This is a brief update on the Agriculture Workforce Training for Collaborative Leadership (AWT4CL) project. Our intent is to send a message like this once a month to keep various stakeholders informed of activities and opportunities related to the project. If this is no longer of interest to you, please reply to let us know. Otherwise, here’s the news….
AWT4CL Update for November 2023
Owl Pellet on Employability Skills: The Owl Pellets podcast recently focused on “Preparing Agricultural Leaders with Employability Skills.” More details on the featured study are published in The Journal of Agricultural Education and Extension in an article on “Preparing agricultural leaders: an assessment of agricultural students’ perceived importance and development of employability skills.”
LifeSkills Educator Support: Barclays Bank offers free access to a variety of resources to help develop employability and money management skills, offering a full range of lessons for young people and adult learning modules. To learn more, check out the Barclays LifeSkills educator support page.
Agriculture Innovation: Building from the “10 Tech Trends to Watch in 2023,” we might see more dynamic tech solutions in 2024. The 4th International Conference on Food Security highlighted the need and reinforced the importance of strategic, innovative thinking—critical employability skills—to connect technology to the community level (Polonskaya, 2023).
Gamification or “Jobification”?: Last month, Celeste Carmichael tackled this question in a blog post on “Applying Game Design Approaches as a Bridge to Workforce Skills.” While gamification focuses on student motivation (including reward structures like digital badges), a focus on “jobification” suggests a more intentional emphasis on employability skills. To learn more, check out this post and others in the AWT4CL blog at: https://sites.google.com/vt.edu/awt/blog