Abstract

One of the most important goals of higher education is to prepare students for their career. Career readiness mainly includes three major components: domain knowledge, skills, and work experience. Skills include technical skills and non-technical skills. Non-technical skills are also called “soft skills”. Technical skills are usually the baseline qualifications for a job. However, it is soft skills that determine the candidate’s long-term success. A report discussing career readiness indicates that 80% of employers think higher education prepares graduates for entry-level roles, but only 34% of employers believe graduates are well-prepared for career advancement due to inadequate soft skills (Canning, 2025). We developed a soft-skill training framework based on National Association of Colleges and Employers career readiness competency model and the ACM/AIS Competency Model for Undergraduate Programs in IS. Our soft-skill training framework consists of two dimensions: intrapersonal and interpersonal skills. Intrapersonal skills are related to self, such as self-management, growth mindset, and personal productivity; whereas interpersonal skills are related to interaction with others, such as communication, collaboration, and conflict resolution. The soft-skill training in the interpersonal dimension has long been integrated into business education in the format of project-based learning and team-based learning. Therefore, our learning module focuses on the intrapersonal dimension, and more specifically, we emphasize growth mindset and personal productivity. In the age of AI, these intrapersonal skills have become “meta skills”. We developed four learning objectives for the module: to develop a growth mindset, to prioritize important tasks based on pre-determined goals, to analyze daily routines and make changes to daily routines to increase productivity for the important tasks, and to engage cognitive-demanding works without digital distraction. We identified four books for the module: Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (Dweck, 2016), The 80/20 Principle: Achieve More with Less (Koch, 2022), Atomic Habits (Clear, 2018), and Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World (Newport, 2016). We piloted this learning module in an upper level IS course. Students used AI to gain understanding of these books, worked with AI to develop actionable plans to implement some key principles/techniques to their work/study/life, and they reflected on their experiences both individually and as a group, and submitted weekly reports. The learning module was well received by students. In our conference presentation, we will present the details of our framework, execution plan for the learning module, and students’ feedback. We will also discuss future improvements.

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