2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Building professional competencies is a key aspect of the higher education student experience. At the University of Michigan, a central unit has created a tool that helps students plan and track their academic, co-curricular and professional experiences, build core competencies, and assemble all the pieces to tell their story, their way – to employers and beyond.

The tool is adaptable to the needs of the programs partnering with the central unit to develop this platform – currently engineering, business, and public health. As a first step, the tool allows each program to determine which competencies they want their students to engage with, and how. The engineering college, for example, has some integration with coursework to automatically move students through different levels of the program, but the primary focus is directing students to engage with the tool to reflect on their experiential learning activities such as project teams, study abroad or research so they can build a story bank of their growth and development to prepare for interviews or other employer interactions. In the business school, the tool is integrated into the undergraduate curriculum, and students achieve different levels of each competency through the courses they take, with some direct interaction with the tool. Lastly, public health has fully integrated the tool with a masters program, where students use the tool to explore the pathways to different careers as they gain proficiency in various skills, and much of what happens in the tool is automated through the courses the students take.

In all implementations, students can earn a badge that can be shared as a LinkedIn credential that highlights their mastery of specific competencies for public view. The visual design of the credential is the same across the units, with custom text and graphics paired with the university logo.

This work in progress paper will share the background and development of the tool as well as discuss the various implementations and future plans.