The purpose of this study is to explore faculty definitions of college‐level learning in order to develop a universal definition to assist employers, career counselors, and academic institutions in assessing college‐level workplace learning.
Faculty were administered an electronic survey to gather definitions of below college‐level, undergraduate level and graduate level learning at a USA university.
A total of 20 per cent of the faculty completed the survey, representing an even distribution across disciplines offered at the university. Data were analysed using qualitative methods to determine themes arising from the faculty definitions; member checking occurred through a representative faculty group. The resulting framework had commonalities to other current college‐level learning schemas (e.g. American Association of Colleges and Universities). Terminology used by the faculty indicated students must understand and utilise different relationships across knowledge.
The framework shifts the perspective from assessing skills and competencies to assessing the ways in which individuals relate knowledge to different ideas, perspectives and global issues. Future research is needed to verify these themes across multiple institutions.
This framework could assist employers, career counselors, students and educators in determining if an individual's workplace knowledge can be assessed at a college‐level. This could be advantageous to know prior to investing in higher education.
The results imply that simply assessing workplace skills is insufficient to determine college‐level learning. Rather, the ways in which individuals relate their knowledge to different issues and solve problems is critical.
