The Gies Professional Pathway: Turning Learning Into Earning

Your college degree opens doors—but it’s your skills, experiences, and ability to communicate them that make you stand out to employers. Today’s business world is looking for problem-solvers, clear communicators, and creative thinkers who can work well with others and drive results.

That’s where the Gies Professional Pathway (GPP) comes in.

GPP is a framework that helps you build, reflect on, and articulate the skills employers value most—skills we call career competencies. These 10 competencies connect what you’re learning in class, on campus, and through internships or leadership experiences to the expectations of the professional world.

Through the 3C-IT process, you’ll learn how to:

Capture It

Document the skills and experiences you gain through your coursework, involvement, and work experiences.

Connect It

Reflect on how those experiences have helped you grow and why they matter to your future career.

Communicate It

Share your story with confidence in interviews, networking conversations, and applications.

Why It Matters

Focusing on your career readiness now will help you graduate with the skills to adapt, grow, and lead throughout your career.

  • Strategize your growth: Reflecting on your competencies helps you identify strengths and areas for development, so you can seek out the experiences that matter most.
  • Tell your story: Connecting the dots between your experiences and your skills helps you clearly demonstrate your value to employers.
  • Launch with confidence: You’ll enter the job market ready to showcase not just what you know—but what you can do.

How We’ll Support You

Focusing on your career readiness now will help you graduate with the skills to adapt, grow, and lead throughout your career.

Your Gies advisors will guide you every step of the way—from choosing a major to preparing for your next opportunity. Together, we’ll help you identify meaningful experiences, set professional goals, and build a portfolio of accomplishments that demonstrate your readiness for what’s next.

Use the Gies Professional Pathway to track, reflect, and grow through high-impact experiences like internships, research, community service, study abroad, and more. Every experience counts—and every skill you build brings you closer to your purpose and your career goals.

Capture it. Connect it. Communicate it.

 
 

The Gies Professional Pathway Competencies

 

Career Competency Video and Resource Library

Self Exploration

Students will be able to identify and communicate their personal strengths and values as it relates to their career goals.

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Career Development

Students will be able to write professional documents (resume, cover letter, thank you letter, and elevator pitch) to use for jobs, internships, and applications.

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Integrity & Ethics

Students will understand ethical business practices. Students will be able to describe a framework for resolving an ethical dilemma.

Communication

Students will deliver professional oral presentations to clients.

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Teamwork

Students will demonstrate characteristics that contribute to effective teams.

Equity & Inclusion

Students will recognize how demographic and cultural differences affect the business environment.

Leadership

Students will be able to formulate viable approaches for leading others given their individual leadership styles.

Critical Thinking

Students will evaluate and construct reasoning as they apply it to case studies.

Technology Skills

Students will be able to perform technology forecasting, mapping technology choices to customer value creation.

Problem Solving

Students will identify, evaluate, and synthesize information to solve business challenges.

Faculty and Departmental Toolkit

Gies faculty and staff are an integral part of the Gies Professional Pathway. Supporting our students in developing the skills and competencies to prepare them for successful careers is vital. Students need assignments and occasions designed to help identify and develop career readiness skills. By mapping curriculum and co-curricular learning and activities to competencies, you are enabling students to advance their skillsets and to successfully transition into the workplace.

Tools for Teaching Career Competencies

Instructors teach career competency skills every day. However, for students, these skills are not always nameable and translatable. The goal is for students to be able to 1) name competencies and translate them to new contexts, 2) practice and reflect on their growing competencies and 3) translate their academic uses of the competencies into relevant careers.

Using Shared Language with Students

Students develop career competencies throughout curricular and co-curricular experiences. However, recognizing these competencies within different contexts can be challenging. Developing a shared understanding, language, and iconography across Gies can support students in making these connections and reflecting on how they can translate their skills toward relevant careers. We encourage you to download the Gies Professional Pathway imagery and use it in assignments, syllabi, slides, and communications with students to highlight the relevance of these competencies to their career development.

Transparent Design

Transparent design aims to make the knowledge and the skills practiced in an assignment clear to students so they can better identify and articulate their own skills. Transparently designed assignments explicitly call out the purpose, skills, tasks, and criteria for success associated with your assignment. Incorporating transparent assignments improves students academic confidence and self-rating of career competencies.

Students Practice and Reflect on their Developing Competencies

Students need multiple opportunities to practice and, importantly, reflect on their growing competencies. Instructors can provide metacognitive and reflective activities to help students be able to articulate how they have developed career competencies and which competencies they want to continue to develop.

 

 

Resources for Departments

Below are some steps departments can take to help embed career readiness into every student's academic experience.

Broaden Awareness of Gies Professional Pathway

Consider using a department meeting or faculty retreat to broaden your unit's understanding of the career competencies and discuss which are most important for your students and what coursework and experiences in your major are most important for preparing students for careers.

You can invite Gies Professional Pathway Committee members or the Office of Career and Professional Development to facilitate the conversation.

Adopt a Career-Readiness Learning Objective

Adopting a Gies Professional Pathway learning objective in your major helps move beyond individual course experiences. It supports alignment and coordination of career-competency development across the curriculum.

Adopting a specific career readiness outcome paves the way for the next steps for you department, mapping how students develop that career competencies through the curriculum and providing an opportunity to assess how well your department is meeting its objective.

Map Your Curriculum

How do the career readiness experiences students have in your courses build upon each other as students progress through the courses in your major? Are there gaps in which competencies students develop? Use a curriculum mapping process to identify where students are developing competencies and how those experiences may build on each other from one course to the next.

Utilize this tool to map your courses to specific competencies.