Jul 27, 2024  
Dallas College Catalog 2024-2025 
  
Dallas College Catalog 2024-2025

Marketable Skills


What are Marketable Skills?

Often referred to as employability skills or transferable skills, marketable skills include interpersonal, cognitive, and applied skill areas that are

  • primary or complementary to a major
  • intended to help students market themselves to employers

Marketable Skills are essential for Dallas College students because:

  • Students want to know how college will pay off for them, while employers want to know what skills students possess. Dallas College Marketable Skills work to ensure everyone is on the same page.
  • According to a recent Inside Higher Education Student Voice survey, Gen Z students expect their college experience to result in being career ready - but students often have a hard time connecting the work they do in Core Curriculum classes with the skills that employers want.
  • It’s not a real skills gap, but rather, as Forbes notes, a “skills awareness gap.” That means Dallas College students learn valuable, foundational skills throughout the Core but might have a hard time explaining what they’ve learned to potential employers. The Dallas College Marketable Skills initiative is designed to reduce this awareness gap by purposely identifying and aligning Core assessments with specific marketable skills.

Dallas College Marketable Skills are interwoven in the Core Objectives

Students learn and practice marketable skills as they accomplish the Core Objectives. Therefore, students should understand that as they progress through the Core, their courses are offering them opportunities to refine the following skills:

Critical
Thinking
Communication
Teamwork
Leadership & Personal Responsibility
Global Awareness & Social Responsibility
Quantitative & Empirical
Analyze Issues Effective Written Communication:
Clearly and effectively articulate
complex issues/ideas in written form
Fulfill team expectations:
Accept responsibility for role on a team.
Self-Motivation and Initiative:
demonstrate time management
and attention to detail
Community Awareness:
Demonstrate awareness
of community issues
Data visualization and presentation:
Communicate results using
tables, charts, graphs.

Complex/Creative Problem Solving:
Anticipate problems, solutions, and
consequences.

Effective Oral Communication:
Clearly and effectively
articulate ideas orally
Effective Collaboration skills:
negotiate team roles and responsibilities
Ethical behavior:
Demonstrate ethical
behavior and decision-making.
Global awareness:
Demonstrate awareness
of global issues
Contextualize
numeric
information/data

Knowledge Application:
Apply knowledge to make
decisions

Facilitate discussion,
using active listening
and interviewing skills
Team management:
Make collaborative decisions,
manage team conflict
Growth Mindset:
Learn and grow from mistakes.
Demonstrate empathy:
recognize the emotions
and perspectives of others
Demonstrate
logical thinking
Pattern Detection:
Detect patterns/themes/
underlying principles
Effective Presentation Skills:
Present Ideas to an audience
Provide
and/or
receive
useful
feedback
Demonstrate Adaptability
and flexibility
Develop civic responsibility:
demonstrating good citizenship
Experimental Design:
Design an experiment or model
Research:
Gather proper
resources and
information to
conduct research
Synthesizing Ideas:
Summarize information
from diverse sources
Embrace Perspectives:
Work effectively with people
from different backgrounds.
Team Leadership:
Lead and manage teams
Develop cultural competency:
Learn from diverse cultures,
races, genders, religions, etc.
Data Inference:
Draw inferences from data,
use data to formulate conclusions
Analysis & Interpretation:
Analyzing & Interpreting data
to synthesize information
Effective Interpersonal Communication:
clearly articulate to diverse groups
  Respect:
Demonstrate consideration
and courtesy to others.
Demonstrate Inclusivity:
foster a sense of belonging
Mathematical Reasoning:
Use appropriate calculations
to solve problems.