Redesigning curriculum for the digital age means taking old topics that have been ‘always’ taught a certain way and looking at them with fresh eyes. Resume and career change courses are chief among them in a fast changing world where skills and job titles become obsolete faster than ever before. Fellow graduate students Alex Jones and Jason Nelson at Teachers College, Columbia University and I looked at collaboratively revitalizing a curriculum unit for job seekers and updating it for the new employment environment.

By using both the Understanding by Design (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005) and Teaching for Understanding with Technology (Wiske, Franz & Breit, 2004) frameworks, we decided to create generative topics meant to be starting points for career planning and job searches, rather than creating a learning module based on a one time event of career and resume development.

Within the curriculum itself we added some new twists, like adding a collaborative environment to career and resume classes, and basing curriculum on job skills, rather than on job titles or specific fields. We also took to heart the idea of the ‘bottomless’ questions, where there are no set answers, but only ongoing new questions about life direction and skills development.

The jobs, career and resume revamped curriculum:

JOBS_RESUME_REVAMP