Career Readiness Curriculum

A Developmental Framework Across the K-Plan

What We Mean by Career Readiness

At Kalamazoo College, career readiness develops over time as students make sense of their liberal arts education, connect learning to experience, and learn to articulate what they know and can do as they move toward life beyond K.

The Center for Career and Professional Development developed the Career Readiness Curriculum as a shared developmental framework that outlines the knowledge, skills, and reflective practices students should encounter across the K-Plan. This work unfolds through multiple settings, including coursework, advising conversations, CCPD programming, student employment, co-curricular involvement, and experiential learning beyond the classroom.

Grounded in Kalamazoo College’s definition of career readiness and aligned with the College’s Institutional Learning Outcomes and nationally recognized career readiness competencies, the curriculum provides shared language for learning that unfolds across the K-Plan.

Why This Framework Exists

Many students engage seriously with career preparation late in their college experience, often when decisions feel urgent and options feel limited. This can be especially challenging for students who arrive at college without prior exposure to professional language, networks, or expectations.

The Career Readiness Curriculum is designed to address this by:

  • Supporting earlier reflection and exploration
  • Encouraging intentional connections between learning and experience
  • Providing shared access to common tools, language, and guidance

By shifting this work earlier and distributing it across the K-Plan, the senior year can focus more fully on synthesis and transition rather than last-minute preparation.

How the Framework Is Structured

First Year: Foundations

(Beginning & Belonging)

Students are introduced to purpose, exploration, and early skill awareness. They begin reflecting on interests and values, explore how experiences inside and outside the classroom can connect, and create a foundational resume that can be revisited over time.

Sophomore Year: Exploration and Connections

(Declaring & Exploring)

Students deepen exploration, engage with alumni and professionals, and prepare for experiential learning such as study abroad, research, internships, and civic engagement. This year emphasizes connections among academic learning, people, and opportunities

Junior Year: Experiential Learning and Integration

(Connecting & Preparing)

Students engage deeply in experiential learning through study abroad, study away, research, internships, civic engagement, and other immersive opportunities. This year emphasizes reflection on experience, integration across the K-Plan, and preparation for the Senior Integrated Project.

Senior Year: Synthesis and Transitions

(Launching & Transitioning)

Students integrate their K-Plan into a coherent narrative, practice articulating learning and skills to different audiences, and prepare for transitions beyond K, whether into work, graduate study, service, or other paths. Faculty teaching Senior Seminars or Capstones can explore additional guidance and sample facilitation approaches on the Senior Shared Passages Capstones page.

Students do not experience every element in the same way. The goal is exposure, practice, and reflection over time, supported through different roles and settings across the College.

How This Connects to Teaching, Advising, and Experiential Learning

Career readiness at K is designed to be embedded across the K-Plan rather than added on as a separate set of activities.

Through a combination of coursework, advising, co-curricular programming, and experiential learning, students are supported in reflecting on learning, exploring possibilities, and giving language to growth at key points in their college experience. Shared Passages courses and advising conversations provide particularly important moments for this reflection, while experiences beyond the classroom allow students to test interests and build skills in practice.

The Career Readiness Curriculum aligns with Kalamazoo College’s Institutional Learning Outcomes and with nationally recognized career readiness competencies by emphasizing communication, collaboration, intercultural engagement, and the application of learning to complex problems.

What This Is and What It Is Not

This framework is:

  • Developmental and flexible
  • Distributed across courses, advising, and experiences
  • Designed to support equity and access
  • A way to give language to learning that already happens at K

This framework is not:

  • A required course sequence
  • A mandate for faculty
  • A replacement for disciplinary goals, advising relationships, or experiential learning

It provides shared structure while respecting faculty autonomy, disciplinary context, and the many ways students learn at Kalamazoo College.

Faculty and advisors engage with this framework in different ways depending on role, context, and course goals. The Faculty and Advisor Resources page outlines flexible, low-lift partnership options and shared touchpoints, particularly within Shared Passages courses.

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