Time for Students to Take the Stage: Improving Career Readiness via a Deliberate‐Practice Case Pedagogy

What skills do supply chain students need to be career ready? The answer: Critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and professionalism. Regrettably, recruiters lament today’s graduates too often lack these core skills. Worse, declining student learning and diminished engagement, especially post‐pandemic, are undermining the value of a supply chain education. To help close the supply chain skills gap and re‐engage students, we describe a deliberate‐practice case pedagogy. We begin by reviewing the pros and cons of various case pedagogies to highlight how they might fit in a professor’s case‐teaching portfolio. We then discuss deliberate practice and show how professors can embed it into a student‐led case pedagogy. We conclude by sharing post‐graduation student feedback that shows this approach not only closes career‐readiness gaps but also helps students build the confidence needed to achieve early career success.