Professional Skills to Degree Program

Kent State Trumbull designed the Professional Skills to Degree Program to develop future leaders within your organization. Employees are your most valuable asset, and this course of study focuses on the skills necessary to take the next step in their careers and advance the goals of your company. The long-term goal of this program is to develop incumbent workers from a professional and organizational leadership approach. This credit-based program is a stepping stone to future college degrees and is designed specifically to transition students into associate and bachelor's degrees while growing within the ranks of your organization. 

The program is designed around a four-course format that will fit within a traditional four-month semester. The majority of courses would be offered consecutively in a staggered five-week format, no more than two courses at a time, so that students are not overwhelmed by taking multiple courses at first. This program design allows the students to focus on individual courses/topics in a systematic format without having to balance three or four at once. Five-week courses would also allow more entries into the program as it grows and individuals enter/fall out of the workforce. This approach embraces the concept of developing academic and professional skill sets.

In designing the cohort, we specifically targeted accelerated courses with a hybrid approach: bring the students in at the beginning of the semester for a "kick-off" that would be a professional residency, and then regular professional residencies after each class to reinforce/touch base and help transition to the next topic throughout the semester. This serves to not only disseminate the information in the program, but to reinforce organizational behavior/expectations of the sponsoring organizations. This approach is designed to provide non-traditional students the academic support that is crucial for success by cultivating rapport among the students and with the professor(s), and it helps encourage some people to move on towards a degree in the future.

The program is designed around an organizational leadership foundation with a base rooted in professional skills and a fourth course tailored to the company or industry needs. The program provides a foundation for professional skills that can build into associate and bachelor's degrees. The goal of this program is to be flexible and easily adapted to meet the needs of current industry and workforce demands.