The focus of this project is on finding key skills that have been developed and/or transferred to the workplace from previous school experience, and how these relate back to a student’s school term. Following a phenomenological approach, this paper explores three case studies and tracks various skills from their coop term into their school term. The most transferable skills were communication, time management, organization, responsibility and problem solving. Some students also specified skills such as diligence, focus and the need for initiative as vital for a successful work placement. One consistency was that students did not find that their technical skills transferred between terms, but rather that there was far more emphasis and transferability of general skills. Therefore, general skills were the most transferable, both to and from the workplace. Finally, students mentioned the applications of skills to clubs, indicating the importance of extracurriculars in a student’s educational experience.

is a Mechanical Engineering undergraduate student from York University, class of 2020. She has worked on engineering co-op education research projects since September 2018 and presented her first paper at a conference in June 2019. She is passionate about understanding the co-op education system, to provide the best experience for students. She is also very involved in her school community and works with students and faculty alike to improve community engagement.

The structure of co-operative programs gives students the opportunity to transform employability skills.  Using a proposed conceptual framework and inspirationfrom Mezirow’s Transformative Learning Theory, this paper analyzes four engineering students in varying disciplines across the three contexts that a co-op experience provides: pre co-op school setting, co-op work placement and the post co-op school setting. Using reflection and by adapting to their settings, these students transformed their communication, organization/ time management and initiative/ responsibility skills. Analyzing these skills and experiences against the framework, we can see how the details and specifics of the transformation varies for each student; however, each student needs to experience each stage for successful transformation. Each of the stages then feeds into and helps further the skills as it changes.