Application Guides for WORKING

WORKING can serve as a catalyst for many teaching, training, counseling, and career/job planning activities. Too few people - whether students, job applications, or new first-line employees - are knowledgeable about what it takes to get a rewarding job and succeed in it as we begin a new century. WORKING can be a launching pad for discussion, instruction, application, planning, and all types of productive learning activities. It can be the basis of seminars, counseling sessions, classes, orientations, changes in teaching/learning processes, and the like.

For specific guidance in developing plans for improving the competencies of WORKING, review the College and Workplace Applications Guides listed below. They provide specific suggestions and student worksheets for how to use the results of WORKING to strengthen workplace competencies. Review the contents of the guides below and download each if you wish.

WORKING User's Guide for College Applications:

Download PDF of WORKING User's Guide for College Applications (PDF files require Acrobat Reader)

WORKING is specifically designed to be useful in a variety of contexts associated with helping students prepare for their careers and/or strengthen their success in college. The manual includes suggestions on how to use WORKING in 12 different situations typically found in college.

1. New student orientation program

Helps students understand what your college requires of them in terms of their personal behavior, attitudes, and skills.

2. A college success course

Supports and enriches the various academic college success courses which are becoming common in higher education.

3. A specific content course

Provides a way to help students assess and improve their performance in several areas important to success in a particular academic course.

4. An overall curriculum or program of study

Provides a way to help students assess and improve their success in an entire technical or academic program of study.

5. Work-study student training

Helps students understand what you expect of them, and how to be stronger performers, in a work-study assignment.

6. Field experience/clinical site placements

Provides a way to alert students to, and strengthen their preparedness for, various field placement assignments.

7. Career counseling

Provides a tool for personalizing and directing student understanding and participation in career counseling activities.

8. Academic counseling

Offers a tool for uncovering and directing student attention toward certain problems which are causing academic trouble.

9. Faculty/staff development programs

Provides a powerful tool for focusing faculty/staff attention on underlying student behaviors which may affect their academic and/or career prospects.

10. Job seeking activities

Establishes a personal, relevant foundation for helping students create effective career search, resume preparation, and interviewing strategies.

11. Preparation for the workplace courses

Provides a tool for helping students come to grips with the realities of the 21st Century workplace in special academic workplace preparation courses.

12. Student seminar series

Can be the basis for student seminars focusing on various aspects of academic success and/or career preparation.

---

WORKING User's Guide for Workplace Applications:

Download PDF of WORKING User's Guide for Workplace Applications (PDF files require Acrobat Reader)

WORKING is useful in a wide variety of business/industry training and information settings. Five possible uses are as follows:

1. In-plant readiness/improvement programs

intensive but usually short-term in-plant training programs to hone the preparatory skills of new employees or improve/broaden the skills of existing employees.

2. Apprenticeships

extended assignments of students to perform regular duties on a daily or weekly basis in a particular job, mainly as part of their program of education.

3. Orientations

short, but often intensive, employer-led introductions of new employees to the processes, culture, regulations, organization, and expectations of a particular company.

4. Employability skills development programs

one or two month intensive training programs which provide those without significant prior work experience with the basic skills, the habits and attitudes, and the general technical skills needed to prepare for productive employment in entry-level positions.

5. Pre-employment training programs

several week, periodic programs which provide those with significant prior work experience or relevant education with ‘brush-up’ workplace skills in areas ranging from technical math and reading through safety, SPC, business economics, and the like.