high-impact, experiential learning activities such as internships, service-learning, or study abroad. These Connect Activities:

• encourage UNT faculty, staff, community partners, and students to think intentionally about the marketable skills students learn within each UNT course or activity and within the context of UNT curricular and co-curricular activities

• provide students opportunities to work in “real-life” settings and document and display what they have learned and produced in their ePorfolios

• allow students to reflect on and make connections between what they have learned and the marketable skills they will need to showcase to start their careers

• help students to become integrative learners who can make connections across their previous learning experiences and synthesize and apply that knowledge to address novel and complex challenges within and beyond campus

Career Connect offers multiple participation options for UNT faculty, staff, and students through the integration of Career Connect program components into existing UNT course and activities. The bullets below list the range of integration options from students’ ePortfolio use only to full integration of students’ ePortfolio use, Connect’s rubric assessments for experiential learning activities, and community partner activities.

• Integrate students’ ePortfolio use into a student experience

• Require students to develop a product or activity that can be observed, rated, and reflected upon

• Require students to reflect on their learning activities and products by providing answers to Career Connect reflection statements and documenting their learning experiences in their ePortfolios

• Develop an assignment or program that involves real-life experiences (experiential learning) that focuses on written communication, oral communication, teamwork, or critical thinking and may include a community partnership

Career Connect can talk with you one-on-one or simply examine your syllabus or UNT activity description to get you started. Or you can propose ideas by completing and submitting the project idea form through Career Connect’s website, or by contacting Meena Naik, Career Connect’s Faculty and Staff Development Coordinator, at Meena.Naik@unt.edu or (940) 369-6176.

We will identify which program components can be easily integrated into your UNT class or activity, which components are difficult to integrate, and a plan for adding more program components in future semesters. At a minimum, offering students an opportunity to work within the ePortfolio is a straightforward way to start the process of connecting. The ideal, however, arises when faculty and staff participate by developing a Connect Activity that incorporates all of the program components, including a mutually beneficial community partnership.