Professional/Technical Degree Outcomes

Pierce College’s professional/technical degrees and certificates are designed to provide students with technical and related skills needed for successful employment. These degrees and certificates emphasize practical, work-related skills that translate to effectiveness and expertise in the workplace. Each program emphasizes program professional competencies, program outcomes, and the five core abilities.

Program outcomes can be found on each individual program’s web page.

The Five Core Abilities

It is the goal of Pierce College to prepare students to live and work in a dynamically changing world by emphasizing whole-student development and hands-on learning. Through experiences both in and out of the classroom, students are given the opportunity to broaden their horizons and be challenged in ways that encourage the development of the five core abilities vital to succeeding in life.

Critical, Creative and Reflective Thinking

Graduates will evaluate, analyze, synthesize, and generate ideas; construct informed, meaningful, and justifiable conclusions; and process feelings, beliefs, biases, strengths, and weaknesses as they relate to their thinking, decisions, and creations.

Effective Communication

Graduates will be able to exchange messages in a variety of contexts using multiple methods.

Information Competency

Graduates will be able to seek, find, evaluate and use information, and employ information technology to engage in lifelong learning.

Intercultural Engagement

Graduates demonstrate self-efficacy in intercultural engagement to advance equity, diversity, and inclusion through reflections and expressions of cultural humility, empathy, and social and civic engagement and action. Further, graduates examine how identities/positionalities such as races, social classes, genders, sexual orientations, disabilities, and cultures impact perceptions, actions, and the distribution of power and privilege in communities, systems, and institutions.

Global Citizenship

Graduates will be able to critically examine the relationship between self, community, and/or environments, and to evaluate and articulate potential impacts of choices, actions, and contributions for the creation of sustainable and equitable systems.