Hundreds of career centers across the country are moving toward a Career Everywhere-focused model of career services because it’s a more effective and efficient way to scale their work.
Plus, it maximizes and increases awareness and engagement with career resources.
In this article, we’ll cover what Career Everywhere means and share seven strategies (with real-world examples) for how to make Career Everywhere a reality on your campus.
What does Career Everywhere mean?
In short, Career Everywhere is about embedding career in classrooms, across campus, and beyond so more students have access to the resources they need to build meaningful careers. It’s about scaling career services beyond the walls of the career center so faculty, staff, employers, alumni, families, and other stakeholders can all have informed career conversations with students should they need to.
Basically, it boils down to three key tenets:
- Engaging students with career resources before, during, and after college
- Providing truly equitable access to all students, 24/7/365
- Shifting the role of career services from provider to facilitator
“The work of career education and preparing students for success is the entire university’s role and responsibility. It’s not an office, it’s not a person. It’s about the entire ecosystem,” said Joe Testani, Deputy to the President (and former career services leader) at the University of Rochester.
Learn how uConnect’s virtual career center platform can help you implement Career Everywhere.
7 strategies for implementing Career Everywhere on your campus
There are many ways to make Career Everywhere the standard on your campus (and we see new strategies all the time!). But here are a few common ones we’ve seen career centers use effectively.
1. Use your website to consolidate resources and make them accessible 24/7
Not every student can physically walk into the career center. And sometimes, the only time they have available to take advantage of career resources is at 2 a.m. That’s why it’s so important for career services teams to make all their resources available 24/7, online, in a curated and easily accessible way.
In other words, don’t be the career center that makes already stressed students go on a scavenger hunt across different websites and web pages to find the important information they need to begin career exploration. Ask yourself how many clicks it takes to find certain resources.
Instead, consider pulling all of the resources you’re already paying for (e.g. Handshake, Symplicity, Candid Career+, LinkedIn Learning, Graduway, Forage, Vault, etc.) into a virtual career center where students can access everything with one login.
For example, the UMass Amherst Isenberg School of Management built their virtual career center (called IConnect) to include their career resources in one place—and they’re even curated by career and identity/affinity communities. On their Accounting career community page, students and other stakeholders can find jobs and internships, professional development resources, job market insights, Vault guides, virtual job simulations from Forage, LinkedIn Learning courses, articles, videos, and more—all related to accounting.
Delivering career resources like this is not only infinitely more effective (Isenberg increased engagement with their Forage simulations by 242% in the last year), but it’s also more accessible and equitable. Plus, it makes it easier for your colleagues across campus to access the full range of resources and opportunities available through your career center.
For more information on how to use your website to advance Career Everywhere, check out this article.
2. Expand your reach by empowering faculty, staff, and other stakeholders to evangelize career services
Faculty and staff are some of your biggest potential allies when it comes to implementing Career Everywhere. After all, they’re the ones most frequently interacting with students (and who students often instinctively turn to for career advice and guidance).
However, not all faculty and staff members feel comfortable advising students about their careers. And those who do may not have the most up-to-date recommendations or best practices top-of-mind like career center staff do.
Additionally, faculty and staff often simply don’t realize what (or how much) the career center does or know about the full range of resources, opportunities, and programming available.
That’s why many career centers have invested in developing programs that intentionally engage stakeholders across campus as a way to enable others to have meaningful career conversations with students. One of the most successful examples of this comes from the University of Connecticut, whose Career Champion program recently surpassed 1,000 faculty, staff, alumni, and employer participants.
Through regular trainings and events, a newsletter, a dedicated Career Champion resources page on their virtual career center, and more, the UConn Center for Career Development has created a campus culture of career readiness.
The Toppel Career Center at the University of Miami has taken a similar approach and built a fleshed-out resource page specifically for faculty and staff. On Miami’s Faculty and Staff Engagement Hub, visitors can sign up to be a Career Champion, view a faculty toolkit, request a workshop, explore job market data, view LinkedIn Learning courses, and more.
For more information about UConn’s Career Champion program, check out this initial podcast episode (January 2023) and this follow-up episode (February 2024).
3. Become a thought leader on your campus to elevate the role of career services
Career services professionals are in the perfect position to be influential thought leaders on campus and spread the message of Career Everywhere.
Serving as the bridge between students, employers, and institutions of higher education, career leaders are among the most in-tune with hiring trends, job market outlooks, in-demand skills, student strengths and weaknesses, institutional goals, and more. You can connect the external trends of the job market with the internal strategies of your career center and institution.
“You see evidence of this [thought leadership] when career services is brought into the discussions, when there is a perception in the community that, ‘Career services has something to say about this, and we should make sure we hear what they have to say,’” said Manny Contomanolis, Associate Dean for Academic Engagement at Harvard University.
When career services professionals are thought leaders on campus (and off!), they elevate the career center and ensure that career becomes a common thread throughout all aspects of the institution.
Learn more about how to become a thought leader on your campus in this article.
4. Partner with admissions and alumni offices
As we all know, career development doesn’t (or at least, shouldn’t) begin during a student’s junior or senior year. And it shouldn’t end when they graduate. Ideally, it should start before a student even steps foot on campus and continue after graduation.
That’s why it’s so critical for career centers to partner with their counterparts in the admissions and alumni departments to embed career in the pre- and post-student experience.
Here are a few ways to do that:
- Train admission/recruitment counselors to make career services a part of their recruitment pitch and get prospective students thinking about career right off the bat. If you’ve invested in a virtual career center (see No. 1), make sure they know about it and can show it to students and parents. Learn how Sharon Belden Castonguay does this at Wesleyan University in this article.
- If you happen to work in a graduate business/MBA environment, you can embed career services professionals into the candidate interview process. You could also add a member of the career services leadership team to the admissions committee and make sure a career coach or leader are present at admissions events. Read this article to learn how Toni Rhorer does this at UC San Diego Rady School of Management.
- If your career resources are easily accessible and don’t rely on in-person or face-to-face interaction (see No. 1), encourage the alumni relations department to promote your resources. In many cases, the needs of current students and recent graduates are relatively similar, so it might make sense to share a virtual career center (including the cost of a platform like uConnect to make it happen). Check out this podcast episode to hear how Emily McCarthy of the University of Arizona partners with the alumni team to share a virtual career center.
When career services partners with admissions and the alumni office, it sets students up for success early and helps them transition into the workforce after graduation. Win-win!
Plus, sometimes these partnerships can also lead to a boost in enrollment. Just ask the team at Illinois Institute of Technology, who drove their highest enrollment in about 40 years after they centered their recruitment strategy around career readiness.
5. Engage parents and families directly with career services
Parents and families are some of the most influential people in your students’ lives when it comes to career. And there is likely no one more invested in a student’s success than their family members. So it makes sense to make sure they’re aware of the resources and programming your team offers so they can use them to counsel their students with the most up-to-date information.
Many career centers engage parents and families by including them in communications (often via email). This is a reliable way to disseminate information in a way that’s most likely to reach the target audience.
Some career teams, like the one at the University of Pennsylvania, also try alternative, creative routes. For example, Michael DeAngelis, the Senior Associate Director of Communications and Technology at Penn, hosts and produces a popular podcast for his career center called CS Radio. With over 200 episodes, the podcast features career-related discussions and interviews with students, faculty, staff, alumni, and more.
While many students come into the career center after listening to an episode, DeAngelis said the podcast is also popular among parents. Learn more about CS Radio in DeAngelis’ episode of the Career Everywhere podcast.
6. Embed career into the classroom
In most cases, a trip to the career center is not a requirement for students (as much as we might like it to be!). So it’s extra important to build partnerships with faculty (see No. 2) and find ways to work with them to embed career development into the classroom.
For example, in an effort to engage more students with career services (and earlier in their college careers), the University of Oregon Lundquist College of Business career center partners with faculty to add career-related assignments to three core business classes.
The assignments, all asynchronous and requiring no live class time, are sprinkled throughout:
- BA 101: Introduction to Business (a freshmen-level class)
- BA 240: Spreadsheet Analysis and Visualization (a sophomore-level class)
- Marketing 311: Marketing Management (an upper-division class)
That way, by the time business 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.
“It’s a way for us to signal as a college that we feel this is so essential to your education that we are embedding it into these core classes and assigning points to it. We’re using the incentive that we have trained them to cue into, which is points in a class,” said Jessica Best, Director of Career Strategy for Mohr Career Services. “We can ensure everybody at least has equal access to it and then they can make the choice whether they want to engage or not.”
Best says about 90% of students engage with the career assignments, and her team frequently surveys the students to get their feedback on the program and track their progress.
Similarly, at the University of Arizona Global Campus, career leaders Matt Phillips and Rebecca Davis work closely with faculty to embed Candid Career+ videos into class assignments. Learn more about how they do this in their episode of the Carer Everywhere podcast.
7. Engage students as early and as often as possible
This is the big question: How can career services teams engage students earlier? Too many students wait until the final semester of their senior year to visit the career center (or virtual career center) or even begin thinking about what life after college looks like.
This is something that the Binghamton University career services team has been focusing on the last several years. Specifically, they’ve developed a four-phase strategy to engage more first- and second-year students with career services.
The results? They’ve increased first-year engagement from 28% to 71%.
The four-phase engagement strategy includes two phases for freshman year and two for sophomore year. The first two phases are all about building awareness around career services and exposing students to career early and often. The second two phases put more of the onus on the students.
The four phases include:
Phase 1: Awareness
In phase one, the career team works to build awareness (outside of normal things like speaking at orientation or being a stop on an admissions tour). They leverage partnerships with academic advisors and groups like Residential Life. They have Student Career Influencer interns who weave career services into fun, creative experiences on campus.
Phase 2: Exposure
Phase two is about career services going into student spaces to meet students where they are and expose them to the career center. The career team goes into classes, presents to student organizations, participates in Residential Life programming, and more.
Phase 3: Engagement
Phase three is about encouraging students to engage with career services in some capacity, whether that’s coming into an appointment, reading blogs on Binghamton’s virtual career center (powered by uConnect), using Big Interview, or attending a program or event. It’s about students taking that step to initiate contact on their own.
Phase 4: Career planning
The last step is all about career planning. Do students 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? It’s about encouraging students to enter their junior and senior year with intentionality and a plan.
Conclusion
Career Everywhere is about making career services accessible to anyone, anywhere, anytime. It’s about expanding career development beyond the walls of the career center and enabling anyone across campus (and beyond) to have a meaningful career conversation with a student.
If you’d like to learn more about different strategies and tactics for implementing Career Everywhere, here are three ways to be a part of the conversation:
- Subscribe to the weekly Career Everywhere newsletter
- Listen to the Career Everywhere podcast
- Join the Career Everywhere digital community
uConnect has helped more than 200 institutions develop a culture of Career Everywhere by ensuring career services is accessible to anyone, anywhere, anytime. If you’re interested in learning more, contact our team.
