The profile of a graduate identifies seven skills and competencies that students need to be successful in the 21st Century.
1. Critical Thinking
- Collect, assess and analyze relevant information
- Reason effectively
- Make sound judgments and decisions
- Reflect critically on learning experiences, processes and solutions
2. Creative Thinking
- View failure as an opportunity to learn, understand that creativity and innovation is a long-term, cyclical process and small success and frequent mistakes
- Demonstrate originality and inventiveness in work and understand the real world limits to adopting new ideas
- Elaborate, refine, analyze and evaluate their own ideas in order to improve and maximize creative efforts
3. Communication
- Articulate thoughts and ideas effectively using oral, written, and nonverbal communication skills in a variety forms and contexts
- Listen effectively to decipher meaning, including knowledge, values, attitudes and intentions
- Utilize multiple media and technologies, an know how to judge their effectiveness as well as access their impact
4. Collaboration
- Demonstrate the ability to work effectively and respectfully with diverse teams
- Exercise flexibility and willingness to be helpful in making necessary compromise to accomplish a common goal
- Assume shared responsibility for collaborative work, and value individual contributions made by each team member
5. Adaptability & Resilience
- Work effectively in a climate of ambiguity and changing priorities
- Deal positively with praise, setbacks, and criticism
- Adapt to varied roles, jobs, responsibilities, schedules and contexts
6. Emotional Intelligence (Empathy & Reflective)
- Deep self-knowledge: Individuals will need to continue to discover their own personal and professional strengths, weaknesses, passions and emotional patterns
- Emotional regulation: Workers will need to be able to recognize their own emotions, understand the triggers that create them and move to more productive emotional states.
- Empathy and perspective taking: People will need to be able to recognize others’ emotions and perspectives to help build inclusive, collaborative work environments.
7. Cultural & Global Awareness
- Learn from and work collaboratively with individuals representing diverse cultures, religions and lifestyles in a spirit of mutual respect and open dialogue in personal, work and community contexts
- Understand other nations and cultures