Professional Pathways to Student Success: Developing a Career-Ready Curriculum

This Professional Development Workshop (PDW) equips business educators to strengthen students’ career readiness by translating core values into measurable, teachable, and verifiable professional competencies. Responding to the persistent gap between students’ self‑perceived readiness and employers’ evaluations, the session guides participants through a focused design process that defines professionalism in observable terms and outlines fair, scalable ways to implement it across programs. Using short, small-group activities and research-informed models, workshop participants will create practical definitions of professional behavior, implementation plans that span departments, and curriculum maps that work for transfer and working students. The workshop focuses on keeping tools simple, easy to reuse, and credible with employers, and provides templates and verification ideas to help participants connect institutional values to real assessment. Participants will leave with concrete tools they can use right away in their courses and programs.