Career Competencies
USG's Core IMPACTS provides students with more than just a broad experience with different ways of knowing the world. It builds the foundations for critical skills necessary for graduates to thrive in the workplace and beyond. Core IMPACTS embeds ten career-ready competencies into courses in General Education, highlighting the skills that students develop as they explore the academic elements of their General Education journey.
These competencies are integral to the creation of knowledge and development of skills in college, and translate into necessary skills for being engaged citizens and excelling in the workplace. By centering career competencies into General Education, Core IMPACTS underscores the important purpose of these courses to student personal and professional development and provides reference points for students as they begin to build their portfolio of skills.
More detail about the ten Career-Ready Competencies is below.
| Career-Ready Competencies | Definition | Source | Core IMPACTS AREA |
| Critical Thinking | Making decisions and solving problems through the use of logic and reasoning to identify the strengths and weaknesses of alternative solutions, and draw conclusions, or approaches to challenges. | Based on NACE and O*NET | Institution Citizenship Writing |
| Teamwork | Build and maintain collaborative relationships to work effectively toward common goals, while appreciating diverse viewpoints and shared responsibilities. |
| Institution STEM |
| Time Management | Behaviors that aim at achieving an effective use of time while performing certain goal-directed activities and the ability to prioritize and structure tasks, resources, and time. | Claessens et al., 2007, A review of the time management literature. Personnel Review p. 262 | Institution |
| Information Literacy | The ability to recognize when information is needed and how to locate, evaluate, effectively use, and synthesize the needed information, and appropriately credit original material. | Adapted from American Library Association (ALA)—Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL)
| Math Humanities Writing |
| Inquiry and Analysis | A systematic process of exploring the world through the collection and evaluating relevant evidence, and using this evidence to support informed conclusions. | Adapted from AAC&U | Math STEM |
| Problem-Solving | Problem solving is the process of designing, evaluating, and implementing a strategy to solve problems using data, knowledge and facts . | Adapted from AAC&U & NACE | Math STEM |
| Intercultural Competence | The ability to develop knowledge, skills and behaviors that support effective and appropriate interaction in a variety of cultural contexts. | Adapted from AAC&U | Humanities Social Sciences |
| Persuasion | The use of messages that are intentionally designed to appeal to another’s reason, emotions or both in order to enact change. |
| Citizenship Writing Social Sciences |
| Ethical Reasoning | The ability to assess one’s own ethical values and the social context of problems, recognize ethical issues in a variety of settings, think about how different ethical perspectives might be applied to ethical dilemmas and consider the ramifications of alternative actions. | Adapted from AAC&U | Humanities |
| Perspective-Taking | Considering perspectives other than one’s own and allowing new information, differing opinions, and others’ experiences to impress upon one’s thinking, understanding, and appreciation of others. | University of Minnesota | Social Sciences |