A career readiness curriculum for liberal arts seminars
Your students can think, research, and write. What many of them can't yet do is describe those skills in language employers recognize, and most career advice resources won't teach them.
This is a free, classroom-ready curriculum that teaches it. Three sequenced 75-minute lessons take a student from "I don't know what I'll do with this degree" to someone who has the beginnings of a professional network, a skills vocabulary drawn from real job postings, and an informational interview request in the works. Each lesson is a full plan — objectives, faculty prep guide, a minute-by-minute class flow, and student handouts — built for an upper-level humanities or interdisciplinary seminar. Use one, use all three, or adapt them to your context.
Who this is for
Faculty who want to fold career readiness into a seminar without turning it into a career-services class, and career centers looking for a substantive, sequenced program to run with departments. The lessons assume no career-advising background; the faculty-prep section in each one prepares you to teach it.
The three lessons
Lesson 1 — LinkedIn as networking infrastructure. Students reframe LinkedIn from a job-application site to a place to build relationships, fix five high-leverage profile elements, and identify five to ten professionals to follow and engage with. Includes a search handout for finding the right people.
Download: LinkedIn Networking lesson plan (PDF) · Student version: How to network on LinkedIn as a liberal arts student
Lesson 2 — Translating academic skills into professional language. Students mine real job postings for skills vocabulary, break down what they did to produce a piece of academic work, and match the two — building out the LinkedIn Skills section from evidence rather than guesswork. Includes a translation worksheet.
Download: Skills Translation lesson plan (PDF) · Student version: Build your own skills glossary from real job postings
Lesson 3 — The informational interview. Students learn the difference between an informational interview and a job request, write context-rich outreach using a five-part structure, and prepare questions that draw on the skills vocabulary from lesson 2. Includes an outreach worksheet, a question bank, and a tracker.
Download: Informational Interview lesson plan (PDF) · Student version: How to ask for an informational interview
How Unbracket fits
Lesson 2 teaches students to translate their own academic work into professional language by hand. That is exactly the task Unbracket automates — it asks about a student's real experiences, names the skills inside them in recruiter-recognizable terms, and leaves a bracketed placeholder wherever the student needs to provide additional details. The lesson and the tool teach the same method; the tool does it faster and more thoroughly for students who want that. You can see a sample profile to judge whether it fits your students.
For career centers
If you're building a career-readiness program for a department or a cohort and want to talk through how these lessons and Unbracket could support it, get in touch at hello@unbracket.app.
These lessons are free to use and adapt in your teaching, with attribution. If you use them, I'd love to hear how it went! If you want someone else to teach one or all three lessons, get in touch at hello@unbracket.app.