Vision
Students who participate in the student employment program will be welcomed into a work experience that encourages and supports their personal agency and responsibility to make a difference in the workplace, on campus, and in the broader world.
Mission
Student employees leverage the professional, technical, and interpersonal dynamics of work study roles at Luther to build core competencies that can flourish and flex for a lifetime. Supervisors challenge and support student employees to facilitate their development through mentoring and performance evaluation.
Guiding Principles
As a result of their work study experience, students will:
■ Learn Actively ▲ Live Purposefully ● Lead Courageously
■ Learn to navigate and appreciate the organizational landscape.
■ Embrace a life filled with rapid change.
▲ Connect vocation to service.
▲ Articulate their value beyond salary/dollar measurements.
● Make personal projects that are socially and organizationally compelling.
▲ ● Work for equity and justice–both locally & globally.
▲ ● Build and maintain personal relationships marked with empathy.
■ ▲ Cultivate networking skills for professional objectives.
■ ▲ ● Consider and realize sustainability in their endeavors.
■ ▲ ● Develop intercultural fluency and engage others in a culturally responsive way.
■ ▲ ● Discover, affirm, and apply their strengths.
Aims
The work-study program provides students the opportunity to discover, practice, and develop essential career readiness skills. Students will develop the following career readiness skills in all work-study positions:
- Career & Life Management: Cultivate awareness of the world’s needs and develop an awareness of self and what they can offer. Identify and articulate one’s skills, strengths, knowledge, and experiences relevant to the position desired and career goals, and identify areas necessary for professional growth. The individual is able to navigate and explore job options, understands and can take the steps necessary to pursue opportunities, and understands how to self-advocate for opportunities in the workplace.
- Ethical Decision Making: Demonstrate integrity and ethical behavior, act responsibly with the interests of the larger community in mind, and is able to learn from their mistakes. Students are mindful of the ethical issues that confront us in our lives as learners and citizens.
- Professionalism & Initiative: Demonstrate personal accountability and effective work habits, e.g., punctuality, working productively with others, and time workload management, and understand the impact of non-verbal communication on professional work image.
Through the varied work-related responsibilities and settings, students will develop many of the following career readiness skills:
- Agility and Adaptability: Cultivate a flexible and proactive approach to problem solving independently and on teams that embraces skills and disciplines as evolving and as intersecting with other disciplines and skills. Grasp the robust general education plus major and minor programs as preparation for a future of creative retraining and multifaceted production of opportunities, research, and proposals.
- Critical Thinking/Problem Solving: Exercise sound reasoning to analyze issues, make decisions, and overcome problems. The individual is able to obtain, interpret, and use knowledge, facts, and data in this process, and may demonstrate originality and inventiveness.
- Curiosity and Imagination: Cultivate an attitude of lifelong learning that is fueled by a sense of wonder and leads to asking questions, seeking information, and developing new ideas. The individual can identify current ways of thinking or working that could be improved upon, and takes the initiative to propose creative solutions.
- Digital Fluency: Leverage existing digital technologies ethically and efficiently to solve problems, complete tasks, and accomplish goals. The individual demonstrates effective adaptability to new and emerging technologies.
- Intercultural Fluency: Value, respect, and learn from diverse cultures, races, ages, genders, sexual orientations, and religions. The individual demonstrates openness, inclusiveness, sensitivity, and the ability to interact respectfully with all people and understand individuals’ differences.
- Leadership: Leverage the strengths of others to achieve common goals, and use interpersonal skills to coach and develop others. The individual is able to assess and manage their emotions and those of others; use empathetic skills to guide and motivate; and organize, prioritize, and delegate work.
- Oral/Written Communication: Articulate thoughts and ideas clearly and effectively in written and oral forms to persons inside and outside of the organization. The individual has public speaking skills; is able to express ideas to others; and can write/edit memos, letters, and complex technical reports clearly and effectively.
- Teamwork/Collaboration: Build collaborative relationships with colleagues and customers representing diverse cultures, races, ages, genders, religions, lifestyles, and viewpoints. The individual is able to work within a team structure, and can negotiate and manage conflict.
Domains of Career Readiness: These domains of career readiness provide students context and language around the skills they develop.
- Interpersonal: Students successfully navigate the many different environments in which they are engaged–from work to the classroom to the fields and stages and to the unique locations they invest their time and energy. The skills support and enhance a student’s capacity to learn actively, live purposefully, and lead courageously.
- Critical Thinking: Encompasses the skills, values, and habits of mind that generate effective, just, and responsive decisions and actions. Students must have the capacity to assess situations, gather and interpret information, and problem solve.
- Civic Engagement: Skills and competencies support purposeful engagement in the community through various means whether as individuals or in groups and teams. Cultural fluency and capacity to respond to situations that arise is a core skill. Students seek to be courageous leaders locally, regionally, and globally.
- Practical Competence: Key skills that position a student to make a difference in their work and their communities. Responsiveness to the needs of the community, the ability to change and adapt, and to constructively communicate their ideas and needs are essential to the functioning of a community. Effective use of digital technology to communicate ideas, to improve processes, or to solve problems.
Sources: Naceweb.org. (2020). Career Readiness Defined. [online] Available at: https://www.naceweb.org/career-readiness/competencies/career readiness-defined/ [Accessed 13 Feb. 2020]. Wagner, Tony (2012). The Global Achievement Gap: Why Even Our Best Schools Don’t Teach the New Survival Skills Our Children Need-and What We Can Do About It [Kindle version]. Retrieved from amazon.com