Core Competencies for New PA Graduates
The Core Competencies for New PA Graduates is focused on the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and behaviors all PA students should be able to demonstrate by the time they graduate.

Creating a Shared Skill Set
PAEA is committed to providing tools and resources to give all programs the greatest opportunity for success, and the Core Competencies for New PA Graduates are no exception. While each program is responsible for designing its own unique curricula and determining learning outcomes based on its mission and goals, there is the need to establish consistency in the foundational knowledge, skills, and attitudes required of all new graduates. The Core Competencies for New PA Graduates is PAEA’s first attempt at developing a set of competencies designed for use by PA programs. The competencies document is a dynamic one. Implementation and use of the competencies will inform a continuous evolution of evaluation and feedback to address changing patient and societal needs. As a leading competency-based educator, Carol Carraccio stated in her keynote address at the August 2018 Competency-Based Medical Education Summit in Basel, Switzerland, “It is not just about educational outcomes, ultimately it is about patient outcomes.”

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What do we Hope the New Graduate Competencies will Accomplish?
PAEA Learning hopes to serve as a resource for programs to help make decisions about learning goals and objectives, to develop curricula and assessments, and to use as a guide for curriculum mapping. To do this, we want to create a shared understanding between faculty and students of the expectations for demonstrating competence by graduation as well as assist programs in better understanding the healthcare landscape and employers’ expectations. And finally, we want to serve as a launch pad for research and scholarly innovation around curricular and assessment best practices.
