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Abstract. The issue of graduate unemployment often crops up in the mass media; and more often than not, the discussions have centred on the failure of tertiary educational institutions to churn out quality graduates. Thus, the method of workbased learning (WBL) is seen as a way to improve the soft skills of the graduates. The study was conducted using quantitative research survey; the design of the study used an adapted questionnaire as an instrument. Data were analysed using Statistical Package of Social Science (SPSS) version 20. The respondents consisted of 97 students who attended WBL programmes at a community college. Descriptive statistics was used to extract data from the questionnaires for the calculation of mean. The findings reveal that the level of soft skills among community college students was high, and they include these abilities: communication skills, problemsolving skills, learning and information management, professional ethics skills and leadership skills.

This study aimed to obtain experts’ opinion and consensus on the elements of career management competencies that can be developed through the Work-Based Learning (WBL) program in polytechnic. The research was used the Fuzzy Delphi Method (FDM) to obtain the result. An expert questionnaire based on the mapping analysis from the relevant document analysis and expert interviews has been constructed. This questionnaire contains 3 domains with 35 items and was administered to 16 respondents. Respondents of this study are experts who are appointed according to the expertise and experience in the implementation of WBL, particularly in polytechnic. The result of the analysis found that 31 elements in line with the FDM condition, which is the threshold value (d) surpass 0.2, group consensus among experts surpassing 75% and Fuzzy Score (A) exceeds 0.5. It indicates that all the experts had reached a strong consensus. Meanwhile, there are 4 elements were dropped due to did not meet the fuzzy score requirements. All elements of career management competencies were arranged by need and tailored according to experts ' recommendations. Our study underlines the importance of actual work experience through Work-Based Learning (WBL) to nurture the existence of career management competencies among polytechnics' students which may highly relevant to their career development. Thus, this study provides useful findings that can be used as material for research particularly in the field of career development learning, experiential learning, and tertiary education. As a result, this study produces a list of elements of career management competencies that are crucial for the graduate in an appropriate occupational direction. The result also may offer useful guidance to young workers to enter the labor market as a career-ready and competitive worker.

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