3 Ways to Improve Engagement with Gen Z Students

Meredith Metsker:

Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Career Everywhere podcast. I’m your host, Meredith Metsker, and today I’m joined by Hayley Hollenberg and Josh Taylor, both of the University of Kentucky, Gatton College of Business and Economics. Hayley is the employer relations manager in the Graham Office of Career Management, and Josh is the senior director of the Graham Office of Career Management. Thank you both for being here.

Josh Taylor:

Hello. We’re glad to be here.

Hayley Hollenberg:

So excited.

Meredith Metsker:

Awesome. Yeah, I’m so excited to have you both. Ever since we had our prep call last week, I’ve just been totally jazzed about this episode. So glad to have you both, and I’m excited to talk to you today about several things you and your team are doing to improve engagement with your Gen Z students. This is obviously something that’s very top of mind for every career services leader out there, and it’s always fun to hear how different career centers are evolving and growing to meet the needs of each new generation. But before I get into my questions on our topic today, is there anything else either of you would like to add about yourselves, your backgrounds, or your roles there in the Gatton College of Business and Economics?

Josh Taylor:

Goodness. Well, I’ll dive in. Meredith, thank you so much for joining us in conversation today. So I’ve been with the Graham Office of Career Management for about five years, was initially hired as the assistant director, today serve as the senior director, and while all of us in the office wear a few hats, one of the hats that I wear most prominently has to do with the curriculum integrations that we have. We’ll talk more about that, but I would say that as senior director, that’s where I get to put the bulk of my attention, is the way that we’re meeting students in the classroom.

Hayley Hollenberg:

Yeah. And just some background with me. So like Meredith said, I’m the employee relations manager. I am very new to this role and new to the world of career services. This role is brand new within our office, so I’ve been really helping Josh and the team forge the path on what this looks like. I started last July, so I’m coming up on one year, but all of my experience before this was in undergraduate recruitment. I worked in three different admissions offices over the years and I have a master’s degree focused in enrollment management. So really recruiting, retaining, and graduating students in colleges. And so I kind of bring that lens of I’ve always interacted with students who are younger than me and really trying to think about what engages them and what do they enjoy. And so I really bring that context and all that knowledge with me to this role.

Meredith Metsker:

Oh, I love that. I don’t know if I knew that about you, Hayley. That’s cool.

Hayley Hollenberg:

I love it. It’s a really fun field and I’m happy to kind of pivot and try some new things.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, I love that. It’s making me flash back to the beginning of my marketing career. I worked for a university and I worked in partnership with the enrollment management department, so I wrote all of the print collateral that went out to prospective students, the web copy, social copy, all that good stuff.

Hayley Hollenberg:

Oh, that’s awesome.

Meredith Metsker:

It’s good times. All right, cool. Well, before I get into my more specific questions, I do want to kick us off with a question I ask all of our guests on this podcast, and that’s what does Career Everywhere mean to you?

Josh Taylor:

For me, Career Everywhere is a philosophy that underscores the extent to which from a time a student arrives on campus to the time that they graduate, we want them to understand that their time as a college student is time to prepare, as we say here in the office, to learn who you are, plan where you’ll go, and get where you’re going. And that doesn’t just happen in the career center, that doesn’t just happen the final semester before you graduate, but from the time you arrive to the time that you leave, everyone around you, faculty, staff, your peers, there are so many windows of opportunity for you to begin to imagine where you’ll go and how you’ll get there. And the Career Everywhere philosophy, I think, underscores and makes quite clear that it’s a creative and fluid process. It’s not just one moment in time.

Hayley Hollenberg:

Yeah, I would have to agree with Josh, and even adding into how so many opportunities and experiences can really help you grow as a future professional. And one thing when I worked in recruitment that I tried to remind students was just even your involvement in a student club, that may not seem like professional development on the outside, it could be like an outdoor adventures club. Just because you are in that club doesn’t mean you aren’t learning skills that can help you grow into a professional later on. Like you’re learning how to maybe organize events, or how to herd a group of people, or how to market and recruit new members. And so just realizing that there are a lot of different ways for you to grow professionally and it’s not just always in the classroom or always in a career center. There’s a variety of ways that you can do it.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, I love that. I feel like maybe too often, students are afraid to participate in those things because there’s not that direct career link. They want to focus purely on academics or things like that. So I love that. That’s a good reminder that students are picking up those career-related skills all across campus. For me, I was in the marching and pep bands in college, and I learned a lot about leadership. I ran my own squad, we all learned drill together. And so I learned a lot about event planning, leadership, communication, things like that, just from being a band geek.

Josh Taylor:

A hundred percent.

Meredith Metsker:

All right, cool. Well now I want to dig into our topic today, which is, again, how you are improving engagement with your Gen Z students. So to start us off with some context, I know you all launched a new overall career services strategy four or five years ago now to acknowledge this needed shift towards Gen Z. So can you just tell me about that strategy, what it entails, why you needed it, any high level results you’ve seen from it and so on?

Josh Taylor:

Meredith, when I was hired a little over five years ago, I was at Morehead State University for the better part of a decade prior to coming to the University of Kentucky in career services before that. And when I came to UK, one of the reasons that the office was looking to really begin to evolve and innovate was precisely because of Gen Z. We know that prior to Gen Z, traditionally aged college students had been Millennials for quite some time, and it was around that window five years back when higher ed understood Gen Z is here. And so what does that mean? What does it mean in terms of capturing their attention? What does it mean in terms of preparing them for the world of work, and how can we do that in a fresh and intentional way, acknowledging that a new generational cohort is here?

And so when I was hired and arrived at Graham, that was really my primary task that I was charged with by the people to whom I reported. And so we got very intentional about doing really a brand refresh among other things that could really explain to our students what this office is, why we’re here, and what we’re meant to do.

And so we are an embedded career center in the Gatton College. That means that we exclusively serve the business students here at the University of Kentucky. And we have five undergraduate programs, accounting, econ, finance, management, and marketing. So we’re an embedded career center for our business students. The first thing that we did was come up with a guiding philosophy. It almost serves as a slogan, it’s tweetable. You can put it on a hashtag, but it takes complicated, if we’re being honest… Well, maybe, I don’t want to use the word complicated. It takes big, complex… That’s a better word. It takes complex career development theory and breaks it down to its most essential parts, which for us are these. We want to help students learn who they are, plan where they’ll go, and get where they’re going. We actually have that on a banner just outside in the atrium that guides students into our office. We want them to understand that’s what we’re here to help you do.

The other thing that we did is that we coined a hashtag, which is #WhatsYourStartDate, that’s a play on when a student graduates or even before they graduate, when they get a big internship, when they get a new job after graduation, hopefully after their friends and family tell them, “Congratulations,” we know that the usual next statement or question is, “What’s your start date?” And so getting back to that Career Everywhere theme, we want students to understand from the time that you arrive on campus, that’s a start date. From the time that you join your first club, when you get your first internship, these are all start dates that build one on the other, guiding you to your ultimate start date after graduation, which is to launch a career.

So we came up with that three pronged theory, learn who you are, plan where you go, get where you’re going. We got our hashtag. And then the last thing that we did to really revamp and strategically organize everything that we do was to come up with a four pronged lens of how we were going to deliver our services. And what we came up with was a philosophy of being the Graham office in four different ways. Graham in the office, Graham in the classroom, Graham virtually, and Graham away. And I’ll tell you what I mean by all of those.

Graham in the office. Well, that’s all the traditional things that a career center is going to do. The one-on-one appointments with a career counselor, career fairs, meet employer nights, all of the things that a career center has done for a long, long time, and all the vital fundamental things.

Graham in the classroom, and I know we’ll talk more about this as we go on, but how do we get the message of career readiness into classroom settings where students already are? And so in large part, that’s through adding career development courses into the curriculum. And we’ve been very intentional about that.

Graham virtually. Understanding that Gen Z is a very connected, plugged-in generation, and really have been for as long as they can remember, and so how do you make sure that you have resources and services that meet them where they are? Mobile first services, platforms that are open and available to them 24/7. We know that a student might start worrying about something in terms of getting career ready at 2:00 AM on a Tuesday, but our office isn’t necessarily open at 2:00 AM on a Tuesday, but our online hub is. And so we launched that in 2020. I’ll say more about that as we go.

And finally, Graham away. How do we make sure that students have opportunities beyond this campus? This comes through industry treks that we do throughout the region, showing them and bringing them and taking them to employers. We also launched a study abroad program in Paris, which I will, I think, get the chance to talk about more.

But these are all things that we did, all of these different initiatives, and it really has led to some measurable results, because we now have the four year data on all of this. I’ll stop talking there because I feel like I’ve maybe given a mouthful, but these are all things that we did beginning back in 2019, 2020 year. And like I say, we’ve got the data now to show where this all led, and it led to a lot of measurable, strong results.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. Talk about good timing for launching some of the virtual stuff too.

Josh Taylor:

Oh my goodness. So I can tell you, Meredith. So we partnered with uConnect to completely reinvent our online presence. And as it happened, our platform, which today we called Navigate, our platform was to launch in January of 2020. And there were a few delays on UK’s end in terms of getting all of the backend pieces ready. And as it happened, the platform was ready for complete launch in March of 2020, and we all remember where we were in March of 2020. So that was just a very, gosh, strange and yet powerful moment in time to really be able to deliver our services in a fresh and completely forward-thinking way. uConnect allowed us to do that, and we’ve been with uConnect for our online home ever since, and it’s been a fantastic ride.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, I love that. And I’ll for sure include a link to the Navigate platform in the show notes, so anyone watching or listening can go check that out because they have a very well-fleshed out platform. Hayley, is there anything you wanted to add about that before I move on to the next question?

Hayley Hollenberg:

I think Josh covered it completely.

Meredith Metsker:

Cool. All right. So that was some great context to get us started. So thank you, Josh. Now I want to dig into some of those individual strategies that you’re using to better engage Gen, Z.

Josh Taylor:

Sure.

Meredith Metsker:

So in our prep call, we talked about three of them. So the first was a popular career-focused study abroad program in Paris, the second was a professional development curriculum, and then the third was a kind of revamped web and social media presence. So we’ll dig into each of those, but I want to start with the study abroad program. So Josh, I know this is kind of your baby, so could you tell me more about that program and why you started it?

Josh Taylor:

I will. And Hayley, I want to just tell you, I love being able to look into the camera and see there, yes, your lovely Paris scenescape that you’ve got there. So I don’t think we talked about this actually previously, Meredith, but I’ll tell you. So I began my career out of… I graduated from the University of Georgia sometime ago, where I studied French linguistics, and my career goal was to be a French interpreter. And so that’s how I started off my career, actually even have, right here. So all those years ago, this was my little badge that I wore to show that that’s what I did for the company. So my role at the time, this is Josh in his early 20s, fresh out of college, I was positioned in Orlando working for EPCOT as well as a lot of training that I was taken to Paris to do for the French Nationals who come back and are the cast members at the France Pavilion in EPCOT, for anyone who’s been down to the [inaudible 00:15:19].

Meredith Metsker:

I was just there in late March.

Josh Taylor:

Were you?

Meredith Metsker:

So I know exactly what you’re talking about.

Josh Taylor:

Yes. So all of the cast members, as Disney calls them, in the World Pavilion are folks from that country. And so part of my role was to be able to go to Paris, work with the incoming cast members, make sure that their English was where it needed to be, make sure that just inter-culturally, from a communication point of view, from a behavioral point of view, from a company policy and company culture point of view, were ready to come to Orlando and engage with guests from all over the world. So it was a really fun time in my early 20s. And then from there, I transitioned to working for Rotary International, a global nonprofit. I worked for the education division there. I was headquartered in Montreal and Quebec City, so in French-speaking Canada. But this is all just a way of saying that before I got squarely into higher ed, I was very French-focused.

And so my time in Rotary, I was working for the education division, headquartered at a college in Quebec City called Laval University, French speaking University there, and that’s when I really realized, “Oh, higher ed is for me.” And so I’ve been in higher ed ever since. And so when I interviewed at Gatton, if I’m being honest, I think I was already pitching a “Let’s do a study abroad in Paris,” I think almost in my interview, because my time away from really having a connection to all things French, it had been some time since I had had that opportunity in a higher ed context, and I knew that Gatton specifically, the University of Kentucky broadly, had the resources in the way to make that happen.

And so I began building a study abroad program. It’s called Business Goes Global, and well, why Paris? Well, I already had the built-in interest in love and familiarity with Paris. But beyond that, Paris is the business hub for the European Union. It’s the largest business hub in all of Europe, home to more Fortune companies than anywhere else in Europe. And so given that we’re a business school, there was an obvious connection there to be able to take students to Paris and show them international business in the hub where it happens directly. Paris has a dedicated business center just west of the historic part of the city that’s just beautiful and it’s an amazing place. And so that’s where we go to take our students to take some required business courses. I teach one of them, CIS 300, and we were going to launch this, I think the initial plan was a little bit earlier than what happened, but of course, COVID, for all the obvious reasons, we didn’t get to launch this until 2022.

And so we’re about to do the third cycle that’s coming up. We did it in ’22, 2023, and in a couple of weeks, I will be heading out the door to take our third cohort. We blend career development into everything that we do. Of course, the course that I teach is a career development capstone course, but we’re very intentional in making sure that all the ways that we show students Paris, we bring it back to career. So for example, we’re going to do all the cultural and historic things that students want to do in Paris. We take them to the Eiffel Tower, we take them to the Palace of Versailles, which was the home of the French monarchy before the French Revolution.

But let’s use Versailles as an example. When we talk in the classroom about the importance of personal and professional branding, I give them the back story on how King Louis XIV, Louis XV, Louis XVI had branding at Versailles. Louis XIV was known as the Sun King, and he was basically doing logos before we knew that’s what they were going to be called. And he’s got little sun icons throughout the palace to remind France that he was the Sun King. So he was doing branding from way back. And so we make these little bit of a sense of humor, sometimes a wink and a nod to, “Hey, if we’re going to take you to the Eiffel Tower, let’s talk about how you need to build a career that can last. You can build a career that can pivot. The Eiffel Tower was originally built for reasons that had nothing to do with it becoming a global tourist destination. It was built for a world fair, and initially it was going to come down in just a few years. And then obviously history had different ideas in mind.

The Eiffel Tower itself has evolved and pivoted, and I coach students, “Hey, your own career is going to evolve and pivot.” So everything that we do outside of the classroom, we bring it back to career, and we have a heck of a time. And there’s embedded company site visits in this program. We go to at least five international companies that give us a behind the scenes tour of what they do. And in the first two cycles of the program, there was also an optional eight-week internship that students were able to stay in Paris after the course was completed, do an international business internship, and come back with just a whole boatload of new skills.

So it’s been an exciting program. This summer, the Olympics will be happening as a backdrop. So looking at even the Olympics itself as an opportunity for businesses to promote their brand, launch new products, we’ll be looking at all of that. So the Business Goes Global program has been one of the most exciting things I’ve had the chance to do in my higher ed career, really introducing students to a city and to a culture that I love and has been a part of my own career journey, and we’ll see where this goes from here.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, I love that. Especially love that you get to teach a kind of career-focused course there as part of the Paris trip. So that’s really cool. What’s the name of that course?

Josh Taylor:

It’s called CIS 300. It’s Strategic Business and Professional Communication. It’s the third and final course that’s required in our career development series. And so that’s the course that I teach in Paris. So it’s usually rising juniors and seniors who are on this program. And that’s then why they’re able to… Many of them have taken up the offer to stay in Paris to do an internship before coming back. And by the way, that’s an English-speaking internship. A few of the students along the way have had some really great French skills, but for the purposes of our program and for this internships, and it’s an international internship, English is the language, but that’s the course, CIS 300.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay, very cool. I have to imagine that’s probably a very popular program for your students.

Josh Taylor:

We’ve filled it up now to capacity. So we launched in 2022. Now I think Gatton has eight, nine, maybe ten international abroad programs, and ours is now the second largest in the portfolio. So I think that we’re fortunate though, because Paris sells itself in a lot of ways. It’s a fantastic city. I set it up where it tosses back and forth between one of the other directors in our office, Rachel Clark. She’s the director of employer engagement, and so she’s my co-director.

I launched this program in 2022, handed it to her to lead in 2023, it’s back with me in 2024, and Rachel will be back in the driver’s seat in 2025. That’s the plan. And so that not only allows more folks in our office. I mean, Hayley, I can see you also being a part of this program in the future. We want, we here, I’m speaking as Gatton, our study abroad programs are also an opportunity for our faculty, for our staff to also lean into opportunities abroad. And so from the outset when we built this program, it was conceived to also allow our team to lean into this. So that was all done with intention and with design.

Meredith Metsker:

Very cool. That sounds like a super fun and interesting program. So thank you for sharing about that. I want to dig into another one of your strategies, and Hayley, I’m going to toss this one to you, but I know you all have been really working on just kind of, again, revamping your social media presence, your web presence, particularly on LinkedIn. And I’m a huge LinkedIn nerd, so I love what you all are doing. So Hayley, I know this is kind of your brainchild, so can you just tell me about the Career Center’s LinkedIn page, what your strategy looks like, how you’re approaching it, any goals you have, that kind of stuff?

Hayley Hollenberg:

Yeah. Yeah. So for some context, when I started last summer, I had expressed to Rachel, who Josh just name dropped earlier, Rachel is our director of employer engagement, I report to her, and I had told Rachel that if we had social media of any kind, I’d be interested in just trying it out on managing it. Not that I’m an expert in marketing or social media content creation or anything, but it just sounds like a lot of fun. And I’m also part of that generation that grew up with social media just being a part of our daily lives. So I was born in ’97, so I think I’m at the beginning of the Gen Z generation, but I identify as a millennial. But we really just started exploring this option of how could I get involved with social media here? And around that time, Graham did have an Instagram account that they had used in the past, and there were posts on it, just not like a consistency with them.

And around the same time, the head marketing department here at Gatton decided that they would rather just have one social media channel for the schools. So that way, it was just not being confused with other things, and there could be also just some more branding and control going into what’s being posted, which I totally understand. So we no longer utilize our Instagram. So there’s a general Gatton, Instagram, Facebook, and even a LinkedIn. But I still felt like there was a need to have some type of social media so we could connect with students somewhere and also connect with employers. And I just knew LinkedIn obviously is a great intersection for both of those populations.

And so I asked Rachel if we could probably try our own LinkedIn account, and we got the green light from the higher ups that that was totally fine, and I just started it and ran with it. So it is like a company page. It’s not set up like an individual profile account where you have to connect with it. You can just click follow. And I was looking back today trying to figure out the start date, and I started it September 28th of last year, so 2023. And since then, we are now at 752 followers. So kind of gaining under a hundred followers per month, which is really awesome.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, it’s pretty good.

Hayley Hollenberg:

I’m very proud of that. Once again, no formal skill sets in terms of marketing or any of that, but it’s been a lot of fun, because I’m trying to find a way to show that we at Graham, yes, we are professional, yes, we can help you, but we are also human. One of the big things that I tried to focus on when I worked in undergraduate recruitment was just to make sure that my students felt comfortable talking with me. And I think sometimes being able to build that type of relationship comes from just being a little more informal and also just showing your fun side and showing that you’re a human too, you’re not just a professional. And so I really wanted to have that kind of a vibe and aesthetic with the LinkedIn account. And so the content that we share on there, we do share some job postings, for example, or maybe pushing an event that is coming up.

We also have some fun content that may be more career-related, and I’ll talk more about that in a second. But all of these posts, I try to have a fun spin on them. I try to use a lot of puns or just emojis or even Taylor Swift lyrics just to make it catch your eye and maybe get you to actually stop and pay attention to the post, because the LinkedIn, as we know, the algorithm is just so odd and different in comparison to Instagram or Facebook, and it’s so easy to lose a post, and users are also more likely to not engage with a post. They may see it, but they’re not always liking or sharing or commenting. They may read it and look at what you’re doing, but they don’t always engage with it. So just finding different ways to make it stand out and hopefully get those engagements and therefore grow our follower count, if you will, is receiving our post in their timeline.

So it’s been really fun to just do trial and error this past year. I haven’t had a strategy going into it aside from let’s just see what works. I do try to post during specific timeframes, so I never post earlier than 10:00 AM and I never post later than 2:00 PM, and try to just keep it in there. And I really just do that to think like a student. We know that LinkedIn isn’t necessarily a sought-out social media platform for them to spend all day on, but if I could catch them during their lunchtime scroll or in between classes, I think that’s a success. So I really try to just stay within those timeframes, and then only during weekdays as well.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. Yeah, I can totally relate to trying to figure out the LinkedIn strategy. The algorithm is constantly changing.

Hayley Hollenberg:

Yes. A challenging one.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, it’s always interesting trying to keep up. But I love your approach to LinkedIn as… Of course it’s professional, but it’s also conversational, it’s human, it’s fun. I think not only does that get people’s attention more effectively, but I think maybe it also gives your students permission to be that way as well in their professional pursuits. They can still be themselves, especially in an interview process. It doesn’t have to be stuffy. It doesn’t have to be overly academic all the time. You can be a real human being.

So I imagine that that is comforting to your students to see content like that coming from their career center. Like, okay, they’re the ones who would know what professionalism is like these days. So that’s cool. I’m curious what some of your favorite posts have been, if you could share some examples. And I’ll include links to those in the show notes, but if you could-

Hayley Hollenberg:

Yeah, sure.

Meredith Metsker:

… paint us a word picture.

Hayley Hollenberg:

Yes. Let’s see. So we’ve had a variety of content types, if you will. And I should also just give a shout out first to Ashlyn Davis, who is a student here at the UK Gatton College of Business and Economics. She’s a rising senior majoring in marketing, and Ashlyn has just informally worked with me this past year as kind of a marketing intern. Nothing was official, but she was a student worker in our office as a peer advisor. And she approached me and just said, “I love what you’re doing. Can I help out?” And I said, “Absolutely. I need the help.” And this girl is amazing. She can really just think of such clever and creative posts, and even bring to life the ideas that I have. I’m very much so a brainstormer and I can spit out my ideas, but I’m not a graphic designer, y’all. I can’t do all the Canva magic. I have a little bit, little bit of skills, but I can’t do everything.

And so Ashlyn really helps just build them out in Canva. So in terms of our favorite posts, definitely any of our Taylor Swift posts that we have had. We’ve had two where we kind of spin off her album releases. So back in October when she did her re-release of 1989, we made our own Graham Office 1989 cover just to promote Career Development Week and really encourage students to check out some of our resources on Navigate. We also did one when Tortured Poets was released just last month, and Ashlyn whipped up a poem too and wrote that down. We called it the Tortured Recruiters Department, and we asked any of our followers who work in talent acquisition to just comment some tips and tricks that they recommend to students, just trying to get them involved too, because our LinkedIn account isn’t just for the students, it’s also for the employers to engage with us too.

So those are very great. Two of my favorites that Ashlyn just came up with on a whim, and she just ran them by me and said, “Can we do this?” One is our Mean Girls-inspired post that shared with students, how can you dress professionally in all the different brackets? So smart, casual, business casual, business professional, and then I think Business Formal was the last one. And she used pictures of the mean girls cast, both current and past to just demonstrate different outfit choices. And so some of the images were maybe from a still of the movie, others were maybe from a red carpet event or an interview. And it was just so out of the box that I absolutely loved it. I wasn’t sure how the LinkedIn world would perceive it, but she did so well.

She made it on what looked like a burn book, for those of you who know Mean Girls, And it was just so well done, and I just wanted to run with it because I was so proud of the initiative she took, and it just looked amazing. And we got so many engagements that day. And even the following week, we had a recruiter come to campus to do a guest lecture in one of our classes, and he was talking about what to wear to an interview and such, and he had taken screenshots of what Ashlyn made for our LinkedIn posts and shared them, gave us a shout out, gave her the credit, but shared them. I thought that was so special how a recruiter noticed our posts, noticed the content, and loved it so much that he’s willing to share it with any student or colleague that he’s possibly working with. So that was a favorite one.

And then the last one, I’d say, is for our career fair, we made a video where Ashlyn walked around to employers and asked them if they knew Gen Z lingo. Some of the phrases she asked were if he knew what slay meant, standing on business, and do it for the plot. And it was just so fun to see this type of content because it wasn’t your stereotypical content that’s going on in a career fair. It was allowing her to get these recruiters to step outside the box, show their humanity, show their fun side, and it was just such a special video that she just came up with from start to finish and even learned how to edit just for this little project of hers.

And it took off. We got, I think, over 50 likes on it, and it even landed that girl an interview for her time spent on this video. One of the employers reached out and asked her to interview for a marketing internship, which I think is just so special. So if you’re ever thinking about getting students involved on social media, find a marketing intern or a communications intern, because it can help them develop a portfolio as well.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, I love that. And I remember watching that video and I was like, I know Slay. I think I can figure out do it for the plot. I have no idea what standing on business means. No clue.

Hayley Hollenberg:

Yes. I’ve learned that standing on business, gosh, now I’m on the spot. But it’s like you’re sticking to it. You’re doing what you said you’re going to do. It’s like you’re following through with whatever that plan was.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay.

Hayley Hollenberg:

Ashlyn tells me I still don’t use it correctly, but I have learned the definition.

Josh Taylor:

Oh, that’s so funny.

Meredith Metsker:

Is that the pro of student workers? They keep us young and connected.

Josh Taylor:

Yeah.

Hayley Hollenberg:

Yes.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay, awesome. I love that. Thank you for sharing those examples. I’ll make sure to include links to all of those in the show notes so folks can check those out, maybe borrow some of your ideas for their own LinkedIn pages.

Hayley Hollenberg:

And I’ve loved on the Career Everywhere communities, seeing people asking questions about who is doing any social media, or even just messaging me directly because they’ve caught wind of it, to ask about my posts and the analytics that I have with it. I was checking it out, and so far to this day, the total number of unique views that we’ve received since we started our LinkedIn account is over 43,000. And I think that’s just so impressive. Just the reach that we’re having, we’re not just reaching people involved here at Gatton. So many of our followers are kind of outside of UK. They might be employers, they might be graduates, or they might just be random people who enjoy the content that we are creating, and they just gave us a follow as well. So it’s just been a real joy to see that spark interest among other colleagues in the field.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, I love that. It’s a great kind of virtual front door to your office.

Hayley Hollenberg:

Yeah, absolutely.

Meredith Metsker:

Showing your personality, your brand. So that’s really cool.

Hayley Hollenberg:

Thank you.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. Now I would love to move on to the third strategy that y’all have been using to improve engagement with Gen Z students, and that’s this professional development curriculum. So could you just one or both of you kind of tell me a little bit about what that entails, how you built it, the feedback you’ve received on it so far?

Josh Taylor:

Meredith, I will answer that, but before I do, I want to just say, your listeners now, I’m sure, understand why we’re so proud to have Hayley and Ashlyn on our team. And I want to, if a moment, if I may, underscore why I think it’s so important what this side of our team has been able to do, because Hayley, just like you said, what y’all are up to, it’s professional for sure, but it’s also, it’s fun. There’s a levity to it, there’s a lightness to it, and that is actually so critical precisely because, let’s be honest, y’all, career management and career development can be a stressful thing.

Students on any career center within the sound of this podcast understands that getting students to be ready to engage and to have honest conversations and begin the work that it takes to get career-ready for a career launch after graduation, these are things that could be thought of as hard or daunting or stressful, or let’s just put it off. But when you can take this and show students, let’s have fun with this, let’s be creative, let’s imagine with joy and with possibility, what is possible, then that becomes something that is powerful, but it also then becomes a motivator that you want to get involved in. “Hey, I want to design where I go from here. I want to be optimistic about what is possible, and I want to have fun with it too.”

All of that is such a powerful shift in tone and perspective that I think is vital. And so I just want to say when I hear, and I’m reminded of all of that. That to me is what rises to the top, is that it is adding a vital sense of levity and joy to a topic that for some students is challenging or intimidating. So I’m excited about all of that. And so I’ll use that as a segue to this course series that we’ve put together.

So Meredith, we call it the GPS, and that stands for the Gatton Pro Series. And our GPS program is a series of three connected scaffolded career development courses. One course is taught to freshmen. It’s a one-credit course. It’s called B&E 250, B&E standing for Business and Economics. Sorry, B&E 150, and that course is called Personal Leadership Development. The sequel course, which is a one-credit course taught to sophomores, B&E 250, that course is called Professional Exploration and Career Management, and the capstone course, it’s the one that we spoke a little bit about earlier, it’s called CIS 300. It’s what I teach in Paris, but of course, we also teach it on campus in the fall and the spring.

So three courses, in total a five-credit curricular integration. But why is this so important? When you can take career development into the curriculum where the students are when they’re sitting in their seats, and this is taught to them from their freshman year all the way until the time that they graduate, it is an absolute game changer, because they’re learning the things that they didn’t know that they didn’t know about self-awareness. And so in that first course, B&E 150, we focus on what our office calls the VIPs. Professionally speaking, what are your workplace values, your interests, your personality wiring, your strengths? We really hone in on those VIPs in that first course as a way not only to assess what will be your major. Some of our students come in knowing what their major will be. Others have an idea, and then they change. Others might not know at all which of the business programs they ultimately want to choose as their own.

But wherever they are on that continuum, understanding yourself a little bit more deeply and with eye towards your professional future, it’s a powerful thing. And so that’s what we do in that first course. The sequel course gets a little bit more into the high-impact practices. We’ve been talking about these, the importance of getting involved on campus, pursuing internships, education abroad, undergraduate research, all the ways that we know that getting involved outside the classroom really becomes a game changer.

In that second course, we also do major specific industry deep dives, so that students not only understand what will be my major, but more powerfully and more importantly, what will I do with that major? What are the many things I can do with a major? And really helping students understand that a major is not something that puts you in a box and then defines what you’ll do for the rest of your career. We’re coaching them to understand it as a knowledge base that you can use in countless ways moving forward. And so that’s something that’s really important to us.

And then the capstone course is a three-credit course that they take as either juniors or seniors. And by that point, we’re talking about mastery of job application savvy, networking, understanding what workplace readiness means in today’s professional environment. And so that’s the course series in a nutshell. So I can tell you this, Meredith. I spoke a little bit earlier about how we’ve got measurable data now to show all the things that we’ve done, the marketing, the branding refresh, launching with uConnect for our Navigate platform, the GPS series. So we now have seen an entire cohort of students go from freshmen all the way now to graduates with all of these things in place.

And for folks to know, so before we were doing all of this, the percentage of our students who are having what NACE might call a successful career outcome, either a job at graduation, are heading directly into graduate school, if you go back to 2019, we were at about 61% on that front. If you look at our numbers today, we’re verging on 90%. And so we’ve had over a 40% jump in our students being ready. And we know that it has everything to do with what we’ve been talking about.

We have reinvented the way that we bring career into the curriculum. We’ve reinvented the way that we put our resources online. We are reinventing the way that we engage with them through social, and it’s all through that Gen Z lens of how do you put your services out there in ways that will resonate, in ways that will be inviting? How do you make these topics within classroom settings feel approachable and possible and relevant and necessary and exciting? All the things. So we put a lot of effort into it, and I’m grateful that we’re able to show now the college, “Hey, we promised you that we would do all of these things, and we knew what we were doing, and we now have the data to show it did indeed work.”

And so we’re having fun with all of these things. But the GPS has been, I think, the most important thing that we’ve done, because it transforms the, I’m pointing over here is our lobby. Our door is open, literally. Our platform is open 24/7. But when we can take this to where the students are in the classroom, that’s a game changer. We have fun too, with the metaphor of a GPS. Where am I now? Where do I want to go? I might need to make some course corrections. There might be a detour, we might find a shortcut. All of the things that that allows us to do with that GPS metaphor, and so it carries over into the name of our platform. We’re staying on that journey theme of navigate. So that’s, that’s the GPS in a nutshell. The Graham in the classroom piece that we talk about, that identity of what Graham [inaudible 00:46:00] Graham in the office, Graham in the classroom, Graham virtually, and Graham away. So that’s all the Graham in the classroom pieces.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. I’m glad you called out the connection between GPS and Navigate and all those themes just reminded me of what Hayley was talking about, that y’all love a good pun, whether that’s in your LinkedIn presence or in your overall strategy. I love that. It’s very creative, and effective, it sounds like.

Josh Taylor:

I hope that the continuity that students are experiencing from all of that really does show them that yes, on the one hand, it’s a metaphor, on the one hand, we try to be creative, but it really is true that your career development is a ongoing journey. And I want students to understand that where you wind up in the first couple of years after graduation, the data shows, particularly workers in today’s economy, you’re going to have lots of employers. You’re going to have lots of career pivots, and this is just the beginning. So teaching them that part of the tools for the journey is going to be a capacity to pivot with confidence and with creativity and with transferable skills. So teaching them that from the time they get here, that’s all part of the method to it.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, I love that so much. Yeah. I’m curious what feedback you’ve heard from students who have gone through this GPS course. I am assuming that it’s positive, but I would love to hear some specifics.

Josh Taylor:

It is indeed, and I’m grateful that that’s the answer. So we collect, of course, qualitative and quantitative data on students who take these courses. The difference that it’s had in terms of prior to these courses being developed and scaffolded in the way that they are, I could give you all the data on the impact that’s made on how quickly… Well, we talked a little bit about the NACE outcomes, but even other things that we’re measuring. The speed with which they get an offer, increase in starting salaries, increase in the number of internships that they’re pursuing, and then we correlate how many internships they had over the time that they were with Gatton, and then we can correlate that to a positive impact that it has on their salary offers. All of these things that we’re looking at. But the thing that means the most to me is we also collect qualitative feedback from the student, written feedback after they graduate from that second course before they head into the third.

And over 95% of students say, “Hey, I am so grateful that I am taking these courses, because had this not been brought to me and packaged to me in these accessible one-credit courses, one-credit freshman year, one-credit, sophomore year, I might not have known the things that I didn’t know, I didn’t know, or I might not have felt empowered to think critically or creatively in the ways that the Graham office is teaching me to approach my career path and my career readiness.

And so to see the near totality of students who take this embrace it and be grateful for it means a lot to us, because for all of us as career development practitioners, matters to us because this is our career and we believe in it, and we’re all career nerds in all the best ways, but to see this land for students who are 18, 19, 20, and they now have the aha moment of, “Oh, I see what this is about, and I see why it should matter to me as a freshman, not just as a spring semester senior.”

Meredith Metsker:

Great.

Josh Taylor:

Because I’ll be honest. When I was a college student, and these were things that I did not think about carefully or critically or creatively my freshman year, my sophomore year, heck, even into my junior year, I don’t think that I was really… I was of that generation where you’ll just go get the degree, and jobs will just find you as soon as you graduate. Now, mercifully for me, it all worked out, but a lot has changed since I was in college. I think we have a responsibility here. When I say “We” now, I’m talking to those of us in higher education broadly, and certainly those of us in career development.

I think we have a responsibility to our students to make sure that they are getting a return on that investment, the investment in time, money, resources, that a college experience is to ensure that when you graduate, you will have the tools and the know-how to make what comes next happen for you. And we are going to deliver on that promise. That matters a lot to me. And to see it working and to see students excited about it means the world to me.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. That’s so cool. It’s clear you and Hayley and all of your team is just very passionate about your work, and it’s just really neat to see.

Josh Taylor:

Thank

Meredith Metsker:

You. In the interest of time, I want to be mindful of our time here, but are there any other results that you would like to share? I know you’ve covered a few of them, but is there any other qualitative or quantitative results?

Josh Taylor:

Sure. Well, let me say a little bit about our presence Graham virtually. So prior to launching our Navigate platform with uConnect, we were having just a mere hundreds of students logging online to our resources and using all of the tools, both the tools that we build and our partner tools, like what can I do with this major, platforms like Handshake. We were having some success there, but when we partnered with uConnect, when I tell you now, we have monthly, monthly over 2000 unique users logging in using the tools. If you take that from a metric point of view, I think that’s an increase of over 600% engagement. And then earlier we heard what Hayley’s in a parallel way doing with our LinkedIn. But just to see that having a fresh and intentional approach to bringing together all your resources in a one-stop shop curated way, it was a total game changer for us from a Graham virtually point of view.

All of it combined, I think, is part of the journey that I was telling you about, where we’ve taken our outcomes to 61% to 86%. Now, I think it’s because we’ve been intentional in all these different ways. So I think what I would encourage anyone in career development broadly to think about is how can you be fresh and intentional in the work that you do? For us, that meant understanding what we do in the office is different to what we do in the classroom, we do it differently online. It’s all, of course, together, but we exist in these different spheres. We’re not just the Graham office. We are Graham in the office, we’re Graham in the classroom, we’re Graham virtually, and we’re Graham away. I think just giving us those spheres of understanding was a liberating thing for our team, and we’re having fun. We’re having fun with it. Yeah.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. I love that it’s not only is it fun, but I imagine it gave you all focus.

Josh Taylor:

Clarity. Yeah.

Meredith Metsker:

So as you’re coming up with-

Josh Taylor:

Strategic clarity.

Meredith Metsker:

… new idea… Yeah. Yeah, exactly. As you come up with new ideas.

Josh Taylor:

Right. You’re right, Meredith. When we come up with an idea, we know, oh, this is a learn who you are thing, and this is a plan where you’ll go thing. This is a get where you’re going thing, and it belongs in the virtual space, or it’s a fill in the blank in the Graham in the classroom space. So it gives us sort of a framework, if you will, to understand where our different services belong, and what need they’re meeting.

Meredith Metsker:

And that’s so important when there’s so many things that a career development office could do.

Josh Taylor:

Right, and has to do.

Meredith Metsker:

What do you have?

Josh Taylor:

Yeah.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah.

Josh Taylor:

Yeah.

Meredith Metsker:

When you have limited resources, limited headcount,

Josh Taylor:

All of that.

Meredith Metsker:

… you have to prioritize [inaudible 00:54:29]-

Josh Taylor:

And figure out how to scale. Yes.

Meredith Metsker:

Yes, exactly. All right, well Josh, you just shared some great advice, but is there any other advice either of you would like to add for other career leaders who want to improve engagement with our Gen Z students?

Josh Taylor:

Hayley, I’ll toss it to you for that one.

Hayley Hollenberg:

I think the biggest piece of advice I have is just don’t be afraid to think outside the box and challenge tradition.

When I applied to this role, I wrote in my cover letter that that is exactly something that I do, and I look for an office that supports that kind of thinking. I don’t like just forming to whatever mold has been set. I like finding new ways to innovate and to just bring those fresh ideas that Josh was talking about. So if you are in an office and maybe you’ve been working there for 15 years or so, don’t be afraid to break tradition and just try something new for the sake of trying it. It can just, one, be refreshing to your own work and potentially help you fight burnout or just have a new renewed interest in what you are doing. But it really does allow you to engage with your students in a different way if you’re able to shake it up a bit.

So whether it’s just forcing yourself to think outside the box, or if you have a young employee who is just coming out of grad school not too long ago or undergrad, pick their brain because they are the ones who are closest to your students that you are serving. And even though they might be different generations, they can still kind of let you have an idea of what’s in style right now, or what are these students going to think of such an event or such a program. And just really utilize your resources and don’t be afraid to challenge yourself. And yes, you might fail along the way, but at least that teaches you one way not to do something.

Meredith Metsker:

Awesome. Excellent advice. And as the theme has been in this interview, don’t be afraid to have fun. Have fun with it. If it’s fun, one of my personal opinions when it comes to creating content, like in my work for uConnect, if it’s fun for me to create, it’s probably fun for someone else to consume.

Josh Taylor:

Well said.

Meredith Metsker:

All right, well, is there anything else either of you would like to add before I start wrapping this up?

Hayley Hollenberg:

I think [inaudible 00:57:01]-

Josh Taylor:

I’ll just say thanks, Meredith, for giving us the chance to tell a little bit of our story. And I would want anyone in career services, no matter the institution you’re in, to be proud of the work that you’re doing, to be excited about the work that you’re doing, because helping a student on the front end and the back end and everywhere in between understand how they’re going to take their education and go out and use it to build a life for themselves, a life of meaning and purpose and impact for the world. That’s what makes us enjoy what we do. I know it’s what is making you enjoy what you do. And we’re all in this together, and we’re all finding new ways to do it. We’re all finding ways to innovate and change ourselves because the world is changing, and we’re all on the same ride.

Meredith Metsker:

Well said. All right. If anyone watching or listening would like to learn more from you or connect with either of you, where’s a good place for them to do that?

Hayley Hollenberg:

You can connect with us on the Graham Office of Career Management LinkedIn. It’s Graham, spelled like graham cracker. You’ll be able to find it that way. Of course, you, you’re also welcome to reach out to me on the Career Everywhere platform. I’ll plug that for uConnect. It’s a really great place-

Meredith Metsker:

Thank you.

Hayley Hollenberg:

… that you should check out, and I’m very active. I have a Top Voice badge that made me so excited. But you’re welcome to find me on there and message me. I’m always happy to chat about whatever.

Josh Taylor:

And of course, our Navigate platform, our uConnect platform is careers.gatton.uky.edu. All of our contact information is there. All of our events that you’ll see is there. That’s where you’ll find us.

Meredith Metsker:

All right. Awesome. And again, I’ll be sure to include links to all of those things, so all of you watching or listening can check those out, especially the Career Everywhere community that Hayley mentioned. We just launched that in January, so that’s kind of a new space for career services leaders to hang out, share ideas, network, share your favorite GIF or emoji. There’s very liberal use of GIFs in that community. So come check us out if you haven’t already.

All right, so now to wrap us up, I want to do this answer a question, leave a question thing that we’d do at the end of every interview. So I’ll ask you a question that our last guest left for you, and then you will leave a question for the next guest. So our last guest was Larry Jackson from UC Berkeley, and he left this question for you. What keeps you up at night related to your career or your day-to-day work, and how do you address it?

Josh Taylor:

Meredith, for me, what the question was, what keeps you awake as a career development practitioner? Is that right?

Meredith Metsker:

Mm-hmm.

Josh Taylor:

And how does that inform the work that you do? Yeah. So there’s a stat that we actually tell our students. It’s a bit of a disconcerting stat in some ways. But Gallup has been looking at job satisfaction among college-educated workers in the US, and for several decades now, it hovers around 70, 75%. Three out of four college educated workers are not in love with how they’re earning their living. That’s a disconcerting number. And so I suppose that’s my answer to what keeps me up at night, and I live to find ways to maximize that 25%, turn it into 25 30, 40. I want the majority. I want every student who works with me and with our team at Graham to find ways to find a professional purpose that they are proud of, and that does give them a sense of success in all the terms. Because right now, for a variety of complex reasons, three out of four folks aren’t feeling that. I want four out of four Gatton students to be able to be proud of what they’re doing.

Hayley Hollenberg:

My take on that, Josh, it’s actually funny that that was the stat that you were mentioning because like I mentioned at the beginning of this whole episode, I started in undergraduate recruitment, which I absolutely love, but clearly that’s not what I do anymore. And so I feel like in society we always have this whole question floating around of what’s next or where do you see yourself in five years, ten years, whatnot. And I have just been trying to be so kind to myself and letting this whole year be just a new time of exploration for me in terms of my own career.

And so in terms of what keeps me up at night, I’ll have those thoughts come in of what’s next for you or where do you see yourself landing? But the truth is, I don’t know, but I’m okay with that, and I’m okay with just learning. And I’ve told Josh a million times before, this is such a safe place to just grow. And that’s awesome about working in a career development office is that we just promote that sense of being happy with your job and finding your niche wherever that is and whatever that is. So it will creep into my head at night, but I definitely try to fight it off.

Meredith Metsker:

I love that. It’s a very healthy perspective that I’m sure your students appreciate hearing as well. I know I’m the same way. People ask me, where do you see yourself in five years? I’m like, “I don’t know.” I don’t have a specific job in mind. What I have is a set of values or characteristics of the kind of work that I would like to be doing. For me, that’s something with great storytelling abilities, something that allows me to be creative and talk to interesting people. And as long as something fits that criteria, then I’m good.

Hayley Hollenberg:

I love that.

Meredith Metsker:

Very cool. Okay, so what question would you both like to leave for the next guest?

Hayley Hollenberg:

I have a fun one on my mind that, Josh, I did not run past you earlier, but I think you’ll approve of it nonetheless. So Josh and I are both Swifties. We are dedicated fans.

Josh Taylor:

It’s true.

Hayley Hollenberg:

And so my question to the next listener is, what is your favorite song on the Tortured Poets Department?

Meredith Metsker:

Ooh, good question.

Hayley Hollenberg:

And if you haven’t listened to that, just name a song that brings you joy and you love listening to.

Meredith Metsker:

I love it. It’s a great question. I’m going to be honest and say I have not listened to her new album all the way through. I listened to Fortnight and I like that one. That’s just I know is maybe the cliche answer because that’s the single, but-

Hayley Hollenberg:

It’s still good. It’s still good.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah.

Hayley Hollenberg:

But there’s so much more. There’s 30 other songs you have yet to discover.

Meredith Metsker:

Oh my gosh. I got to get on it.

Hayley Hollenberg:

You do.

Meredith Metsker:

All right. Well, that’s a great question. Okay. I know we’re over time, so I apologize for that. But thank you both for taking the time to talk with me on the podcast today. This was such a fun episode. This time just flew by. I think there’s so many great specific ideas that our listeners can take and implement in their own work. So just thank you both for taking the time and sharing your expertise.

Josh Taylor:

Thank you, Meredith.

Hayley Hollenberg:

Thank you for having us.