Notes on the Center for Student Experience & Talent’s Faculty and Employer Luncheon
This week’s edition of Slow Digest explores how the Center for Student Experience, Talent’s Faculty and Employer Luncheon prepares students to begin their career journey. Written by C21 Graduate Fellow Chloe Kwiatkowski.
How can higher education better prepare students for the workplace while maintaining the intellectual value of a liberal arts education? This question guided the September 30, 2026, Employer–Faculty Luncheon hosted by UW-Milwaukee’s Center for Student Experience and Talent (SET). The luncheon brought together UW-Milwaukee faculty across the College of Letters and Science and local Milwaukee employers to explore the skills graduates need, how students develop them, and opportunities to connect classroom learning with professional experiences.
SET helps students graduate with the Panther Edge, a set of key career-readiness competencies identified by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) as essential for success. These competencies are critical thinking, communication, collaboration, equity and inclusion, professionalism, community engagement, tech savviness, career and community leadership, and self-reflective lifelong learning.
Throughout the luncheon, faculty and employers identified these Panther Edge competencies as essential to both academic development and workplace success. Employers emphasized that graduates must do more than possess these skills: they must be able to apply them in unfamiliar situations, respond constructively to challenges, collaborate with colleagues, and communicate their reasoning. Faculty, meanwhile, shared how coursework already provides opportunities for students to develop these abilities through writing, research, presentations, group projects, peer review, and community engagement.
The discussion revealed an important opportunity: helping students recognize how their academic experiences translate into professional competencies. A student who revises an essay in response to feedback practices adaptability and reflection; a student who presents research develops communication skills; and a student who navigates a group project gains experience in collaboration and shared responsibility. Yet students may not automatically recognize these activities as evidence of career readiness or know how to articulate them to potential employers. Students may struggle to answer behavioral interview questions, “Tell me about a time when…,” because they have not practiced articulating their classroom experience in a way that would be productive for a job interview.
Lastly, five opportunities for continued collaboration emerged between UW-Milwaukee faculty and Milwaukee-based employers. These points of collaboration need to be developed further with practical applications in the classroom:
- Make transferable skills explicit in course assignments and learning outcomes.
- Incorporate reflection to help students recognize their growth.
- Develop authentic, scenario-based learning experiences.
- Give students practice articulating their skills through concrete examples and behavioral interviews.
- Strengthen ongoing dialogue between UWM faculty and Milwaukee employers.
Preparing students for professional success means helping them apply knowledge in unfamiliar situations, work effectively with others, and communicate what they bring to a role. Continued collaboration between faculty and employers can help make these connections more tangible, perhaps through a workshop where faculty and employers work together to create assignments that prepare students for the workplace. This will ensure that students leave the classroom not only with valuable skills, but also with the confidence and language to demonstrate them.
In the coming weeks, C21 will produce a report that further explores key insights outlined in this post. That report will be published on C21’s Careers for Humanists landing page.
All Slow Digest posts are independently researched and written by individual contributors. All opinions expressed therein are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the views, policies, or positions of UW-Milwaukee or the UW system.