Faith, Formation, and the Future of Work: Faculty Perspectives on Career Readiness

• In Event: Organizations, Occupations, and Work Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 12: Working in Higher Education

Abstract

As labor markets become increasingly precarious and nonlinear, higher education institutions face mounting pressure to demonstrate their role in preparing students for the future of work. Career readiness has emerged as a dominant institutional response, yet little research examines how faculty interpret and enact this mandate within their everyday labor. Drawing on qualitative data from 11 semi-structured interviews with full-time faculty across the social sciences, humanities, STEM, theology, and business at a Christian liberal arts university, as well as a content analysis of 56 career-relevant syllabi, this study analyzes how faculty mediate between institutional expectations and shifting occupational structures.
Findings show that faculty redefine career readiness less as narrow skill training and more as the cultivation of transferable competencies such as adaptability, ethical reasoning, and critical thinking, which they view as necessary in volatile labor markets. Faculty explicitly reference the decline of stable academic and professional pathways, reframing preparation as equipping students for nonlinear trajectories rather than singular career destinations. Advising emerges as relational labor in which faculty engage in vocational sensemaking alongside students, even as they express uncertainty about providing technical labor market guidance. These tensions reveal how faculty labor is expanding to include career mediation without corresponding structural clarity or support.
By situating career readiness within broader processes of labor market restructuring and professional socialization, this study contributes to work and occupations scholarship by examining how institutions and faculty reinterpret employability under conditions of economic uncertainty.

Authors

• Charles Watkins, Point Loma Nazarene University

• Ava Urquhart, Point Loma Nazarene University