In its effort to better equip its students for a fast-changing job landscape, Brandeis University announced last Thursday the latest step in a university-wide overhaul: the creation of a secondary document, on top of the academic transcript, focused on skills attained outside the classroom. 

The competency-based transcript aims to market students to the current job market by listing a student’s accomplishments and skills that were earned through extracurricular experiences that are not listed on traditional transcripts, which focus on course titles, credit hours and grades. The new transcripts will highlight extracurricular activities, research, fellowships and internships. The initiative is funded by a $1 million, 18-month grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. 

Students will also have opportunities to be assessed for new “microcredentials,” which are specialized, career-focused skills listed on the new transcripts, such as for applied statistics, data analytics, person-centered research, policy analysis and communications skills. Using the transcript app, powered by the career-readiness platform Suitable, students can then transfer Brandeis-approved badges for each microcredential from their transcript to their LinkedIn, giving the university’s stamp to each skill.

The new transcript is the latest step in The Brandeis Plan to Reinvent the Liberal Arts, which staff are referring to as “Arthur’s vision,” the reorganization of Brandeis University that is the brainchild of the school’s president, Arthur Levine, who took office last September. The plan includes a restructuring of the university into four core schools that feature overlapping undergraduate and graduate programs: the School of Arts, Humanities and Culture; the School of Business and Economics; the School of Science, Engineering and Technology; and the School of Social Sciences and Social Policy.

“Brandeis will prepare you to have one foot in the classroom and one foot in the street and make sure that you’re ready for the world after graduation,” Lewis Brooks, director of the university’s new Center for Careers and Applied Liberal Arts, which is running the transcript program, told eJewishPhilanthropy, paraphrasing Levine.

Brooks, who was a longtime advertising executive and Brandeis trustee, was announced as the founding director of the university’s improved career center in September. The new transcripts are in a pilot phase, rolling out fully this fall.

At a time when colleges and universities are struggling across America, the goal of the initiative is to innovate a new way to market students post-college for careers in today’s world, one that other schools can take on.

Historically, students have attained skills through volunteer work and extracurricular activities that are essential to future employees, but students did not receive proper credit for them on a transcript. For example, Brooks said, a student may join an emergency medical group as a freshman and learn CPR and other life-saving techniques. By the time the student is a senior, they may serve as a supervisor in the organization and have attained skills such as leadership, teamwork, communication and critical thinking.

To credit a student with such beyond-the-classroom credentials, Brandeis has created a microcredential and badge, Leadership and Emergency Medicine, which the student can list on their transcript;  the credential, the thinking goes, would better market the student for a career in a multitude of medical fields. 

“The goal is to have students be able to sit in an interview and see, as a script, essentially all of [their] accomplishments at Brandeis, both academic, extracurricular, their passions, and they can then advocate for themselves,” Brooks said.

Working towards the transcript will cause students to pay attention to the real-world experiences and skills they are obtaining, but “it’s also giving [those skills and experiences] a validation at a university level that what they’re dedicating their out-of-classroom and out-of-library time to is something that can help them later in life,” Brooks said.

In a rapidly changing world with technology leaping forward, students need to be agile and adapt, Brooks said. “We need to make sure that our students are prepared for what the world is going to look like when they get out as best as we can.”

The school will publish its findings from the pilot phase and launch online, with the goal of setting an example for other schools so their students, too, can be equipped for tomorrow. “People are watching us,” Brooks said, “and we want this learning to spread.”