Re-imagining Transferable Skills: Professional Development in a Post-COVID World (GSC session) - Roundtable

Re-imagining Transferable Skills (NeMLA) 2021


Education



The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic has dramatically if not irrevocably altered our world in ways that we are only now beginning to realize. Academia has been one of the areas profoundly impacted by this global disaster. Hiring freezes instituted at universities, structural retrenchment, and newly arisen budget crunches have ensured that the academic job market will be beset by uncertainty for the foreseeable future. Even before the onset of this crisis, the academic job market was precarious at best and non-existent at worst. Under these circumstances, therefore, it is a pragmatic career approach for graduate students, early career academics, and contingent faculty to think of professionalizing beyond academia and chalk out strategies for figuring out the overlap between the skills they now possess by virtue of their recently acquired online pedagogical training and the expertise necessary for attaining success in increasingly corporatized alt-ac and post-ac work spaces.
As such, this Graduate Student Caucus-sponsored roundtable invites 250-word proposals from participants addressing the ways in which they might be able to leverage the skills they have acquired as academics while transitioning to remote teaching, research, and work during the last half of the Spring semester and, in some cases, the beginning of Fall 2020 semester (as anticipated) to pursue alt-ac and post-ac employment.Topics might include but are not limited to:
● Reframing online transition efforts as crisis management skills
● Considering large-scale research projects and online course development as traditional project management
● Re-writing teaching philosophies as personal mission and vision statements
● Post-ac professions where such transferable skills will be valued
● Inclusive Instructional Design, Educational Technology, Corporate Training, and Learning & Development (L&D)
● Pursuing careers in higher education administration & student affairs
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Submit 250-word proposals and 100-word bios to https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/18677.
Please direct your inquiries to either of the co-chairs, Samadrita Kuiti (samadrita.kuiti@uconn.edu) or Saronik Bosu (sb5749@nyu.edu).