Scaling Engagement with Career Services in a Business School Environment

Ashley Safranski:

We’re going to get started. Good afternoon everyone, and welcome. My name’s Ashley Safranski, and I lead marketing here at uConnect. I really want to thank folks for taking an hour out of their day just to join us on this super important and timely topic, I think of Scaling Engagement with Career Services in a Business School Environment. We’re super lucky to be joined by two fantastic leaders, Toni and Gene. And I’m going to let Toni and Gene introduce themselves. So Toni do, do you want to get us started?

Toni Rhorer:

Yes, thank you, Ashley. Hi everyone, it’s so great to be here today. My name is Toni Rhorer. I am currently the executive director of the Career Management Center at the Rady School of Management at UC San Diego. And I have been in this role just over a year. In my previous roles. I’ve been in higher ed career services, started about 23 years ago. I’ve worked with solely undergrad populations in private women’s colleges, large universities, and I’ve spent the majority of my career with business schools. And I’ve worked previously for the Duke MBA Career Management Center. And I spent 10 years at Arizona State University, eight years with W.P. Carey School of Business. So nice to see some of my former colleagues, hello, April, on the call today. And a lot of the scaling and what I’ll talk about today, a lot of that work started at Arizona State. The business school there is the largest business school in the country with 16,000 undergrads and about 1,500 grad students. And I’ve brought that over to the Rady School. And we have a smaller population here, it’s only graduate business students, a little under 1,000 students we have, but I have a much smaller staff, so scaling engagement is still very important to us here at Rady School. Nice to see you all.

Gene Rhee:

Hey, good afternoon everyone. My name is Gene Rhee, I’m the executive director of Mohr Career Services, which is the career center for the Lundquist College of Business at the University of Oregon. Go Ducks. Just really quickly on my background, I’ve been in career services for about 13 years now. Started off at Georgetown’s MBA career center, and then moved west to Pomona College. So I left MBA, went to liberal arts undergrads for a short while, and then to Chapman University in Orange County, California, back to the business school, working with undergrads as well as graduate students. I took a bit of a left turn, I left higher education, at least the institution side, and I went to work at a ed tech company called VMock, some of you might have heard of that, it’s a resume-improvement platform, but then decided, “Hey, I want to get back to students.” And so came to the University of Oregon five years ago. So I’ve been leading the team here at the University of Oregon’s Business School Career Center. And it’s been a fantastic time, and looking forward to today’s conversation.

Ashley Safranski:

Excellent. All right, thanks you two and just thanks so much again for joining us. And I know my colleague Zach was in the chat, just Toni and Gene are also great uConnect partners, so we appreciate them, and he wanted to throw their links to their platforms in the chat in case you’re curious. So I think it’s important to set up this whole entire conversation with some definitions, or at least how you two think about defining certain things. So I think the first would be, how are each of you either defining or thinking about engagement, what does that mean to you?

Toni Rhorer:

I think it’s a super important question, because I think as we all talk about the work that we do and we think about the metrics and the data, it’s very hard to measure something if you haven’t really defined it first. And as I mentioned, I’ve been in career services for a very long time, so I think that has changed over time. And I do think there are still a lot of traditional places that define engagement with the career office as one-on-one career appointments, or maybe workshop attendance. And I think, as I think about engagement, I would broaden that definition to be any engagement with career content, career staff, career capability. So whether it’s a faculty teaching resumes in a class, that’s engagement with a career competency. And so I think we need to look broader at engagement, and we’ll talk about the scaling of that, but I think defining it broader is important because not everyone needs a one-on-one appointment or not everyone can come into a one-on-one appointment, but they could engage with your content through an email newsletter or on your website or in other ways. And I think if we can capture that engagement in different ways, then we can show a broader impact that we’re having on students.

Gene Rhee:

Yeah, for me, it’s the million-dollar question, I think that many of us have been trying to figure out an answer. And similarly, it’s what keeps us up at night. Engagement, it could be defined as simply an opportunity to meet with a student. I think it’s how do you use that time, and I think if we can impart some knowledge, but also gain some knowledge in that interaction, as an advisor, you meet and you talk to a student, or in a class session you talk to a student and you impart some knowledge, but I think there’s an opportunity for us to gain some information from that experience from the students. And so I look at that as part of this idea of defining engagement.

And I think, Toni, what you’re saying about how things have changed, I think you’re spot on with that, where even when we look at our mission statement for the career center, we talk about leading this effort. That’s not just all of our responsibility in the career center, because I mean, let’s be honest and real, these conversations are happening everywhere. Just like uConnect talks about Career Everywhere, that’s the truth, it is happening everywhere. It’s not just the career center, it’s not just our events. And so how can you start to look at that in its totality to figure out what the engagement means? And so Toni, I totally agree with what you’re saying there and how to define it. And I’m sure we’ll get into a little bit more details of what that is, but at a high level, that’s what I think about.

Ashley Safranski:

Yeah, that’s such an important call-out too, Gene, about how are they engaging with the career services team and related resources specifically, but how the broader ecosystem at your institution and where you know career conversations are happening, I think it’s a really important call-out, like I mentioned. So what about this element of scale? What does scale mean? Scaling can mean different things to different people, or based on what your goals or what you’re trying to address. Can you touch on just this element of scale as well?

Gene Rhee:

I’ve got a pretty simple definition I suppose, it’s how do we increase whatever that output is? And if we’re talking about engagement, how are you increasing that at a faster pace or doing better than what your resources allow? And when we talk about career services or anything in higher education, we will never be appropriately resourced, we will never have enough to manage all the students. I think about Toni and ASU 16,000, you’re giving me nightmares, so I’m going to stop thinking about that, but you’re never going to have that. So I think it’s imperative for us to thinking about what are the different resources or ways that we can get information into the hands of students. So you start thinking about technology, you start thinking about influencers, people who can share your message, one to many as opposed to just one on one, because that’s just impossible.

Toni Rhorer:

Yeah, I think I would add onto that, totally agree, that when we’re looking at scale, we’re trying to find a way to get all of the information and all of the content and all of the support to every student. And how do you do that if you have five people? I mean, I’ve talked to people who are the only person in their career center, one person, how do you do that if you’re just one person or five people, or even if you’re 30 people, but you have thousands and thousands of students? And so that’s where the scaling comes in, where you have to really think about how are you trying to engage the students, what do they need, what’s the content they need, what’s the support they need, and then how can you do that in an efficient way that makes it accessible for everyone at any point in time?

So just like what Gene mentioned as well, like using technology, how do we use that better in a way to get that information to students when they need it, and not just 8:00 to 5:00 when the office might be open. So I think in terms of scaling, because agreed, we’re never going to be fully resourced, otherwise you would need a career advisor for every student, they all need that help. But limited staff, limited resources, limited budget, how are you going to do more with what you have? And I think if you are really intentional about the scaling and how you do that, then you can reach all of those students in a way that is impactful to them.

Ashley Safranski:

Yeah, absolutely. Actually, I think Toni, that sets up my next question for you specifically. I know that you have a pretty defined or specific engagement model that you leverage at Rady School of Management and you’ve used previously. Can you give an overview of that?

Toni Rhorer:

Yeah, sure. So again, it started with defining engagement and helping people understand that engagement goes beyond the one-on-one appointments. And in thinking about that, the thought process was what are core career capabilities that all students need? So what are the things that we might be delivering one-on-one to students, but we’re telling them the same thing? And so it’s like, “Over and over, how can we scale that so we don’t have to tell every individual student that?” And so we think about four career capabilities, like resume writing, cover letters, interviewing, job negotiation, all those core career skills that students need, and then find a way to deliver those to the masses. So workshops is one way, group engagement, you can get more students more times. Now that we can do things hybrid or online, we can even reach more students at different times of the day and different days of the week. Deliver the content on your website. So this is one place where uConnect is really beneficial to us, is that we have built those career-skill communities on our website and all of the content goes there. So if a student needs resume help at midnight on a Friday night, they can get all of that information on the website. So anything that is a core skill that everyone’s going to need a foundation in, find a way to deliver that at a group scale.

And then you have some needs that are more targeted. So for example, we teach everyone about behavior-based interviewing, but our masters in business analytics students need to know how to do technical interviews, and that’s not something everybody needs. So we look at a way to deliver that content in a way that we can reach that whole group. And so typically we do that, we could do a targeted workshop, so we could do interview technical interviewing workshop, or we partner with the club. So we have a data analytics club, we might partner with the club to bring in a speaker or to do a workshop for the club members, or we might bring in alumni and do a technical interviewing panel. But again, we’re reaching a smaller audience that’s targeted, but it’s still at the group scale.

And then when we get to the one-on-one coaching, what we’re really trying to do is use that limited time for really high impact conversations around a student’s career strategy, around their very targeted job search, patience, things like that. So that the limited amount of one-on-one time my coaches have, they can spend that really helping the student individualize their approach, and all of the other things we have a way to deliver at a broader scale. So that’s how we’re looking at it and trying to make sure that we can reach all students for at least those foundational skills, and then use the more individualized time to build on that.

Ashley Safranski:

Yeah, I think that’s an important, I think maybe not in all cases, but when we think about scale and big group sessions and websites, and it’s certainly not about one-on-one appointments aren’t valuable or worthwhile, but how can they have deeper meaning? And I think that’s really key. I did want to ask, because both you and Gene had mentioned this idea of limited resources, understaffed, and in your engagement model, Toni, a lot of the group workshops and things like that, the top two tiers, don’t necessarily require more, but if you are looking for an additional resource, and in your case it was uConnect, how did you go about getting buy-in to fund something that would allow you to have that scaled impact?

Toni Rhorer:

First of all, I’ll say when I was at Arizona State, we launched uConnect there. So I actually had some experience with it already before I came to Rady. But when I got to Rady, my first step was to really assess what was going on here. And they were in the middle of revamping their website, but what I came to quickly understand was that the audience for the website is prospective students. And so that happening gave me a good foundation to go to my leadership team, to my dean. I built a deck for them starting with what are the problems we’re trying to solve, which included, I think a problem that a lot of places have, which is so many different resources and so many different places, and how do you bring those all together to make it so easy for students to find what they need?

So that was happening here at Rady, we had Handshake, we had 12twenty, we had online resources somewhere in a library here, somewhere on a website here. So that was one easy problem to present. In addition, I think COVID gave us all a bit of a foundation to ask for this type of resource, because once we weren’t in the office anymore, how did students find us, how did they find the information? They couldn’t stop by and pick up a copy of your resume template or handout on interviewing. So being able to show the importance of having this 24/7 digital career center was again a really good sell.

In addition for programs like mine and probably Gene’s, I’m not sure, we have flex students. So we have students who come on the weekends and who come in the evenings, and they’re not here when the office is open. So again, a really good way to highlight the need for something that’s not just a website and not just housing something, but something that’s dynamic and changing where we can also advertise other opportunities and events and things that are happening. So I went to my leadership team with that information, “Here’s what I’m looking at, here’s the solution. I’ve used it before, I know what it can do. And here’s what it’s going to cost.” And I was able to present that, and also I’m very lucky that my leadership team was really supportive.

Ashley Safranski:

Yeah, that helps. Yeah, awesome. Thanks, Toni. Gene, I know that you and your team leverage a really unique program to help support engagement efforts. Can you speak to that and introduce that for us?

Gene Rhee:

Yeah, I’d to. I love what the team has built, and I’m excited to share about it with you. And I don’t know, hopefully by the end there might be a few people on the call who might feel comfortable and maybe a little bit more confident to move in this direction, because I mean, we have a team of 10, and I understand that there are plenty of people on the call who look at that number and wish that they had even half of that, and I think that’s the reality. And I know Toni brought that up before about one-person shops. So to talk about, basically we’ve built a career requirement for our undergraduate students. And this year alone, we’ve engaged 3,820 students through that requirement. And it’s all asynchronous assignments built into three core courses, and it leverages technology to do much of that.

And so when I talk about three core courses, so these are courses that every single Lundquist student has to take regardless of your concentration or what you want to focus on, they’re courses that every single student must take. And so we are integrated into our VA 101 class, our VA 240, and our Marketing 311. And so basically students are getting career-readiness activities in their first year, their second year and their third year. And so as career services professionals, I think everyone understands, it’s like the gym, you can’t go once and declare yourself fit. And if anyone has figured that out, please let me know, because trying right now and it’s not working. So the repetition is really important. And so yeah, you need the repetition to build this sort of career muscle as it were.

All of this is really managed by one person and several student staff, and it’s integrated into our Canvas, which is our learning management system. And I talked about some of the technology platforms that we’re also leveraging there. And I can share a little bit more about assignments as we progress through the meeting. But yeah, so that’s basically what we’ve got, and the outcomes I think have been fantastic. Students are telling us, 76% said that they would not have done these activities had it not been for this program, three out of four students are doing stuff, and I think that number is incredible, I love it. It’s a required thing, and 77% are saying that they would recommend it to a friend, and it’s required. So I think we’ve figured something out that’s working well for our students. And again, I understand that it’s not for every school, it’s not for every program, and there are lots of potential challenges and things to overcome. But yeah, I’m excited about the way that we’re able to share career education with our students in this way.

Ashley Safranski:

Yeah, those numbers are remarkable, Gene, I think that’s a number of students who may not have ever engaged with your office. I have a couple of follow-up questions for you. Faculty are an elusive group, I think that many career centers would say it can be difficult or challenging to engage with. Can you speak a little bit deep into how you went about getting the buy-in from the faculty or department chairs, or whoever you needed to, to get these courses required and embedded within those courses?

Gene Rhee:

Yeah, I think it comes down to a few things, just strong relationships, a little bit of understanding, compassion, empathy for faculty, and then also just options. So I’ll dive a little bit deeper into those. So I think we have strong relationships with faculty on our team, and those have been built long before I got here. And I think that was huge. And I think for anyone on the call that’s thinking about this, just being able to map out your own relationships around the college or the institution, I think is important to do, just to know who are your advocates and who are the ones that you can go to. So the relationships were number one. I think also understanding from your faculty what are things that are possible, what are things that are absolutely deal-breakers. And I think one thing I’ll just mention for us is class time, forget it, it’s not going to happen. If we ask for class time, we’re on terms, quarters, we have 10-week quarters, they have so much information to pass to students. And this is where the understanding, compassion, empathy, I’ll put that together.

There’s so many reasons to, what’s the word? Get annoyed or upset about, “Why can’t we do X, Y, or Z?” Working with faculty. And I get that, I understand. I think in this situation it’s just knowing what are the limits, what are the things that we can and can’t do, and I think for us, that was one. And so that’s where we come up with options. What are the different things, what are the different possibilities of a requirement? So we came up with three different options and presented them to the department heads and the dean. So it’s helping them to feel as though it’s like, “It’s only this way or nothing.” So it gives them a little bit more autonomy, a little bit more say in the matter, I suppose. It opens up discussion.

And then the last, tied to the relationships, I think, our dean, she at the time, we have a new dean now, but fortunately he’s fully on board with what we’re doing, she had a saying of well-educated and career ready. And I’m sure half the people on this call probably have the same saying from their institution, but she really believed that, and she walked that talk. And I think she also played a role in, “Hey, let’s have the conversation.” So I remember distinctly having a meeting with faculty, department heads, the dean, several associate deans and presenting, “Hey, here’s what we’d like to see happen. Let’s have the conversation.” And that opened up the doors for us to move in this direction.

And then it was phasing this out. We didn’t start with three, we started with one, and we piloted that, and we chose our biggest advocate, because that was going to give us maybe the best chance of success. Yeah, and then that was successful, fortunately. And then we built out a second one, built out a third, and this was all in conversation with our Undergraduate Programs Committee. And so honestly, at this point, it’s as official as it’s going to get, and it’s part of the curriculum. Oh, and I forgot to add that it’s weighted as part of the grade for these courses, which honestly I wasn’t even expecting or asking, but I think the faculty members felt as though, “If it’s that important, it’s part of my class.” I wanted to make it a little bit more official. So it’s 3%, 4% for another. One of them is maybe up to 10%, which is incredible, but yeah.

Ashley Safranski:

Yeah, that’s great. There’s a question that came through, and perhaps, Toni, you may have some thoughts on it too, given that you exclusively serve graduate students, but I think related to your initiative, Gene, there’s a question about, “What about for graduate students?” I believe the courses that you’re speaking to are for undergraduate business students, but any thoughts on how that type of initiative could perhaps be modified or implemented in a graduate business environment?

Gene Rhee:

Yeah, so our program is for undergraduates. We still have the thought of what it might look like at a graduate level. We engage our graduates in career education in different way, we work with them pre-matriculation with assignments before they get to campus, and then we’re integrated into orientation. We also have other partners within the college. We have four centers of excellence that do an incredible job of offering programming on the career-education side, as well as the getting speakers and experiential learning opportunities. So there are just different program elements at the graduate level than the undergraduate level. And our college is 95% undergrads, and so I think we started with that larger population. So I guess all that to say those conversations are TBD and what that might look like, but right now it is for the undergraduate population.

Ashley Safranski:

Yeah, that makes sense. Toni, do you have anything, maybe even just speaking to engaging faculty in general?

Toni Rhorer:

Yeah, definitely. I think it’s a challenge here at Rady, we do not have any required career courses, and to get a required course in a graduate program takes a lot of work, so it’s mostly not going to happen. So the one thing I would say, to Gene’s point on the relationships, I think what it comes down to is career center staff need to be really influential. I think you can’t assume that faculty understand the work that we do or how we think about it or why we think it’s important. I think most of them, of course do think that getting jobs is important and all of that, but I think being able to really talk to them, maybe do a road show, get in a faculty meeting, find the influential faculty so that you can explain to them what the strategy is, what the engagement’s like, why you’re doing this. And then I think it would really be up to you to find out where are the natural synergies.

So I’m not going to go to, I don’t know, a data analytics professor and say, “Can I come talk about X, Y, Z career stuff?” I’m going to look at the curriculum and see where there are some natural opportunities for us to insert some content. So a good example is we have a master’s in finance program, and the executive director teaches a professional seminar course, and he brings in people, high CEOs of finance companies, to talk about their own career path. And so we are able to get one of his class times to talk about interviewing. And so it’s a required course, we’re able to come in and do an interviewing prep workshop for everybody in the class.

So there may be other courses, I know some programs have a communications class, or there may be other parts of the curriculum where you can see a natural synergy with a career topic. And so then you could influence the faculty to maybe either let you come in, but like Gene said, it’s often hard to get face time because they have so little face time with students, but maybe an assignment is something to do with career or something like that. So I think really working with your faculty to help them understand what our strategy is and how we’re working with students, but then how can you do that? And I think it’s maybe because they’re the faculty, people might rely on them to come up with the idea, but I think if you could go to them and say, “Here’s the class you’re teaching, and here’s where I think we could embed some of this that would be beneficial to students,” but it’s also serving their purpose as well, that seems to be working on some levels here.

Gene Rhee:

Yeah, I think one thing I did fail to mention is, so our MBA population has an MBA seminar, that it’s gone through some changes, so we have interacted with the instructors and the faculty who are overseeing that seminar, and we’ve worked with them to build career education into those. And that’s, again, it’s gone through some different iterations, but basically a weekly one to two-hour seminar that all the MBA students are participating in. And then I would also just look at what are the curricular elements. If you’re not looking at curricular, then what are the curricular ways in which you could figure out how to talk to the people managing those programs or those sessions to embed, as Toni was suggesting, embedding these kinds of activities or just nuggets of career into some of those areas? Yeah.

Ashley Safranski:

Yeah.

Toni Rhorer:

And one other quick thing that Gene made me think of is using the technology, our programs all have Canvas pages, and the executive directors allow us to have career content on the Canvas site as well. So even though it’s not an assignment or whatever, we can put content there also for the students.

Ashley Safranski:

Yeah, that’s great. I think this all flows into the next question that I wanted to ask. And you both really have mentioned this theme of, Toni, I love how you said it, be influential, and be comfortable with that and telling your story. Can you both dig into how you were partnering with other stakeholders in your college? And I know we talked about faculty specifically, and Gene, you started to mention some of the co-curricular ways, but I’d love to dig into that just a little bit if you have advice or thoughts.

Gene Rhee:

Yeah, I talked a whole bunch last, Toni, do you want to go ahead?

Toni Rhorer:

Sure, I can jump in. Again, I think at the graduate business level, it’s a little bit different than what you would find at the undergraduate level in some areas. We partner really closely with admissions. I think if anyone heard the uConnect podcast where we talked about that, it’s really important because we have small programs, that whatever students we’re bringing in, those are the students that we work with on the career side. So having a voice with admissions is really helpful and we work really closely with them. We also do a lot of events with them, webinars, yield events for new admins, or preview days for prospective students. We do a lot of that, because when people think about coming and spending over $100,000 to get a degree, they want to know that there’s some return on their investment afterwards. So having the career team there to share that is really helpful.

We work a lot with our student affairs team who are responsible for the student journey, everything that happens while they’re in the program, we work really closely with them. We work really closely with our alumni of course, because some alumni want to work with us because they need a job, but also they have great insights and advice for students. So bringing them into the clubs, into panels, speakers, things like that. And then I mentioned before, we do work closely with our student clubs, and trying to help them enhance what they’re doing. We have a model where we work with the students. I have one coach and one of our employer-engagement staff assigned to every student club so that we can work closely with them either on helping present career content, or connecting them with employers if they want to bring people in to speak or do panels. So we work with lots of stakeholders. We work with also, besides faculty, all of our internal departments, like marketing and finance and IT and all of those. And then we also collaborate with our undergrad central career center, as well as our engineering school and our global policy and strategy schools have career center. So we often will collaborate together on events and different things there too. And also our International Student Scholars Office, there’s so many people.

Ashley Safranski:

There’s so many. Toni, are these relationships that, are you going out and having to start these discussions, are you seeking these out, are people coming to you? I’m just curious how intentional, or has it just always been this way, because I think in different scenarios, I think there’s just different situations where sometimes they’re in place and other times you just have to be super assertive and intentional about creating those, just starting discussions.

Toni Rhorer:

I think it’s both. I think there are just some natural synergies that happen. For me, it’s maybe a little bit different and maybe a little bit more of being intentional, because again, I’ve only been here a little over a year, but in that year, and besides myself, there are 12 staff positions, I hired nine people this year. So mostly my whole staff is new. And many of the other teams at Rady also have a lot of new people. So we’ve been the directors, we’ve been very intentional about trying to collaborate on more things. And then some things just happen naturally with the central career center, of course, we’re going to chat. But other things, when you think about what’s your strategy and what you’re trying to accomplish, then you could think about, “Who should I partner with to make those things happen?” And then some reaching out and making that happen.

Gene Rhee:

I think when you’re thinking about partnerships and with stakeholders, trying to influence students, one thing that comes to mind is thinking about when can you get in front of students and when is that the most impactful? And so for both undergrads and graduate students, I think before they even come to campus, maybe even before they’re deciding to come, how can you make an impact, how can you influence that decision? And so Toni, I present to potential students, prospects, and letting them know about how our team is going to help them with their career and their search. I think the other point is around orientation, and is there a way to set the tone early on with the students around either expectations, or sometimes with undergrads, it’s less about maybe expectations and more about just letting them know who you are, that you’re there and that you care. And I think for us, orientation at the undergraduate level happens differently. And I think that’s a nut we haven’t cracked yet. So that’s there for us to improve on, but at least at the graduate level, I think we’re very much ingrained into their orientation experience.

And I think student organizations, those are huge, because again, this moves into the idea of influencer space, how less one-to-one, but instead of one-to-many, and how can you as a career services professional or as a team work with people who can influence others, and I think student organizations is a way to do that. And I mentioned recruiting, admissions, we work with them, and then trying to do a better job of working with other stakeholders within the building who are doing industry stuff, because an incredible amount of stuff that’s happening and it’s awesome, and how can we communicate better, how do we collaborate better, and even coordinate. I think, yeah, I’d love to get to a place, and we just talked about this, I don’t know if it was earlier this week, on the team of coordinating better with other stakeholders and that more isn’t always better, because I think there’s fatigue amongst students, there’s so much stuff that’s happening. And so how can we coordinate with others so that it’s a richer experience? Maybe, I’m not saying less experiences and opportunities, but fleshing them out more fully as opposed to one-off here, one-off here, one-off here, and then students are like, “Okay, which one do I go to?” And I think that might be a frustrating experience for them. Yeah, so partnerships, those are some of the things I think about.

Ashley Safranski:

There are several questions before we get into the Q&A, and thank you to those who have submitted questions. Technology has been a theme, and Toni, you talked a bit about it, and of course I certainly don’t want to be too on the nose or anything, but I am curious if you both can speak to how you’re leveraging technology, or if there’s anything more to share as it relates to scaling engagement? Yeah, I’ll just leave it there.

Toni Rhorer:

Sure. So I think, again, back to that problem we were trying to solve, I think in career centers we have lots of different technology. So most places have some kind of career platform, Handshake or GradLeaders or 12twenty. So that’s one platform that we need students in, we use 12twenty, and that’s where students sign up for workshops, that’s where they see jobs, that’s where they make appointments, we need them in that system, but then we have online resources that we want them to go to, other vendors that we work with, like VMock or something like that. And then those are other platforms that they have to remember the URL to and their password and all of that. So which is why the uConnect platform is that good solution for us because of the integrations with all of those career platforms, with things like Vault and LinkedIn, and we use Graduaway for our alumni network.

So all of those things already being integrated in makes it so much easier for the student. And then it gives us one place to always send them. So instead of saying, “Go to 12twenty to set up an appointment, and go to this to mind your resume.” Sorry, my light keeps going on and off, or, “Go here to find this document,” we can always just say, “Go one place. This is the place you go, and then you can find everything.” And so I think leveraging that kind of technology, and I know not everyone can do that, not everyone has the budget for that, but for us, that has worked in getting people on the same page. And we just launched six months ago, so we are seeing increased numbers. In fact, I looked this morning, the first four months we were averaging about 850 users a month, and now we’re over 2,200. So I think we are seeing movement, we are seeing students use that information and being able to find what they need when they need it.

Ashley Safranski:

What they need when they need it is everything, you just summarize that. Anything to add, Gene?

Gene Rhee:

Yeah, I think technology is a huge part of the strategy, and I think it needs to be, I’m not just talking about my career center, but I think for everyone. And I understand it takes funds, and I think that’s a different conversation, which by the way, if you’re not leveraging donors, got to do it. So maybe, I don’t know. Actually, maybe that’s a different webinar if you have [inaudible 00:44:57].

Ashley Safranski:

Definitely another topic to dig into. Yeah.

Gene Rhee:

But I think the institution has a responsibility to, at a bare minimum, help with equitable access to resources. And the reality is that we have many students that, for a variety of reasons, don’t want to come to the career center, some of them can’t come to the career center. Think about how many of the students are working, or child care, or whatever the reason is, they can’t make it, we have an obligation to ensure that they have access to things. And without that technology, I don’t know how you do that, because I’m not going to be working at 10 o’clock at night in the career center.

So technology has been huge. We launched our uConnect platform on January, and I think the biggest for us, it was… Funny, Toni, you were talking about your websites for prospective students, I thought we were the only one, but that’s absolutely true. And that’s exactly what they said like, “The users were prospective students.” I said, “Well, that doesn’t really help me.” I mean, it does, we all want more students, of course we want students, but current students I think are our number one priority, and so how do we make that a better experience? And that was the biggest reason, but I think another reason was, how do we make that a better experience for the students? And the idea of personalization at scale for our students, that was it, like, “I’m interested in finance.” “Well, go to the finance page. You get all the finance alums from our PeopleGrove, you get all the jobs and internships from Handshake, you get the events all tailored for you.” That’s what the Gen Z student expects, and I think we need to meet them there. And if you don’t, as my daughters say like, “You’re from the 1900s.” I don’t want to think that way, I don’t want to be a career center from the 1900s, even the 2000s.

So it is a huge piece for us. And yeah, just like you, Toni, I mean, I looked up this morning, 384% increase in users in the month of January. January 2022 compared to January 2023, we had a 384% increase in users, 798% increase in page views. So I don’t know about anyone else, but I like that, it’s a good number. I love sharing that with the college, which I did, and getting emails back like, “Hey, that’s incredible.” And that’s what builds confidence with other stakeholders that, “Hey, they’re spending resources wisely, they’re spending their time wisely.”

Ashley Safranski:

You can show it. Yeah, I think-

Gene Rhee:

Yeah, and here’s the data to show that.

Ashley Safranski:

There was a question in the chat, first question, so I want to answer it. And I know that we spent a lot of time talking about defining engagement and scale earlier, so we’ll rely on the recording a bit for that, but maybe just briefly on how you think about defining success and what are the metrics used to monitor progress would be great.

Gene Rhee:

We have a dashboard, and it captures the last four to five years worth of data, and we have a lot on it. And I was actually asking Toni for advice for sure, like, “How do we narrow this down? Because there’s 100 rows.” Honestly, it’s a lot in some of the categories. We do just keep track of advising numbers and Handshake profiles and logins, we keep track of our fundamentals program. And I think the reason for us, we are engaging with all students through fundamentals, every single student, we are connecting with them through that. And so we still want to keep track of what does engagement look like in all these other services and programs, because we want to be good stewards of our resources and time. And so how do we look at things longitudinal for year over year, term by term, to have a better sense of, “Hey, why did that number drop? And is there an explanation?” At least have the conversation. And so having this dashboard has really helped.

And a new one for us is website and newsletter engagement, because now we have uConnect that is helping us with that. And we keep track of collaborations with faculty members, whether that’s allowing us to come in with guest speakers, or if faculty members are wanting us to come in to give a workshop on interviewing, whatever the case may be. And the newest one, which I’m super happy about the progress, honestly, need to figure out where we go from here, but it’s student engagement relative to college demographics. So an example of that is, “Hey, how many students that identify as Latinx are coming in for an appointment, relative to what percent do they make up of the college?” And so we’re looking at that number and the delta to see where are we doing better than others. And then I think the big question for us is, “Okay, what next from there?” But we’re doing it, I’m happy we’re doing it, it’s a start. So let’s go on from there.

Toni Rhorer:

Yeah, I can just add onto that. Yeah, I think the career office has a lot of data. And what I would challenge people to do is really think about, again, what are your goals, and what data makes sense to share with whom, and what’s the narrative that goes with it, because just giving people numbers doesn’t usually tell the story of what’s happening. So we do collect the regular things, like we monitor number of one-on-one coachings. We also look though, at distinct number of students that are coming in, because those are two different things. We of course look at our workshop attendance and who’s doing that. Just like Gene, we’re looking at who’s interacting with our system, who is uploading an approved resume, who’s giving us a status in the system? So all of those things, because they can help us see how students, and if students, are engaging with our office. We do look at the website engagement. uConnect does have lots of analytics, so you can look at the particular resources people are accessing, the particular pages, things like that. And that’s not something that we share out with people, but we use it on our team to inform the way that we’re putting content onto the website.

We also have a rubric for students, and this is something I realize is not really doable at a large scale, thousands of students, but we have something we started at ASU that I brought here to Rady, is we do a red, yellow, green status for every single one of our students each month. And there we have two dimensions on that. One is, are they engaged with career in any of those forms, and how focused are they in their career goals? And based off those two dimensions, the coaches put each of their students in a red, yellow, green status. And every month we share that information with the executive director of the program. And we share all of those metrics, the coaching, the workshop, attendance, the resumes, and we share that so that they can see overall how their students in their academic program are engaging or not engaging. And then we can use them as influencers to help us get the students coming into the office or using the resources and that sort of thing.

So those are some of the things that we’re externally putting out. We have other things internally that we use more for decision-making and things like, I think Gene mentioned the website data, things like that, you can use to then take to your leadership to support the money and the budget to continue that or to bring that on. So we’re definitely looking at those types of things. Some to help people understand what students are doing, but other things to help inform our decisions around resources and staffing and all of that type of thing.

Ashley Safranski:

So many resources, so much data. Yeah, but I love this idea of simplify, what are you sharing, and with whom, and how are you sharing it? And even, Toni, how you’re taking so many various data points and simplifying it and distilling it into red, yellow, green. So you’re not asking people to synthesize the data on your behalf. We probably have time for one more question. Super last question, any advice on how to increase attendance to workshops? I think that’s probably a common question.

Gene Rhee:

I would tie it, find your anchors, who are groups, it could be a student club, maybe there’s a class, how can you find a group of students to be the anchor for that event? I think this idea of one-off events, if it’s a well-known organization, yeah, you’re not going to have any problems, otherwise I think there’s just a lot going on at the institution, and there’s so many choices. So I would try to find this anchor group of students that you can get to come and be the core of an event.

Toni Rhorer:

Yeah, real quickly to add onto that, I agree, I think if you can find the students who are influential with their classmates and employ them to help you, that goes a long way. I think sometimes incentives help. We often have our workshops at lunch or at five o’clock, so we try to offer food because we know students have one hour to get lunch, and they don’t have time to go get lunch and come to a workshop. So if we can offer food, we do that. And then I think the last thing I would also say is, I think there’s a real shift away from this idea of just telling students what they need to do, and really helping them understand why it’s beneficial to them. So I think that comes down to maybe the marketing of what it is you’re trying to do, to help students understand how it’s going to help them, versus like, “Just come because you need to know how to do this,” but really helping them see, “Here’s how it’s going to benefit you, and here’s how it’s going to help you.”

And the other thing that we try to do on our workshops is really make them more applied, so students aren’t coming and listening to an hour lecture, but rather, “Can we deliver 20 minutes of content, and then give students a chance to practice whatever it is we’re doing?” So those are some ways. And we find that if we offer it hybrid, we get more attendance. We’ve been trying to do everything on campus, to get people back on campus, but we have noticed the fully in-person doesn’t get as many as the hybrid.

Ashley Safranski:

I’m not going to lie, food will get me to go to places too, so I think that’s good. I know we are one minute over. Toni, Gene, thank you so much. You two just dropped so many golden nuggets of wisdom, as I like to say, a lot of good secret sauce in there, so thank you. Is it okay if folks follow up with you on LinkedIn if I share-

Toni Rhorer:

Absolutely, yes.

Ashley Safranski:

Okay.

Gene Rhee:

Yes-

Ashley Safranski:

I’ll share your-

Gene Rhee:

… of course.

Ashley Safranski:

… LinkedIn profiles in the follow-up. So truly, thank you. I hope everyone has a great rest of your Thursday and a great end of the week and a fantastic weekend.