PS 1-4 - Developing environmental career tracks for effective training of two year and four-year college students to meet non-academic environmental workforce needs

Background/Question/Methods

The emerging environmental job market seeks skills that are not only ecological in focus but include information synthesis, industrial technologies, communication with diverse audiences, and project management experience. The ESA four-dimensional ecology education curricular framework (4DEE) guides undergraduate instructors to integrate teaching ecological principles with hands-on practices, elevating the human dimension and acknowledging cross-cutting biological themes. Here we focus on developing career-centered ecological curricula that follow 4DEE guidelines while connecting more closely to community environmental problem-solving. Today’s environmental issues affect minoritized communities disproportionately, but we lack diversity in our environmental workforce. Community colleges typically have a diverse student body that can be guided into environmental careers. There is currently clear advising for underrepresented STEM students to health science careers but little focused advising to prepare students for the environmental technology workforce. We reviewed environmental career skills desired by employers and collected information on community college–private sector partnered environmental programs. Our goals were to provide: 1) a career-focused student advising guide for introductory college environmental programs, and 2) an action plan for developing and implementing coursework teaching modules and curricular sequences that better articulated 2-year and 4-year college degrees to help meet non-academic environmental career skill needs.

Results/Conclusions

We found that environmental career-related college programs required students start early in doing environmental measurement and data collection, analysis and visualization, field work, GIS spatial analysis, operation cost analyses, and technical writing. Successful programs relied on case studies from community-identified environmental needs to provide data for analysis, planning, designing, and implementing solutions, such as phytoremediation, water quality planning in response to flooding disturbance, and community-engaged communication plans. Environmental consulting jobs require that students learn how to identify major taxa (e.g., vascular plants, insects, birds, mammals) to species or other meaningful level, sample populations, communities, and ecosystems for relevant parameters, understand ecological processes like disturbance and recovery, and understand government regulations that bear upon protected species and ecosystems. Best practices in private sector-focused environmental career preparation indicated that student awareness of how environmental concepts connect to environmental problem solving, integration of job environmental skills needs with student interest in environmental justice and maximizing use of regional environmental faculty expertise leads to best articulation of coursework from two to four-year colleges. We illustrate real-world successful lab exercises that combine environmental principles with awareness of community environmental perceptions, cost-benefit models, private-sector and governmental regulations, to facilitate community acceptance of environmental solutions.