Library resources for SOAR

For higher education, career readiness provides a framework for addressing career-related goals and outcomes of curricular and extracurricular activities, regardless of the student’s field of study. For employers, career readiness plays an important role in sourcing talent, providing a means of identifying key skills and abilities across all job functions; similarly, career readiness offers employers a framework for developing talent through internship and other experiential education programs.

The National Soft Skills Association is an organization dedicated to promoting and developing soft skills among professionals, students, and job seekers. Soft skills are personal attributes and interpersonal abilities that help individuals effectively navigate workplace interactions and professional environments.

The Foundation for Critical Thinking
A review and definition of critical thinking. Includes multiple resources on developing an understanding of the core concepts of critical thinking.

Provides a definition of critical thinking along with practicing skills of critical thinking. Offers a critical thinking test to practice skills.

Articles from The Foundation for Critical Thinking specifically focused on higher education.

IDEA Paper 37
Developing effective problem solving skills that employ a solid knowledge foundation is a lifelong endeavor. When thinking skills are lacking, poor decision making and planning result. We can use what is known about how thinking skills develop to design assignments and learning environments that enhance thinking skills and increase the likelihood that our students will be able to address the open-ended problems they will face in their professional, personal, and civic roles.

Teaching critical thinking is imperative. Every minute of life in the modern world, we are confronted with information and misinformation, advertising and distractions, complexity and ambiguity. Making sense of it all — distilling it, separating the important from the trivial — requires skill, patience, and practice. It requires, in brief, critical thinking. Yet we largely do not teach our children how to do it. Reboot’s guide for teachers contains resources for teaching critical thinking to students of all ages, in any subject, including math, science, literature, civics, writing, and philosophy. The guide — written with teachers, for teachers — is an invaluable resource for teaching the skills needed to be engaged and informed global citizens.

Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning Objectives classifies a number of skills which can be used to teach critical thinking.

A comprehensive list of interpersonal skills and interpersonal skills self-assessment. Also includes leadership skills with leadership self-assessment

Matt Rebro and Matt Blaylock talk with people from a wide variety of professions about what they do, how they got started, and how you might follow in their footsteps. Trying to figure out the right career for you? Check out A Real Piece of Work: The Job Podcast for Young People.A Real Piece of Work is a partnership between Junior Achievement of the Heartland and WVIK, Quad Cities NPR.

Organizational psychologist Adam Grant takes you inside some truly unusual places, where they’ve figured out how to make work not suck.

Build a career that matters to you with job search strategies and career advice.

Sarah Ellis and Helen Tupper cover all things work: from how to manage stress and overcome your confidence gremlins to micro-aggressions and discovering your strengths.

Explore career paths of those in all different industries including nursing, post-secondary, business, teaching, trades, and so much more. Learn the different an unique paths each and every person takes to success.