Year in Review: 2023 on the Career Everywhere Podcast

Meredith Metsker:

Hey, friends. Welcome back to the Career Everywhere podcast. I’m your host, Meredith Metsker, and this week we’re doing something a little different. Instead of an interview, I’ll be doing a recap of all of our episodes from this year. If you’ve missed any episodes or you just want a refresher on all of the interesting topics we’ve covered in 2023, this is the episode for you. Without further ado, let’s take a walk down memory lane.

We’re going to start by going all the way back to episode 1 featuring Josh Domitrovich of Pennsylvania Western University. In that episode, I talked with Josh about two Career Everywhere initiatives he recently launched. The first was a Career Champion program for faculty and staff. The second was a five-week Professional Advantage Academy for students that simulates the job application process. This episode was especially interesting because Josh is in the unique position of leading career services for a brand new institution. PennWest was established in July 2022 as the result of a merger of three Pennsylvania universities. He shared actionable advice, best practices, and detailed breakdowns of how he built the Career Champion program and the Professional Advantage Academy and how he got buy-in from top to bottom.

Josh Domitrovich:

When we started this conversation, we wanted to ensure that every decision that we made and every program or service we provided had the NACE competencies in mind and were really infused and built off of them since our number one goal for PennWest is enhancing students’ career readiness. That’s how we want to be seen as an office and staff in this environment, so we knew leading with that was going to be very important.

During that conversation with the staff, I’ll never forget it, the big thing that they really brought forward when we were going through this planning phase was we have to build something that is ultimately sustainable because we’re in a very financially turbulent time where enrollment is declining in our state, where we’re not getting the support from the state as much as we would like to see so. Whether it’s somebody leaving the office or there’s a retirement, the likelihood of somebody being replaced in our current environment is pretty slim. So we have to be thinking about as we grow and move forward, how do we go from institutions that were an office of four and one to now we’re an office of nine, and now we have to oversee and support 13,000 students, almost 14,000 students. Doing the traditional one-on-one engagement is not going to work any more because of the challenges I shared earlier about having to support all the physical and online students.

Meredith Metsker:

In episode 2, we talked with Daniel Pascoe Aguilar of Excelsior University about how he’s using identity and allyship communities to serve underrepresented students. A longtime leader in career services and higher ed, Daniel discussed the critical importance of developing the next generation of diverse leaders, improving access, and building a village around underrepresented students on and off campus. Daniel shared how his team built the communities, how he got buy-in from senior leadership, and why improving access to higher education is everyone’s responsibility.

Daniel Pascoe Aguilar:

Our future talent will determine how our world looks like, our planet, our society, our democracy, our international relations, poverty, hunger. I mean, you name it, all the systemic issues that we’re facing. So in my mind, there is no way that we can any longer think, “Oh, we have a career center. They’re taking care of that,” or to think, “Oh, higher education is doing this work.”

Preparing our next generation of leaders and particularly preparing a purposeful next generation of leaders that finds meaning in what they do, preparing systemic challenge-ready next generation of leaders becomes imperative. It’s clear to me that our decision-making tables are not engaging the necessary diversity of perspectives and backgrounds and experiences and skills. Our interdisciplinary decision-making, our ability to think in multiple ways about the solutions that we need to generate has become one of our most important societal endeavors. So to me, Career Everywhere is this mandate that requires us to be leaders in our communities, to bring everyone, to help us facilitate, or as I like to say, scaffold the preparation of a purposeful systemic challenge-ready and diverse next generation of leaders.

Meredith Metsker:

In episode 3, my colleague Ashley Safranski talked with Nancy Bilmes of the University of Connecticut about how she and her team built a Career Champion program with over 500 champions. And fun fact, I recently talked with Nancy and they now have over 700 champions. Crazy, right? In the episode, Nancy shared how and why her team started the program four years ago, how they recruit champions, particularly faculty, what the training process looks like including the resources they share with champions, how they measure success, and more.

Nancy Bilmes:

It probably wouldn’t be hard for most people to guess what the biggest barrier is or was and still is would be time. Faculty, especially at a Research 1 university like uConn, faculty are invested in teaching. Some are advising and doing research. So there’s a lot on their plate. And the work they do for us doesn’t count toward their PTR and tenure or anything like that, so there’s definitely challenges around that. And because we heard that time and again from folks that we talked to, our center decided to create a program that is flexible. And we don’t have a presentation or a series of workshops that our Career Champions need to participate in before becoming Career Champions. And we decided that because they’re having these conversations anyway. So regardless of whether they become an official Career Champion, they’re still informal Career Champions. So we decided that it was more important to work with folks around where they were at, provide the information in different ways that they could still get it and use it at their own leisure.

So for example, we hold several training sessions every semester on different topics on DEI and career using Handshake, using Focus 2 and whatnot. And some of those are done by our staff and some of those we recruit Career Champions to lead as well. But we record them all and we also have a newsletter. So if folks can’t come to those live sessions or can’t watch the recordings right away, they can do that when they have a little bit more time or they can read about what we’re doing in the newsletter. So we feel that it’s important just for them to know about us and to know what we do and to be able to refer to us and be able to understand at a baseline level what they could share with students than needing to go through presentations and workshops to become a Career Champion.

Meredith Metsker:

In episode 4, I talked with Junior Delgado of Westfield State University about how career services teams can build allies across campus. Junior shared how he’s built so many partnerships in his 22+ years at Westfield, how he leverages them in his work as a career services leader, and why it’s so important to approach these relationships with authenticity.

Junior Delgado:

What I have seen in this campus is I see our students are a reflection of who I am. Many of our students are first generation. We have students of color on our campus. We have students that work all the time. And so I’m going to say blue collar-ish I think is the word that I want to look for. And so that’s my background. So I think that that’s why I resonate with the public state institution as well that is educating the masses. I think that also resonates with me. And so the reason why these relationships, being genuine, being intentional are so important. We are all here for a purpose, and our purpose is to work with students to build the next future leaders, the next workers of wherever they decide to go in the world, in whatever field they decide to choose.

And so I want to ensure that we impact every single group on campus. Again, I may not get to all 4,000 students, but I know that through some of these collaborations, the messages that we share, the interactions that we have, if it’s a positive interaction with one faculty member, that faculty member is going to go into their classes and say, “Hey, have you visited the career center? Did you know that they have resource A, B, C, and D for you?” And so I think the importance of these relationships is so that we’re building a career network, that it isn’t just the four or five staff members in the career center selling the message, that it becomes a university-wide message.

And I think that that applies at every institution. When I talk to some of my colleagues as well at other career centers, that is the message. They want to build as many allies as possible on their campuses so that their message spreads to all of their students in every facet, whether you’re an art student or you’re a health science student, or you’re the PA student, that you understand that the institution is there for your success.

Meredith Metsker:

In episode 5, my colleague Ashley Safranski talked with Thy Nguyen, formerly of Illinois Institute of Technology, about how Illinois Tech drove their highest enrollment in about 40 years by centering their recruitment strategy around career readiness.

Thy Nguyen:

We realized that we needed a new strategy, that what we were doing wasn’t going to work in this environment. And what’s interesting is we had this framework that was sitting around and we were starting to build on it called Elevate, and it’s been in existence for probably at least five years. And I certainly didn’t come up with it. One of my dear colleagues did. And we decided to jump on it and really reframe what Elevate meant for the university. And I think the reason we did that is looking at the students that attend IIT, we realized we have a fairly high percentage of first-gen students, a fairly high percentage of students that are Pell eligible. And I’m obviously talking about the undergrad population. But even at the grad population, it’s definitely more on the international side. There were some common themes, and the most common theme was students were thinking about jobs and careers and thinking about social mobility as well.

And we’re one of the leading institutions in the country from raising a family, socioeconomic standing, at least in the state of Illinois, one of the top. And so we thought we had something that we could really jump off of, and that was Elevate, which is really focused on everything co-curricular in terms of the experience. And where we landed, and it’s still continuing to evolve as we operationalize things, is we’re guaranteeing experiences for students. We’re tracking it to the best of our ability and we’re going to continue to pour resources into that as well in making sure that students get that experience at a Illinois Tech in ways that are interesting to them. And it’s all about career readiness.

Meredith Metsker:

In episode 6, I talked with Toni Rhorer of UC San Diego’s Rady School of Management about how career services can partner with admissions in a graduate business school environment. Toni shared why it’s so important for career services and admissions to work together, how she’s embedded her team in the admissions process, what interview questions she asks potential students, and how to think about engagement in broader terms.

Toni Rhorer:

The first thing to really think about is how you define engagement. I think that’s a really key part. And I think traditionally, career services, people would think a one-on-one advising appointment. That’s career engagement. But I think we can look at it broader. And I recently listened to one of the former podcasts from the woman from uConn who was talking about their Career Champion program, and they’re educating faculty on career stuff that they can deliver in the classroom. That’s engagement. It’s not a career coaching appointment but it’s engagement with career content. And so I think when you think about engagement in broader terms, then you can think about how to deliver that at scale.

Meredith Metsker:

In episode 7, I talked with Megan Baeza and Maribea Merritt of the University of Texas Permian Basin about six ways to make a big impact with a small team. The six ways include teamwork, tools and technology, consistent student outreach, community partnerships, time management, and classroom presentations.

Megan Baeza:

The biggest change for us is that we do not focus on what we don’t have or what we can’t do. Yes, we have limited time, limited staff.

Maribea Merritt:

Limited budget.

Megan Baeza:

We don’t have a big budget to work with. So there’s all these things against us, but I think when we go and look at what we can do, that’s where we spend our time and focus. And when at the end of that semester, and we’re 25% and four career fairs, and I forgot the number for presentations, I’m like, “There’s a lot…”

Maribea Merritt:

25 presentations.

Megan Baeza:

Yeah, there’s a lot that we can do.

Meredith Metsker:

In episode 8, I talked with Joe Catrino of Trinity College in Hartford about how career services in higher education can innovate and prepare students for the future of work. A lot of Joe’s philosophy is inspired by the concepts of life design and design thinking and how they can be applied to career services. He even wrote a chapter on design thinking in the new career center in the 2022 textbook, Mapping the Future of Undergraduate Career Education. In this episode, Joe shares what the future of work means for higher education, how career services can embed life design into career coaching, and what it will take to make sure today’s students are ready for tomorrow’s workforce.

Joe Catrino:

Well, the future of work is here, Meredith. It’s all stemming from disruption. There’s disruption everywhere. Think about artificial intelligence, machine learning, automation. Technology is disrupting how we work. Think about, go back to 2019, beginning of 2020 and how we worked. I was on Zoom. I could probably count on one hand how many times I had been on Zoom prior to that. My point is, there’s disruption happening and it’s impacting how we work, what kind of work is getting done, what kind of jobs are around. Some jobs are being lost to that automation but some are being created because of that technology and automation.

And so what’s happening is because of that disruption, so we’re talking about technological disruption, we’re talking about economic disruption, we’re talking about ecological disruption, and pandemic disruption. So there’s this litany of disruption happening and it’s impacting everything. And so what I mean by that, really what it comes down to is, again, jobs are shifting and changing. And how we work is shifting and changing. How we live and how we make decisions is changing. So as we think about helping students across the globe think about the future of work, it’s important because jobs that our students are going to have, they don’t even exist yet. So how do you prepare students for that? How do you prepare for this future of work, this disruption? Well, you focus on skills.

Meredith Metsker:

In episode 9, uConnect’s founder and CEO David Kozhuk talked with Harold Bell of Spelman College and Leonelle Thompson formerly of Langston University about how they created digital corporate sponsorship programs for their career centers. In the episode, Harold and Leonelle share tactical advice on how to get started, how to find sponsors, what types of sponsorship opportunities to offer, how to grow your program once it’s up and running, and more.

Leonelle Thompson:

Align the sponsorship program with institutional goals and objectives. That gets buy-in from all those people with VP and their title and above. Align it to student success, retention, persistence.

David Kozhuk:

Say more. How did you position it that way?

Leonelle Thompson:

I positioned it with, “We have a relatively low retention rate,” and I said, “With sponsorships, with Uconnect, with more opportunities, our freshmen will be engaged quicker because they can see what happens after four years. There’s a pathway for them that’s not just academic. They can see internships. They can see people are interested in them and get those opportunities. The networking, we know that first generation students sometimes struggle with building networks. This is going to help build those networks early on.” And that got the institution involved. That’ll help them stay semester to semester, year to year.

Meredith Metsker:

In our 10th episode, I talked with Sharon Belden Castonguay of Wesleyan University about how to implement Career Everywhere in a liberal arts environment, particularly as it relates to career services partnering with admissions, academic affairs, and advancement.

Sharon Belden Castonguay:

We all attract students who want to be broadly educated. They see the value of studying subjects that might not on the surface seem directly relevant to career outcomes. That’s true even among students who might be choosing a more, quote-unquote, practical major like computer science. They don’t want to just take computer science. They want to take computer science and Korean dance and medieval poetry and government. But com sci aside, many of our students only have a vague idea of the utility of their majors. And I think that’s led to this public notion that broadly educated, liberally educated students aren’t actually prepared for anything after graduation. And we argue the opposite, which is that in a world where jobs are disappearing and being invented every day, students are best served with a curriculum that teaches them how to think analytically, creatively, and more importantly, just how to learn new things quickly.

Learning how to learn is the number one skill you can learn right now on a liberal arts campus. Career Everywhere means that the community is helping students make sense of what they’re learning inside the classroom, outside the classroom, within their major, outside their major. Helping them connect the dots so that students are coming out with a coherent narrative about why they chose the course of study they did, why they chose to do all of the other things that they did, the Korean dance class, the medieval poetry class, why they played intramural lacrosse, why they were involved in activism, why they were volunteering in their community, and thinking about how are they putting all of that together in a way that is meaningful to them.

Meredith Metsker:

In episode 11, I talked with Laura Kestner-Ricketts of Augustana College about how she introduces faculty to career resources in a super scalable, efficient way. In the episode, Laura offered a step-by-step overview of a new 45-minute program she launched at Augustana that trains faculty on how to navigate the career center website and use all of the resources.

Laura Kestner-Ricketts:

I remember talking to a few people and they said, “Oh, you’ll be lucky if you get eight.” And I said, “All right, eight’s my goal.” And I got 41. And for people coming from big schools, they may think, “Oh, that’s nothing.” But that’s a big deal. And I really didn’t have to do a lot because again, I was planning on talking about this later, but there are people who, when you talk about faculty, they’re on a spectrum of career. And I know career can be a bad word. I’m on a college campus. Because we’ve got on one end the people who are… And I’m in a private liberal arts college, so learning is for learning’s sake. And then on the other end is maybe our professional, pre-professional programs of we’re here, we’re building skills so that students can go out and be professionals living lives of purpose and meaning.

But the majority of people fall somewhere on this spectrum. And so to me, I used to spend a lot of time in my career trying to convert the one end. If I could just convince them, “This is important too and all students need to do this,” and all of that. And I just realized and heard this great phrase from Kathy Davies who was out of the studio, the life design studio, who just said, “Go with the goers.” And to me, that’s it. I say it all the time. Sometimes you can get pulled down in, “But what? But what? But what? What if?” No, we’re going to go with the goers. And to me, that’s what this is about. We’re going with the goers. My goal is not to make every faculty or staff member a Career Champion, but it’s like, “Okay, who’s out there who gets this who is also passionate about helping students with career success? Let’s find those people and let’s just make sure they have the tools and skills that they need to get students to the next step.” And so to me, that’s what this is about.

Meredith Metsker:

Next up in episode 12, I talked with Gene Rhee and Jessica Best of the University of Oregon Lundquist College of Business. In their episode, they shared how they’ve partnered with faculty to embed career-related assignments into three core business classes. So by the time students reach their senior year, they’ve already been exposed to career multiple times. And because the assignments are part of their grade in three required classes, every student gets the opportunity to learn more about the career center and what resources are available.

Jessica Best:

By embedding it into the curriculum, we’re telling them they have to take these classes. We’re also making it very clear that this is for everybody. Career services is for everybody. It’s not just for people whose parents know to tell them to go in and see career services. It’s not just for people who might have that social capital coming in or have somebody, know somebody who can give them an internship. This is important for everybody and it’s our responsibility as an institution to make sure everybody has access to that. That’s one of the key things about making it a requirement. Requirement sounds very like we impose this on you. And really, I like to think of it more as that we are making sure everybody has access to these things. Not that they have to do it, but they get to do it.

Gene Rhee:

Think of all the students who cannot attend our evening event in the atrium that we had last week because they have to work. They don’t have that choice. And yeah, there are virtual options that we come up with and we have them, I said. But at the end of the day, when we ask our students also, “How do you want to engage with a lot of this material and a lot of, let’s say, recruiters and alums?” In the classroom is, if not number one, but very high up on the list. And so being able to say to those students, “No, you don’t have to go anywhere else. You don’t have to attend anything else. It is here. You’re already here.” And I think that has helped out and will continue to help in terms of equitable access, for sure.

Meredith Metsker:

In episode 13, I talked with Mark Peltz of Grinnell College about how to improve equity and access to career services. Mark walked through several specific strategies he and his team have implemented and how they use those strategies to achieve a 98% engagement rate for Grinnell’s Class of 2022. He also shared how his team tracks student engagement data and how they use that data to measure success and adjust programming and outreach to make sure they’re reaching all students.

Mark Peltz:

You can claim that diversity, equity, inclusion is a value to you, but you have to spell out what does that mean? What does that mean for you as a unit, as a division, as an institution, et cetera? And so we’ve gone through that work. And so as a consequence, we’ve really started to integrate these principles into every program, opportunity, service, procedure that we think about. So when we look at our grants or we look at our internship funding, we look at any number of those programs, we’re doing it with these principles in mind. And how do we continue to audit ourselves to ensure that we’re living up to the promises that we make? And so that’s I think, a key part of it.

The other piece is developing meaningful metrics. And these may vary from institution to institution, but really going through the work of defining what does that look like for you? And then putting those systems in place so that it’s not just some aspirational metric that you’ll never be able to measure, but it’s actually something that you can get your hands on. And as I mentioned earlier, brace yourself for troubling info. It’s okay if it comes back and it’s not good information as long as that’s met with a commitment to do something about it. Perfection is probably unachievable. Progress is what you need to be committed to. So I just stay the course, stay committed, live your principles, live your values, and you’re going to make progress.

Meredith Metsker:

Next, in episode 14, which is one of our most popular episodes of the year, I talked with Christian Garcia of the University of Miami about three ways his team makes career services everybody’s business. Those three ways include building a faculty toolkit and webpage, embedding live job and internship RSS feeds on academic webpages, and doing an annual awards program called the Toppel Awards.

Christian Garcia:

Share information and share data widely. Don’t be afraid of it. I think sometimes we’re afraid of how people are going to interpret it. Or even share data maybe that doesn’t show the university in the best light, but it’s factual data. It’s okay to do that. So remember the dean’s meeting that I told you where I was launching, teased these different ideas? That started because when we compared ourselves to our peers, the percentage of students who engaged in at least one internship, we were way off lower than our peers. I used that data to really galvanize people to support these kinds of programs because I was able to show, our hope is that by offering live feeds, it will result in more students clicking on these things, which will result in students applying to more jobs, which will result in students getting jobs or internships and so on and so forth. But that was only one of the many different tactics we were going to take.

So sharing data, that yes, that you want to brag, but you also have to show where there’s a gap, where there’s a problem and how you’re poised to solve that problem, but that you can’t solve that problem by yourself as a career center office or director. You have to use other people. So I would say definitely share the data, share the information. But then also asking how you can serve them. How can I help you? How can I make your job easier, the job of your faculty members easier or better when it comes to career or career adjacent? Sometimes we’re not doing anything related to career per se, but it all is in one way or another. It definitely comes back to that.

And then the last thing I’ll say is to just try something. Just try something new. Try something different. You may think you don’t get a lot of return on investment at the beginning, but at least you’re moving forward. And it doesn’t have to be something super flashy. Look at our faculty toolkit. It’s a PDF. There’s nothing really high-tech about it. But it provides just enough information and resources that easily digestible by faculty members and it doesn’t overwhelm anybody. So I think sometimes small could be innovative.

Meredith Metsker:

In episode 15, I talked with Joe Testani of the University of Rochester about how career services and higher ed in general can better partner with education technology vendors. Joe discussed the current gap between the industries of higher ed and ed tech and how both sides can bridge that gap. He also shared his process for researching and evaluating a new ed tech vendor and what he looks for in terms of mission, product viability, customer service and support, and more. Joe offered his best advice for getting buy-in to make a new technology purchase and working a recurring line item for technology into your career center’s annual operating budget. He also dug into his most successful strategies for implementing ed tech and getting the most out of each tool.

Joe Testani:

Try to always negotiate for line item budget. I think we always default to negotiating or opting for staffing, and I think we don’t oftentimes build in some operating, whether it’s generic operating or targeted operating money. And universities are making, and I get more of a bird’s eye view of this in my current job than I did in my last job. How are we making decisions at a very macro level about finances? What was the impact? If we give this much money to this unit, what’s the impact of that dollar? How can we demonstrate the impact of that dollar? So to me, if technology offers you an opportunity to talk about impact and scale in ways that sometimes staffing can.

So I think whenever you can squeeze in a line item or negotiation for operating or technology support, I think you should try. I think you always add that in. So staffing and $10,000 for X to scale the work of that person that I’m hiring. I think that’s just an important practice if we don’t do that to get into the habit of, because to me, that goes back to how do financial decision get made at your institution? What’s the pyro dynamic and the jockeying? Do you have to ask for? In one of my jobs, the $10,000 job I used to ask, they didn’t give me parameters. They’re like, “Give us your budget for the next three years.” I was like, “Okay.” And I was like, “Is there any parameters? I need limits.” “No, whatever you want.” So I put in the budget like $400,000 over the three-year period. They’re like, “This is crazy. What are you thinking?” I was like, “You told me there was no parameters to what I could ask for.”

So it became a negotiation of like, “Well, what do you need?” I was like, well, if I baseline, I need two more people and I need this line for technology do X, Y, Z.” So it became a negotiation of what’s necessary, what’s critical path for the work that you’re trying to do. And so that’s something that you should think about. But if you’re not asking for those line items, you’re not asking for that support when you’re negotiating or building in, either you’re taking a new job,” I always definitely think you should ask for these things as a new job. Say, I need this line. I need this much money for technology.” That’s what I did when I came to Rochester. I was like, “I need a fund that I can do whatever I want with it to launch some different ideas.”

And that was an important thing to ask for because I knew I needed something. I needed startup capital. And they gave it to me. And so it’s great. Awesome. I can jumpstart. I could get some things off the ground immediately. I don’t have to wait and put a proposal in for the next year. So anytime you can negotiate, starting a new job, asking for new things. Every budget cycle, try to put in line items in there. I think that’s an important piece of trying to build your portfolio and your budget.

Meredith Metsker:

In episode 16, I talked with Leonelle Thompson about how career services teams and employers can work together to get students career-ready. Leonelle is the manager of Early Career at Williams, a gas and energy company, and she’s also a former career services leader at Langston University and the University of Tulsa. In the episode, Leonelle discussed what career readiness means, what skills today students are lacking as they enter the workforce, why it’s so important for the two sides to partner, what questions career services can ask employers to open a productive dialogue, what programming ideas, employers can approach career services with, what both sides need to know about each other’s workflows and more.

Leonelle Thompson:

One question I would love to hear in this call, well, feel free to invite me because I got a lot to say. It’s just say, “What are we doing right and what can we improve on and where would you like to help?” I like the open-ended questions because I would love for some of our schools to ask us, “Where would you like to help?” because I’d be like, “I’d be on campus. Let me have an hour of your time with the students and let’s talk through each of these competencies. Let me build out a program for you and get beyond, ‘How organized was the career fair? Were you able to find parking?’ Really focus it more on the student.”

Now, a question I would love is, okay, so you have interns with you right now and you have new hires that are starting in June, July, et cetera. First day, “What did you see that you want to tell us that did not go well?” And let us tell you because I can tell you. They didn’t read their e-mails so they had no idea where to go. So how can we solve that problem? There was, “It took them a while to do onboarding.” So can we walk through a little bit more on what systems, again, going back to career readiness. What’s the technology that’s going to be used that we can help communicate? This is what onboarding looks like when you come to a company.

So those types of calls, not the logistics of career fair or, “Please sign up for this event,” but you see our students as interns when they are our students so, “What could we improve on? How can we help?” And usually those answers are not going to be like, “Well, I wish that they had had that database class.” It’s not going to be that. It’s going to be back to this career readiness, these intangibles.

Meredith Metsker:

In episode 17, I talked with Monica Clem of Teach for America about how the Teach for America career center supports its 60,000 plus alumni in their careers after the two-year teaching program. Monica shared how her team uses technology to engage alumni, how the national and regional TFA teams work together to support alumni all over the country, and what career resources TFA offers to alumni. As a former higher education career services leader, Monica also dug into the differences and similarities between higher ed career services and career services within companies or non-profit organizations like TFA. She also discussed why supporting alumni is so critical for higher ed and the corporate world.

Monica Clem:

I think in higher ed, I alluded to this earlier and I think there’s a pretty wide recognition of this, that there are just fewer students to enter the higher ed pipeline. And college has become very challenging in terms of being affordable for a lot of people. And that has led to a lot of questions about the value of a college degree. And yet, we know those of us who work in this field, how valuable a college degree continues to be. And so I think one way to really address some of those concerns is to tap into your alumni network, not just for the purpose of mentoring or connectivity between students and alum, which of course is very important, but also for the purpose of engaging alumni with the resources that the institution can provide to advance them in their careers.

Some institutions do this in a really formal way through executive education programs, continuing education programs, and it’s also true that you can do it in ways that are not as formal. Inviting alum to return to campus and to attend lectures to identify what are some of the new skills on the market that your institution is positioned to offer. And really thinking about the value proposition to your alumni network beyond engagement I think is really important because for a lot of institutions, there is going to be more of a lifelong model in order to stay relevant where it’s not just come into the institution for four years and then you’re gone at your alma mater, but really thinking over this span of someone’s lifetime. People are working longer than ever. And so thinking about how you can continue to be relevant to your alumni network and continue to add value to their career throughout their lifetime, of course, is easy to say. But I think that is one way to continue to engage them because it might be one of the top ways to continue to stay relevant as an institution.

Meredith Metsker:

In episode 18, I talked with Emily McCarthy of the University of Arizona about how her team partners with the alumni office to support recent grads in their career development. Emily talked about the services they offer recent grads, what the partnership with the alumni office looks like, and how both teams partner to cost share the uConnect platform to scale their support for students and alumni. She also gave one of my favorite answers to my, “What does Career Everywhere mean to you?” question. Let’s take a listen.

Emily McCarthy:

The career development office should not be the keeper of the keys and the holder of all the knowledge. We need to be thought leaders. We need to be educating our peers across the institution about what career means, what current best practices are, what current industry practices are. And I feel like we’ve had three or four different job markets in the last three or four years. So it takes a lot to stay on top of that. But we need to be educating our partners across the institution, but we shouldn’t be the only ones sharing that information with students. A lot of students might never walk into a career development office for a variety of reasons. So we want them to hear that same message from their faculty, from their academic advisors, and from staff across the institution. And I think that message resonates more even if you hear it multiple times. I think that just reinforces the message and it resonates more when it comes from a lot of different voices.

In addition, and I think this idea is starting to emerge more and this is one of the reasons we wanted to partner with uConnect, it also speaks to availability of career resources 24/7. We live in a very self-service oriented world. We know that not everyone’s schedule is the same schedule, and a lot of students can’t or do not want to visit us during our open office hours because they’re in class or they’re working or often all of the above. We want to have resources available to them. I have joked for many years now that at 2:00 AM, students just might have a career conversation, or a career question rather, and want to learn a little bit more about a topic. Honestly, I don’t know how often that takes place. Like in my dream world, that takes place all the time, but if and when that does take place, we want them to have a place to go and we want to have that self-service information out there for students.

And then if a student does come to see us in person, they’ve also had that baseline information they’ve had exposure to. So hopefully they can study that prior to seeing us, and we’re updating our materials to encourage that prior to student appointments. So that’s a little bit about what it means to me.

Meredith Metsker:

In episode 19, I talked with Dr. Carissa Liverpool of Rutgers University, Athletics about how to engage student athletes with career services. Being a former Rutgers student athlete in softball, Carissa knows better than anyone that student athletes are one of the hardest student populations to reach. Between athletics, academics, social life and more, student athletes are notoriously strapped for time. In this episode, Carissa shared her best tips and tricks for reaching student athletes and connecting them with employers.

Carissa Liverpool:

I think you have to meet them where they are. If you know that they are in a specific building or they’re taking a lot of the same classes as their teammates, navigating their time and being present where they are physically is very helpful. That, number one. Number two, I think going to their competitions is really important. I have the luxury because I work in athletics. I can just pop into their practice. It’s normal for me to show up to practice. It’s normal for me to show up at competitions. But for folks that don’t work in athletics or at university career services, showing your support at their competitions is huge and I think slowly building that relationship and that trust and that rapport, because at the end of the day, they are students. They’re students first. And knowing that you’re supporting their athletic abilities and their student abilities is important too, which obviously career development falls into that skills and life skills and things like that.

They are definitely a hard population to tap into if you’re not housed in athletics at this level. At other institutions, different size institutions, sometimes an athletic academic advisor is doing career development as well, and there may only be one for 500 athletes. So how do they manage that? A lot of the times at schools like that, the student athletes will seek out university career services because they have more resources than, let’s say, the athletic academic advisor who has to do life skills as well.

Meredith Metsker:

Up next in our 20th episode, I talked with Beverly Johnson from Arizona State University about how her team is engaging indigenous students with career services. Beverly talked about the programming and initiatives her team has implemented to reach more indigenous students, what important cultural considerations to keep in mind, how career services professionals can be good allies, and more.

Beverly Johnson:

There’s a lot of things to take into consideration when you’re working with indigenous students, and it’s very hard to generalize. But given that, I would say that that mistrust, don’t take it personally if you encounter that. It can take a lot of times of showing up. It can take a lot of conversations to really build trust with our students and with our indigenous professionals that we’re working with as well. So I would say it’s worth it when you do take the time, but it takes several times of showing up, of making a commitment and following through with that commitment to build that trust. And I think that a lot of that comes from their tendency to rely on the people that they already trust, their family members and their friends. That’s where they would be getting most of their advice. But as we know here in the career world, that that can limit people’s worldviews and that self-efficacy of thinking of all the different types of careers that you might be able to achieve if you keep your circle very small when it comes to who you talk to about career.

Indigenous people still today face higher rates of unemployment and underemployment. And that is regardless of where they are in the US. It is pretty stark, the discrimination that they’re still facing. And then I would say another thing too. You’re not going to make a huge impact on your data by engaging with indigenous students. And that is one thing I’m so grateful for the support of the leadership here in my department and ASU as a whole. Our president, President Crowe, has made a special commitment to the indigenous communities here in Arizona. And so I think a lot of that empowers me to be able to do this work even though I know if I get 100% of our students who identify as indigenous who participate with us, I’m barely going to push that needle. They’re always going to be the smallest population of students that you work with unless you are of course at a tribal college or university.

Meredith Metsker:

In episode 21, I talked with Mike Summers of Lafayette College about why career must be everywhere. He shared how he and his team have implemented the Career Everywhere approach to career services, why it’s so important for career services to lead the charge, and what results his team has seen since implementing Career Everywhere, particularly in terms of improving equity and access.

Mike Summers:

Talent is evenly distributed, but opportunity is not. And so we have to increase the social capital and the access to all students. Realizing that when I think most any institution in Lafayette certainly falls in this category, we have students that come here and they’re on this continuum of the knowledge that they bring with us. Not academic knowledge, but knowledge about they could be first generation students, they could be international students, they could be students that don’t have parents that are able to guide them and support them and give them those nuggets before they get here. And then we have others who have tons of those nuggets in their bag, if you will. They’re not at the same place. So in order for us to make sure we are adequately and intentionally serving every student and making sure that that talent that’s evenly distributed, we shift that scale towards making sure the opportunities for them are equal.

I say my day that I envision one time is when we all come up and we’re getting ready to start a race, that every single student is at the same starting line, whereas now they’re not. And we have to make sure we keep inching those who are not closer and closer to that starting line so it truly is an equitable and equal playing field. In October, we’re going to be doing a modern mentorship networking event here where we’re going to talk all about what building social capital is and how you can build your network in a way that is very much just the basics of what they need to do and how they need to practice it. And when they do, they’ll see, A, it’s not really hard. B, now they know how and now they know the why and now they can go do it for themselves. So really excited about that. And that really is something that I feel very strongly about, that we make things as equitable as we can be. And that’s one of the centerpieces of why it’s so important that career is everywhere across this campus.

Meredith Metsker:

Next up in episode 22, which was another one of our most popular episodes of the year, I talked with Julia Vollrath of the University of Florida about how to use data to track and improve student engagement. Julia shared what specific data points her team is measuring and how they measure them, the most interesting things they’ve discovered in their data, how they’re using the results to adapt their career services offerings, including the timing of their events, how they create a narrative around their data, how they visualize their data, and how they share their data with other departments and leaders on campus.

Julia Vollrath:

One of my favorite things that we have done is our gateway data. This is something that we wanted to figure out how are students engaging with the center, so how can we tell the story of where a student first engages with the center and then the story of where they go next and what that journey through career looks like for them. We were able to use the data we’re already collecting, which is engagement data points. You’re thinking about career planning, you’re thinking about drop-ins, attending a career fair, things of that nature. But then it’s also looking at our online resource usage. That’s our simplicity system. That is what we call Chomp because we’re the Gators, but it’s Focus 2, and how students are engaging online as well because of the population that we’re serving now. So basically, we dumped all of that data into a Tableau and we’re able to look at that first point of engagement, that’s their gateway, that point of service, and then what happens next.

And that has totally changed the way that we look at our student services because we found out that our top three services are really large services. One is Focus 2, which is an online tech. So that’s a number one way that students are engaging are doing that career assessment. Then we have our career showcase, which is our largest career fair, happens in the fall and spring. And then third, we have workshops, which we include both ones that we host and outreaches. So ones that faculty, staff, or student orgs request. Those are three top services that students are getting their feet wet, if you will, when it comes to career, which is exciting because for us, that means that it is scalable. Scalable means that it’s not one-on-one. There’s no way that we could have 60,000 students here at the University of Florida and serve them in a one-on-one capacity. So to see that we’re already doing work where they’re getting their needs filled in a scalable way was great news for us.

Meredith Metsker:

In episode 23, I talked with Jackie Warner of Thomas Jefferson University about how career services professionals can support neurodivergent students. Jackie is a career services leader and former special education teacher with a master’s degree in severe autism. She regularly speaks on neurodiversity-related topics and offered a ton of helpful tips, advice, and best practices in this episode. Specifically, she shared what neurodiversity is, what unique challenges neurodivergent students face when it comes to career development, what accommodations career services teams can make for neurodivergent students, how to advise students on whether or not they should disclose to an employer that they’re neurodivergent, how to make programming more inclusive, and more.

Jackie Warner:

The biggest thing that we can all do is be an ally for all disabled students and just be there for them. If a student tells you, “Hey, I really need to take notes. Can you please take a break in between talking or talk slowly or just let me write that down?” Or, “I really need to edit this while you’re talking so can you give me a moment to fix that?” Or even, “Hey, I see you made notes on my resume. Could you email that to me?” Those are really easy things that students might ask for. And we might say, “Well, no. You’re an adult and that’s extra work for me.”

But we don’t know why they’re asking that. They could be asking that because they’re neurodiverse. They could be asking because they have anxiety. Maybe English is not their first language. That’s an easy accommodation we can make for all of our students is just listening to what they need and believing them. We don’t need to ask if they want us to talk more slowly, “Well, do you have an accommodation for that?” We don’t need to put that out there. We can just talk more slowly. And I know sometimes it can be a pain and it can make appointments longer or students might need to make more appointments with us, but at the end of the day, our purpose is to help students, and that’s one of the best ways we can help them.

So another thing that I struggle with myself is providing direct feedback. So limiting the flossing things. Don’t use synonyms or acronyms or things that maybe other people might not understand outside of the career services world or just in general. In Philadelphia, we call everything Philly. It’s not Philadelphia. It’s Philly. So if I go to someone who is not from Philly and they’re like, “I don’t know where Philly is. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I’m like, “Oh yeah, just get a job in Philly, in Center City over by this, that, and the other,” that might be how someone feels when we’re talking about something related to career services like a resume or a CV like, “What even is a CV? I don’t know what you’re talking about right now.” So that’s one way to do it as well.

An example that I used earlier in my presentation was, “You need to edit this bullet for clarity,” versus, “Well, I feel like this bullet doesn’t make the most sense in the world. Maybe we can tighten it up,” or, “Let’s get to the meat of things,” versus, “Let’s talk about this section of your resume.” So instead of using slang or things that you’re used to saying, just try to be as direct as possible because a lot of people who are neurodiverse may not understand what you’re trying to say, and people who are speaking English as a second language also might not understand what you’re trying to say. So again, it’s multiple populations that we’re assisting.

Meredith Metsker:

Next up in episode 24, I talked with Kerry Spitze and Steve Russell of Bowling Green State University about how their career services team and the entire campus are implementing life design and design thinking. Like Career Everywhere, life design is all about helping students think about their careers and life after college as early and purposefully as possible. To implement life design campus-wide, Bowling Green is taking a top-down approach with support from the university president and collaboration between different departments.

Steve Russell:

I think higher ed has been under fire for this kind of return on investment conversation, and my 2 cents on it is that there’s really a hierarchy of needs that a student has on a campus. And so when we have this mindset of trying to address ROI, a lot of people go to the career center. But a student has to be in a place to have those conversations and feel like they have a toolkit to do something with a connection that’s made for them. So when you think about implementing life design, I think it’s a deeper, more holistic answer to that ROI question where we’re setting up students to be successful in the spaces that we’ve traditionally hoped that they would be successful in without necessarily giving them the preparation they need.

Meredith Metsker:

In episode 25, I talked with Manny Contomanolis of Harvard University about how to become a thought leader on campus. Manny discussed why thought leadership is so important, and he provided strategies for becoming a thought leader, such as asking hard questions, leveraging external trends, and being a good storyteller. He encouraged career leaders to make time for thought leadership and to seek support from others in their network. He also emphasized the need for career leaders to stay up to date on external trends and to connect them to their institution’s goals and values.

Manny Contomanolis:

One of the tangible ways that thought leadership contributes to is the way the office and the team is positioned in the broader way that the university is thinking. For example, being pointed out as a center for excellence, as the office that accomplishes what needs to be done and does it well. All of these things influence funding support. They influence relationships and where career services can be involved or brought into discussions, especially when they go beyond just career services to impact and touch on other areas of university life. It’s that feeling of pride that the office feels collectively but that individual team members feel for being part of that organization. It frankly oftentimes helps you recruit talent to the organization because people go, “Wow, that’s one of the offices that if you can get into that office, that’s one of the offices you really want to focus on because they’re doing amazing work. They’re recognized by the university, they’re held with respect.”

Those are the kinds of things, the kinds of people, and the kind of organizations people want to be associated with. So you have those benefits as well. And so the impact can really be significant and well worth the time investment, so to speak, in doing some of these things, which I know as I talk about and people are like, “Oh my God, when am I going to do that? Doesn’t he realize that I have a two-person office?” And again, that’s all fair, but the reality is you have to work at it.

Meredith Metsker:

In episode 26, I talked with Kelli Smith and Lexie Avery of Binghamton University about how their team has engaged more first and second year students with career services. Kelli and Lexie talked about their four-phase strategy, why it’s so important to engage students early and often, and how they’ve increased first year engagement from 28% to 71%. The four phases of their strategy include awareness, exposure, engagement, and career planning.

Lexie Avery:

Phase 1 is really around that awareness piece. So the idea that students are just going to find the career center and know exactly what you do, even if you talk to them at orientation, even if you are the first stop on every admissions tour, it’s just not super realistic with all of the other noise and things that are happening. So that awareness piece. And so students being able to know where we physically are on campus and be able to know one to two things that we can do to support them is that initial phase 1.

Phase 2 is around exposure, so it’s us going into student spaces. It’s classes. It’s student organization presentations. It’s residential life programming. It’s things that students are already participating in and we’re invading and going into that space. Year 1 is really about us and really being intentional and having the ownership to get out there and create this culture that it’s normal to engage early and that it’s important to engage early. And all of this stress and anxiety that students think about really can go away when you engage early and you have those steps in place. Year 2, it’s a lot more onus on the student. In their first semester of their sophomore year, we want them to engage in some capacity, whether that’s coming into an appointment, whether that’s logging on reading blogs on uConnect, whether it’s using big interview, attending a program or event. So really just them taking that step to initiate on their own.

And then the last step is really career planning. Do they have an exploration plan? Have they taken a career exploration course? Have they met with a career consultant to talk about career planning? Have they attended a program around creating an action plan? Those sorts of things. That intentionality, so they’re going into their junior, senior year like, “I have a plan. I know who can help me. I have a plan I’ve explored.” And so that’s the breakdown, and we have metrics that we’re looking at for each phase along the way as well.

Meredith Metsker:

Next, in episode 27, I talked with Amanda Morgan of Washington State University about how WSU blends academic advising and career coaching. Amanda shared why and how WSU’s academic success and career center office is set up to blend academic advising and career coaching, how they’ve created an optional university 100 course for students that’s all about career exploration, how they train academic advisors across campus on how to have career conversations with students, how they use uConnnect’s Labor Market Insights module to help students with career exploration, and how they train academic advisors on how to use it in advising appointments, what advice she has for other career leaders who want to work more closely with academic advising, and more.

Amanda Morgan:

Naturally, these two conversations go hand in hand, academic advising and career readiness. I was just looking at a NACE report this morning from another meeting, and I want to say it was like 50% of career centers really see academic advising and career services as two different entities. And I can see why depending on university structure. But I think here at Washington State University, we really see those two conversations going hand-in-hand because oftentimes students are pursuing a specific academic plan because of the career that they’d like to see themselves in after graduation. And sometimes, that could mean that the students’ going off to graduate school, obviously, or maybe they’re doing professional school or they’re going to go into entrepreneurship.

There’s lots of different routes that a student can take. But I will say oftentimes, their academic journey to get there is vitally important. And the person helping them navigate that journey is oftentimes their academic advisor. So being able to really think of those two things as integrated and ensuring that our academic advising community has the tools to really be confident in those conversations is really important. I’ve also found within the colleges, oftentimes our advisors are really in tune with what’s happening within their college. And so if there’s an advisory board that has external stakeholders, and that could be possible employers, they’re really in tune with what’s happening within their college and they oftentimes know a lot more than they give themselves credit for when it comes to career engagement and career readiness. And so being able to say, “You’ve got this. You have all the tools. You’ve already been having these conversations, let’s just be a little more intentional about it.”

Meredith Metsker:

In episode 28, I talked with Dr. Ellen Awad of Hope College about how to help students connect their co-curricular experiences to career. Ellen shared why this is so important, how to help students articulate the skills and competencies they learn in these activities, the need for students to reflect on their co-curricular experiences and think about how they can apply what they’ve learned in different contexts, how career services can partner with student life to support students in making these connections, the common skills gained in co-curricular activities like communication, teamwork, conflict management, and goal-oriented thinking, and more.

Ellen Awad:

We live in an ever-changing world, and our workforce is changing and the demands related to all of that are shifting. And we’ve all been through a global pandemic now and we know sometimes you’re not expecting a shift or a change, and there it is. And so I think our graduates need to not only be well-versed in that thing that they studied, that they majored in, that they minored in, but they have to be able to function with other humans in this world, in this ever-changing world, in a way that they can take from one space to another, to a different setting, to a different context, and be more agile and I think creative in how they approach the work, and also have to be able to really apply what they’ve learned in their co-curricular experience in whatever work setting they eventually find themselves in.

Meredith Metsker:

And finally, in episode 29, I talked with Michael DeAngelis of the University of Pennsylvania about three ways his team is implementing Career Everywhere. Those three tactics include starting a Career Champions program, strategically sharing student stories, and producing the CS Radio podcast for the career center.

Michael DeAngelis:

We know that you are literally getting career advice everywhere. And so we are trying to embrace at Penn Career Services this idea that we want to partner with everybody at the university, give them tools to help have those conversations and make sure that we’re all on the same page. Everybody has the same understanding about how recruiting works, about how the graduate school application process works, all those sorts of things so that when they are talking with students, they have up-to-date contemporary advice and they know what resources are available to them and their students on the campus.

Meredith Metsker:

And that’s a wrap on this year’s recap episode. Thank you so much to all of you for listening to the podcast this year. It’s been an amazing year full of so many great conversations, and I hope you’ve all enjoyed listening to this podcast as much as I’ve enjoyed hosting it. Thanks again and we’ll see you in 2024.