Career Preparation

UBC considers it a priority to address students’ needs and educational strategies at the intersection between academic disciplines and career development. See the dedicated resource about “Career in Courses” (2023) prepared by the UBC Career Centre. (Contact is Kimberley Rawes, Manager, Career and Professional Development). Also in UBC’s strategic plan, the words “career”, “job”, “work-integrated”, “experiential” appear frequently. Preparing for rapidly changing and increasingly competitive world are certainly priorities at the institutional, faculty and departmental levels.

In this section, recommended actions are listed first, then some discussion is provided about balancing academic preparation and career development.

R12. Incorporate career development into courses and curriculum

Some EOAS courses already do this in labs, lessons, assignments or projects. See figure 1 above, and discussion about Current activities targeting career preparation in the report on interviews from summer 2022.

  1. Make use of  UBC’s Career Centre. They are eager to contribute workshops, presentations or materials to support inclusion of career-preparation components into existing courses and curricula.
    • They also offer students advice on interviewing, resumes, and other aspects of career preparation.
    • ENVR program includes a workshop given by them – ask Valentina.
    • Also, UBC’s Career Learning in Classrooms page offers an introduction to tactics, resources and who to contact for assistance (K. Rawes, Career Educator and Manager, Career and Professional Development), including workshops for students that can be given as part of lessons.
  2. Establish a Department-wide set of objectives and corresponding strategies for incorporating career preparation explicitly and transparently into courses and curricula (see “Transparency of teaching practices” on the Frameworks page).
  3. Adjust course syllabi, learning goals and maybe even formal course descriptions to highlight how career-relevant learning is occurring next to learning goals that emphasize fundamentals & scientific values. Geophysics students have asked specifically for “More industry-relevant examples, better connections with co-op options” (Jolley, 2018). In fact, to quote McFadden etal., 2021, “… targeted professional development could increase instructors’ use of quantitative and data analysis skills to meet the needs of their students in context.”
  4. Actively facilitate career exploration (many ideas from day-2 discussions at the EER 2023 workshop). The goal is to introduce opportunities for students to learn about and reflect upon QES careers & how their learning and experiences at UBC relate to these options. Specific tactics could include:
    • Make at least one required assignment in each of the 2nd, 3rd, & 4th years (in any EOAS core course), that causes students to explore the EOAS Canvas student advising resource.
    • One or more assignments suitable for a second year course; see two example activities plus ways to adapt for EOAS.
    • Introduce a careers seminar, workshop or bootcamp. With alumni? (UBC-OK and others do this – ask C. Nichol.)
    • Consider having students incrementally build a resume or portfolio. This could be “required” or part of a core course.
    • A career planning template could be part of such an event, or an assignment or lab in a core course.
    • Weave Linkdin into career-prep activities. Search SERC for “linkedin” (79 results in Nov. 2023).
    • Alumni can be inspiring – but we need to access them more effectively than previous attempts. The “ask” needs to be clear, succinct and “easy”. Surveys are “boring”. Interviews are personal and meaningful, and a 30 minute zoom call should be “easy”. The questions driving the interview need to be clear and answerable in 2-5 minutes each. Whether it is necessary to contact alumni through UBC’s bureaucracy needs to be investigated. Single point of contact is quicker and more likely to be followed up. Accessing volunteer executives of societies such as BCGS could be a good starting point.
  5. Consider an official “course” or “for credit” career-development experiences.
    • Such an initiative is non-trivial but several schools are finding it worth while. Georgia Tech’s School of Earth & Atmospheric Sciences is one example of a department that has committed to offering a  1-credit career development course.
    • Impacts of a purpose-built course all about exploring career options in geosciences are reported in Viskupic et. al., 2022.
    • Egger & Viskupic discuss similar initiatives at Central Washington and Boise State universities in their presentation with materials listed under “Tuesday” from the 3-day Earth Educator’s Rendezvous, 2023, workshop.
  6. Highlight the importance of QES professions in terms of impacts on society. This is “marketing”, but such visibility should be included in core courses like EOSC 212, 350, and others.
  7. Suggested tactics for career development in G. Ng, 2023. For example, as an instructor, ask yourself:
    • What can I adjust easily to give my students a greater awareness of what’s happening in the world AND how they fit into that bigger picture?
    • What can I adjust to give my students experiences they can boast about in future job interviews?
    • How can I give my students more opportunities to build relationships with non-academic professionals?
  8. Incorporate aspects of Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (JEDI) into all career preparation activities.
    • Consider reviewing AGI’s “vision and change” document (Mosher and Keen, 2021), which includes sections and discussions of recruiting for a “diverse and inclusive community”. “Diversity” and “diverse” are mentioned 50 and 47 times respectively in that report.
    • The engineering and geoscience professions have high expectations regarding every professional’s attention to the importance and value of equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI).
    • Also, engage with local initiatives and aspirations – especially those being run by L. Lukes and S. Pete, and review the Faculty of Science EDI website.
  9. Improving support for students who need or want to register as professionals within BC is the subject of a separate set of recommendations.

Explicit career development as part of academic preparation

Why should we actively promoting awareness of geoscience (especially quantitative) career opportunities that encourage students to reflect on personal goals, preferences, priorities and progress? To quote Viskupic et. al., 2022, “Undergraduates majoring in geoscience are often unaware of their career options beyond traditional resource industries;  they need explicit support to consider their post-graduation options.” …and… “Being deliberate about exposing undergraduates to geoscience career opportunities may help to attract and keep students engaged in the field, and to graduate geoscientists who are more highly-qualified for the workforce.”

Is it our job to include "job-training" along with teaching the scientific fundamentals that underly our own expertise? Ng, 2023 makes several relevant insightful points; it is well worth taking five minutes it takes this short article from Harvard Buisness review. E.g:

  • "Students today - your students - face “experience inflation,” in which even entry-level jobs require previous work experience. The result is a chicken-or-egg problem; graduates need employment to prove themselves, and few employers are willing to give a chance to someone who is unproven. No wonder more than half of college students suffer from chronic stress.
  • "You are more than an educator; you are a role model, a mentor, and a gateway to a better life."
    And more. This does not mean the answer to the question above is yes - we are responsible for "job training. HOWEVER it does mean we are responsible for making the effort to weave opportunities for students to practice some of the behaviors, attitudes and habits that are going to help them succeed with the discipline-specific learning they encounter during their time as BSc students.

From the EOAS students' experiences survey in 2020, a key finding was that “the ability to plan for the future and careers” was a topic of wide interest and critique, except for engineering students. See both the survey results and the Focus Group Results sections of the summary prepared by Alison Jolley in 2020.

Resources related to career preparation include (also listed in the tools and resources table):

  • Advising via Canvas: a Canvas “course” for all (or some) EOAS students with information about degrees, advising, career preparation and departmental activities.
  • Exploring Careers: examples of career awareness and preparation initiatives
  • Professional registration: why and how to efficiently ensure that interested students will be able to register as professionals after graduating.
  • Important: before developing curriculum adjustments of any kind, be sure to review relevant section(s) of the UBC Guide to Curriculum Submissions for UBC Vancouver.

Precedent regarding career preparation

What strategies do instructors of majors-level geoscience courses currently use to expose students to geoscience careers? Data representing a broad sample of US institutions was synthesized by Viskupic et. al., 2022, using data from 2016 first presented in Egger et al., 2019:

  1. Make explicit connections between skills needed in the geoscience workforce and course assignments and outcomes (64.4%)
  2. Include info. about geoscience and STEM careers and career pathways (57.0%)
  3. Highlight alumni who work in geoscience (52.4%)
  4. Give an assignment in which students explore geoscience careers (9.1%)

Interviews of 20 EOAS faculty with diverse backgrounds yielded results detailed in the report on interviews about teaching they use to support career preparation. Thirteen career preparation tactics were identified from these interviews. This figure shows the degree of consistency or agreement among EOAS interviewees.

Figure 1. Summarizing the number of respondents who mentioned they use each career-preparation tactic in their courses. Numbered tactics correspond to Table 1 in the report.

There are notional similarities between points 1-4 above and the 13 EOAS tactics. The main difference is that EOAS faculty focused on "teaching tactics" whereas the points from Viskupic et al. 2022 are about ways of exposing students to career settings other than those integrated into courses and teaching.

EOAS interview results are particularly interesting when interviewees are distinguished based on whether the individual has (a) had industry experience or research partners or (b) has a purely academic background and research contexts.

Figure 2. Comparing interviewees with industry experiences against those with primarily academic experience. Proportions of each group are used to illustrate the extent of agreement among interviewees in each group. Results are illustrative only as no significance tests have been applied. Numbered tactics correspond to Table 1 in the report.

Zero or one of the faculty with purely academic backgrounds mentioned these tactics as important for supporting career preparation:
• Emulate professional tasks
• Economics, safety, regulations, gov't. etc.
• Dep't and other social events
• Offer work experiences

Also, zero or one of the faculty with industry background mentioned these three tactics as important for supporting career preparation:
• Focus on physics, math, programming skills
• Reflective, metacognitive & peer evaluation activities
• Critical, scientific, & precise thinking

These and other differences in perspectives (see the report for details) suggest that the students might benefit if the department worked towards establishing a collective set of strategies for incorporating career preparation much more explicitly and transparently than the current, ad-hoc approach that depends on an individual instructor's personal perspectives. Hence the list of ideas below.

Desirable skills for QES graduates have been detailed using three categories in our separate desirable skills report, and summarized on the desirable skills page. But what exactly do "career preparation tactics" look like? To quote A. Egger from the job preparation workshop at Earth Educator's Rendezvous, 2023: “How can we help students become aware of their career options, recognize and reflect on the skills they are learning, and make plans to achieve their career goals?“ Many creative ideas were gathered there, collected in 11 categories in the workshop's GoogleDrive folder.

  • There is plenty of literature on this subject and institutions are increasing the variety and quantity of support opportunities to help students with choosing specializations, job searches, and preparing themselves to enter the increasingly competitive workforce. At UBC, see the UBC and community experience section of the UBC Student Services home page, and especially the UBC Career Centre.
  • For an annotated bibliography about career preparation in math courses and programs see the report generously prepared for QuEST by K. Rawes. It includes a framework for HOW career preparation can be embedded in a degree experience.
  • Several good workshops related to career preparation in geoscience courses and programs were run in July 2023 at the Earth Educator's Rendezvous 2023 meeting. Corresponding resources, references and outcomes are cited on our reference page under Websites and resources.
  • See also two examples of initiatives enabling students to explore geoscience career options and opportunities at other institutions, with suggestions of adaptations for EOAS.