Career Everywhere in a Decentralized Model

Meredith Metsker:

Hey everyone. Welcome back to the Career Everywhere Podcast.

I’m your host Meredith Metsker, and today I am joined by Adam Capozzi. He’s the Director of Career Services, Assessment, and Student Success at Syracuse University.

Thank you for being here, Adam.

Adam Capozzi:

Thank you, Meredith. I do appreciate it. I’m excited to be here.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, I’m super excited to have you and I’ve been looking forward to talking with you today about what Career Everywhere looks like in a decentralized model. I know you all have an interesting career services set up there at Syracuse, and I’m excited to dig into that with you.

Adam Capozzi:

I’m happy to share, and you’ve had a great roster of individuals within our profession that have been speaking with you up to this point, so it is a true honor to be participating alongside them.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, I’m excited to add you to that roster.

All right, before I get into my questions, Adam, is there anything else you’d like to add about yourself, your background, or your role there at Syracuse?

Adam Capozzi:

Sure. I come from a very untraditional route of getting to where I am right now. I graduated undergrad in 2008, and as many of us know, 2008 was not the best time to be going into the workforce, but I was very fortunate to jump into a profession in the marketing, advertising, and communications world that set me down a path of feeling more prepared for what was going to be out there in my next steps of my professional life.

I jumped into higher education in general with not really knowing what my long-term goals were and navigating from admissions work to career services, finally finding my niche. It’s been great learning not only within the confines of two separate institutions, but as I mentioned, the great roster of people that you’ve been speaking with, tapping into those people as guides and mentors through this process, especially in this role that I have here at Syracuse.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, I always love hearing how people come to be in career services because it’s not like there’s a degree for career services. Everyone comes from a totally different background, so thank you for sharing that.

Adam Capozzi:

No linear path whatsoever.

Meredith Metsker:

No, no, not at all. But I think that’s why it’s such an interesting field and so many interesting people gravitate to it.

Adam Capozzi:

Very much so.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah.

Okay. Well, before I get into my more specific questions about our topic today, I would love to kick us off with a question I ask all of our guests and that’s what does Career Everywhere mean to you?

Adam Capozzi:

That’s a great question and I’ve been watching a lot of your podcasts and hearing what all the folks are saying and it’s following a similar path, and really to me it boils down to successful education or engagement that ultimately leads to continued conversations that really highlight what career services is, what we do, how we can be a facilitator in all areas of our campus community.

So, I like to use examples for our experience here at Syracuse. We get connected with our admissions team to assist them in ushering in the next wave of students, participating in helping out with new student move-in processes, carrying that over to working with our new student programs department and faculty on workshops that really showcase how career services are committed to a student’s success in and outside of the classroom from that moment, they step on campus. And really if we’re able to make that positive first impression, it’s going to put us in a situation and be portrayed by our partners as not only a career resource center, but as an overall guidance group to our campus at large that can really assist one another in creating deeper connections between academic pathways, meaningful career development, and ultimately to aiding the personal, social, and professional aspects that our students… This generation specifically are finding is true indicators for creating a community and belonging.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, I love that. I love that concept of Career Everywhere where it’s it takes a village. It takes a village…

Adam Capozzi:

Yeah, a hundred percent.

Meredith Metsker:

… To help a student be successful.

Adam Capozzi:

Yeah.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah.

Okay, awesome.

Well, now I would love to dig into our topic today, which again is what Career Everywhere looks like in a decentralized model.

So, to give us some context, can you just tell me more about how career services is set up there at Syracuse and what that decentralized model looks like?

Adam Capozzi:

Yeah. Decentralized distributed career models are not foreign to our industry. I think we are a little bit unique still within that vein. Right now as of spring 2023… 2024 now. Wow. I’m still thinking we’re in 2023.

The central office really that I oversee, we have eight full-time staff members, one practicum student, and four student workers, and that’s just the starting point. Then when you look across our campus, we have 12 individual school college-based career centers, as well as specialized units that work with designated student populations like student athletes, our veterans community, as well as students participating in part-time programs. So, everyone is going to be a little bit unique in their nature.

The size of these departments, and it’s run the gambit in overall size. This can range based on the sheer volume of students currently enrolled at the schools and colleges or even based on their individual models, based on what their leadership groups are looking for.

I like to use our College of Arts and Sciences makeup, which is very unique. They’re a very large liberal arts school here in our great university setting and they have a blended model of career services and academic advising meshing to one another within one specific unit.

So overall, we have right now, in about the mid-fifties of career-focused staff members on our campus currently feeding into this overall distributed decentralized model.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. So, each college and school has their own career center or their own career services team?

Adam Capozzi:

Very much so.

We went to this really just to… I know we’re going to talk a little bit about why it’s set up this way, and really when I came to Syracuse University in 2014, we did have a traditional central career model set up and we only had a few of our professional schools having dedicated teams.

I began my tenure over at the business school before transitioning to our central office in late 2018 to help with the transitioning our campus wide model to this current makeup of distribute Career Everywhere. We kicked it off in fall of ’18, and this essentially was rolled out to be really better preparing our students for what’s currently going on in industry as well as preparing them for the moment they walk on campus to them feeling fulfilled and that going into their first career, whether it is an internship, post-graduation, full-time opportunity, even continuing education, military service or volunteer work.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay.

Yeah, I could see how it would be helpful for each school to have a specialized team that specializes in the career pathways and the majors that are based in that school.

Adam Capozzi:

Yeah. We spent a great deal of the 2017, 2018 academic year setting ourselves in motion for that summer of ’18, fall 2018 kickoff, where we initially focused on streamlining what our central office was going to end up focusing on and shifting staff members, because that group was about in its early to mid-twenties of total staff count, our central office, and starts to transition them over into our schools and colleges and/or either creating or increasing externally the overall head count of those units. This really showed us, allowed us to transition from a more, as you said, generalized to a specialized approach for career education starting in year one, the moment they step on campus.

So, students have access to really targeted resources that align with not only just their course of study, but as well as access to customized programming, experiential learning, direct staff partnerships with academic advising offices, and really dedicated job support tactics.

Right now with this all taking shape, it’s great for our central team because now we’ve been able to really focus our efforts on collaborating with these individual units to administer initiatives that bring our campus community together. Career Everywhere mindset.

Examples of this right now that we’re really honing in on is overall data collection assessment for external publications, managing career and job search technology, hosting large scale programs both on and off campus, so that can be anything from career fairs to career explorational programming in different geographic locations and working with our undecided student population. I think that’s a piece that sometimes always gets not lost in the shuffle, but not really talked about to its fullest extent because we do have so many students that come to Syracuse University that are still unsure of what they really want to be doing, and if they’re major/minor in discipline is really going to correlate with not only their time here at SU, but for what their goals will be post-time of commencement.

And I would say one of the big things that I’ve been the biggest fan of since transitioning to our central office and overseeing it is we’re the main arm of administrating experiential learning funds for our students seeking financial support during their internship search process.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay.

Yeah, that transitions into a follow-up question I had, is if there are these career centers for each individual school and college that makes sense, they help those students. What does the central office do? What do you all oversee?

Adam Capozzi:

I like to say think of us as your general practitioner. If you’re going to the doctor’s office to be meeting with your general practitioner to figure out what’s exactly going on with you, they’re going to give you some great recommendations, but they’re also going to probably provide you a pathway to meeting with a specialist to help with aiding you get to be 100%. So, we are that generalist and the schools and colleges are the specialists. But that doesn’t mean my team is not able to be there from a career education standpoint to allow students to understand what’s exactly at play for them during their time here at Syracuse University.

I have two phenomenal career exploration specialists that are really jack of trades. They work with students from year one through year four of the simplest of creating resume, getting your online brand presence situated with LinkedIn, cover letter support to full gambit of offer negotiations, setting you up and trying to make you feel comfortable of connecting with a specific alumni club association if you’re moving to a specific area.

So, we do that from the career education side, but from the external relations piece, employer engagement is extremely important. A lot of our schools and college career offices do not have a designated employer relations person. I’m very lucky to have two individuals that sit on that side of the house. They review a lot of what’s going on in the industry, assist our campus offices in understanding different trends, knowing what’s going to be happening both on and off campus from an info section workshop base, and make recommendations as well. As we’re seeing these organizations heavily looking at entry level talent within your specific area from a school and college and your students’ interests, so let’s start conversations with them.

We are also the data hub for campus. We do a lot of the assessment from the career side that reports out to not only the senior leaders at the schools and colleges, but all the way up through the Chancellor’s office. We’re assessing everything from career outcomes to individual assessment of appointments, workshops, events, looking if we need to actually alter our approach and our communication strategy.

So, we do a little bit of everything, and I like to say we are really customized relationship managers for our entire career service network here on campus.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay.

Yeah, it sounds like that keeps it really interesting that you do a little bit of everything.

Adam Capozzi:

Yeah, very much so.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay.

Well, now I would love to dig into why you’re all set up this way. Why did you all decide to move to a decentralized career services model?

Adam Capozzi:

Yeah. We were looking at the evolution of students and how they’re really getting the support from the moment they engage with Syracuse University, from an outside of the classroom perspective to getting ready to be going into the real work world. And yes, we were doing our best, but we knew we could do better.

We started to benchmark off of other R1 research institutions, peers that we saw that were doing it right, and we decided it was about time to be switching our model. Allowing students within not our professional schools, but our other outfits on campus to have the same aspects of having an office dedicated in their home school and college that they could walk right into, set up an appointment with, meet with, understand how to really be bridging that in-class experience with the real-world application based on what they’re hearing from the faculty, either coursework or group conversations, and parlaying that into a potential job search strategy.

Not all psychology majors are going to be psychologists. I always say that. They’re going to be great communicators. They are going to be individuals that could potentially go into PR firms, working government agencies. So, by having a specialized career unit within that school and college, they can talk about the different career pathways that are associated, that this major/minor discipline can go after.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay.

Yeah, that makes sense. Like we were talking about earlier, there’s so many different career pathways that are possible with each major, and I imagine it would be helpful to have someone who specializes in those career pathways for those specific majors to help you give just a little bit more personalization there.

Adam Capozzi:

Definitely.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay.

With so many career centers across campus, how do you all stay connected to each other and work together?

Adam Capozzi:

That is the great question where my team does an amazing job. I have to give credit to every single member of my group.

When we kicked off this redistributed decentralized model, it was the fall of ’18, so we had the ’18, ’19 academic year, we had fall of ’19, and then we all know what happened in spring of 2020. The pandemic hit, so we transitioned virtual and we were all doing our best to make sure students felt supported, seen, heard, and given the true support as best as possible to allow them to be successful.

But as we started to transition back to campus in the fall of ’21 in its truest nature, we did a deep dive into assessing, “Is this work really set up for success? Are we communicating from a centralized standpoint to our schools and colleges and working together in a way that’s really putting our students first?” This was really great. That fall ’21 was a lot of round table conversations, a lot of discovery work that I did with senior leadership within the division of the student experience, which our office sits within. And we then created what’s called our Syracuse University Career Council, which started in the spring of 2022, and that was bringing together the heads of all the career services office as well as senior administrators within the schools and colleges and units to the table on a real frequent basis.

We started off with once a month conversations, and now that’s matured into twice a semester due to how much success we’ve had. But we started to examine where we could be doing better, how we can be working with one another and really figuring out the best path forward. So, that’s been really one of the big starting linchpins for us of working collaboratively, sharing ideas, keeping each other up to date.

This also then matured into our Summer Career Summit Series, which we launched in the summer of 2022, and that was actually a brainchild of a fantastic staff member I have on my team, Christopher Maldonado, which really focused on our technology platforms. How are we using them to our fullest advantage when engaging with students as well as external parties?

We turned this summit into a day of learning and training throughout summer of 2022 to great success. We did pre-summit surveys, post summit surveys to see what proficiencies were being approved upon, areas that we can identify that we really need to be working on from a training aspect outside of just this day of learning. We saw great success in our platforms going forward after summer of ’22 being utilized and our students being more understanding of what they’re set to really be doing.

We matured that into the summer of 2023, which focused a real relaunch and reimagining of our career services network that we call it here on campus, which essentially is providing opportunities for our campus, as I mentioned, 50 plus career focused staff members, to participate in monthly working groups dedicated to their area focus. We created three working groups that meet annually now. We have our Directors Group, which is the head of all the career offices talking about big picture initiatives. What’s going on within our areas? What should we be aware of for passing future trends in industry? What are other institutions doing that we potentially want to start looking at?

Then we have our Internal Working Group, which is all student based individuals, so a lot of Career Counselors, Assistant Director of Advising, and they get together to talk about best practices with student appointments. What can we be doing to change our appointment types and Handshake? Should we be creating new career guides? What are you doing in your area that I could potentially utilize within my area to make sure my students feel more seen and/or heard?

And then our other group is our External Relations Group, which is our non-student facing individuals, which are employer relations, operations, data and assessment folks, and it’s coming to the table and talking about, what are we doing to portray ourselves as a one university setting where we engage with our employers?

And all of this is a work in progress. We’re not going to easily be able to flip the switch overnight, but we’ve seen such great movement over the last several months since this [inaudible 00:18:38] instituted, that we’ve seen a high increase in overall collaboration on our programs and initiatives. And when you break the data down even further, we’re seeing more cross-pollination of students from schools and colleges participating in other schools’ and colleges’ events and programs.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. That’s really cool. You guys do a lot to stay connected.

Adam Capozzi:

Yes. We have not only email communications. We have Teams channels. We have constant email threads outside of just the traditional, “This is what’s going on in our career service network.” We have people checking in on one another. “Oh, I need staff to volunteer for this event.” “Oh, I’ll jump in. I’ll sign up.” So, the Google sheet gets sent over.

It has been fascinating to see it evolve.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, that’s great.

I feel like so often it’s easy for departments to get really siloed in between the different colleges, and it sounds like you all have figured out a way to break down those walls and work together across campus. That’s great.

Adam Capozzi:

Yeah, we do our best to make sure that no barriers are set up, so students as well as the individual teams feel like they’re on their own little island, but it’s always a work in progress. We always got to make sure that while relationship and our conversations are heading in the right direction, we have to do those consistent touch points. So, are we staying on path? Do we need to pivot? Do we need to alter? And being very open and honest with one another has been something that we’ve been really trying to improve upon greatly over the last several months to the last year.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, that’s awesome. That’s really cool.

I’m curious, in these annual all-team summits that you do, you mentioned you do, what is it, a full day of programming?

Adam Capozzi:

Yeah.

Meredith Metsker:

Right?

So, what are some of the topics you all cover? I’m just curious.

Adam Capozzi:

Yeah. That first one in 2022, we gave all of our technology platforms. We either got a peer pro on campus to talk about the technology and how they use it or we were able to get one of our vendor partners to come in person or virtually join us to walk us through product updates, what they are seeing that’s best in terms of how to be engaging students or external partners with the system, forecasting of what they plan on changing to better help assist our work on a day-to-day basis.

And then summer of ’23, we turned this into a very unique setup. We spent the morning doing a peer pro session where we chose three schools and colleges on three separate topics on things that they’re really excited or big achievements that they had throughout the academic year. And a lot of Q&A did happen with the group that was participating to say like, “Oh, that’s awesome. I want to do this. How can I go about it?”

So, we had our architecture school talk about their portfolio days and the way they work between the employers as well as the students. We had our technology school talk about their amazing efforts within our first destination survey. They had record high numbers and overall knowledge rate and positive career outcomes and massive increases in average starting salary. So, they give a peek behind the curtain of how they break down their discussions with students to feel comfortable for sharing this information, which was great to see. And then we had our business school talk about their utilization of social media, specifically LinkedIn, to highlight all their work and how they’re seeing a return on investment from students engaging with it to set up appointments and or attend events post that I’m putting up all the content.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay.

Yeah, sounds like some good variety of programming there.

Adam Capozzi:

Yeah.

And then we mixed in some stuff. We had some external peer pros. We had fantastic guest speakers from two different institutions that came in and talked a little bit about their work on their campuses. Then we had our Vice President of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion talk about synergies between the work that she’s doing in her department and the way that we engage with students.

And then we spent the rest of the day in sessions breaking out into those three groups that I mentioned, The Directors, The Internal Group, The External Group, to talk about what are our goals for the upcoming year? Or how can we set the path towards positive traction in the areas that we’re focusing on over the next 12 months?

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. Very cool. Awesome. Thanks for sharing.

As we all know, not only is it important to engage students, but it’s also important to engage faculty, staff, alumni, employers, all those good folks. So, I’m curious, how do you all work together to engage those other stakeholders?

Adam Capozzi:

Yeah. From the central standpoint, a couple areas that we’ve really focused on over the last year or so is, one, creating a campus career workshop request form. That is live right on our website, and we see a lot of interest from our student organizations as well as faculty looking to submit forms on having career services visit their class or one of their group sessions that do one of several topics that we lay out in this form. We usually have a quick turnaround. If a student or a group or a professor submits it on a Monday, we’re usually in conversations with them two days later and getting something on the books within that month fitting around the schedule. So, that’s been great to see.

We’ve really focused as well as on creating campus partner informational packets around career services. What we do, the services that we provide, the technologies that are accessible to all students, staff and faculty, as well as important information on our first destination survey.

Digital signage in highly trafficked areas around campus, and that goes towards our student centers, our barn center, which is our health and wellness area, within our libraries to showcase all the events, the programs that we’re doing, with QR codes associated with it. And you’d be surprised how many people are actually looking at that and engaging with that, because we do live in the digital age. Even our staff is taking note of that as well as the faculty.

This has also led to networking and employer engagement opportunities. Some that we’ve been really proud of over the last calendar year is our work with 119 Euclid, which is a space dedicated to supporting diversity, equity, and inclusion for students of color. We’ve done specialized networking events with them, etiquette experiences. We also did a really cool program during career week this past year that talked about identity and culture in the workplace that led right into our career care later that day, and we had some phenomenal employer partners come in, talk a little bit about what that means to themselves as well as their organization and areas that they’re really trying to focus on to better both the internship experience as well as the early entry career development of a person coming to work for their company.

Same thing can be said with our LGBTQ Resource Center and Disability Cultural Center. We’re in active conversations of exploring ways that we can better engage their student populations.

On top of that, our first year seminar. Syracuse University is very unique. Several years ago… I guess not unique in the sense that other institutions are doing this, but I believe it was the 2018 academic year we put together as a university, a fifteen-week, one-credit course that engages all first-year students and transfer students in guided conversations, experiential activities, written assignments, all about transitioning to Syracuse University in general. So, that’s campus life, exploring their identities as they situate themselves in new contexts, understanding how they relate to or interact with other students, faculty, or staff, and/or even contributing to being welcome to that inclusion diversity aspect of campus. We partner with them to get one or two sessions within that 15 weeks where we come and talk to them about the importance of career services, how it’s part of the everlasting effect of their time here. We are a heartbeat behind the scenes and we’ve seen a lot of that maturing in students that take part in these seminars to actually having appointments not only in our office, but making recommendation services and appointments to their schools and colleges.

And that leads a little bit to the campus-wide perspective. As I said, faculty can be submitting these forms that get us to be visiting the classroom, but we provide this area where they can say specifically what they’re seeking and we then make the recommendations like, “Hey, you’re asking for a specific topic or a discussion point. Central is more than happy to help, but do you realize that you have your own career office within your school and college that can really be more specialized in this approach, and that facilitates additional conversations that they may have not had up to that point in time?” Which that’s been great to see.

And career services specifically [inaudible 00:27:36] invites outside of that. We run a lot of programs that the faculty will just stumble upon and they’re like, “Okay, can you do that for my classroom next week?” And we’re like, “Sure, we’ll come right in.”

Meredith Metsker:

That’s awesome.

Adam Capozzi:

Yeah.

Meredith Metsker:

That’s great. I love how you all support each other.

Adam Capozzi:

Yeah. We do our best, because we are one major large institution, so we don’t leave any stone unturned.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. Yeah, that’s a good strategy for sure. You got a lot of students to support.

Adam Capozzi:

Yeah.

Meredith Metsker:

On that note of scale, how are you all using technology to support your collective engagement goals?

Adam Capozzi:

Yeah, well, we are talking today, so uConnect, first and foremost. We’re proud to say we just launched our brand new 24/7 Career Hub, and we’ve seen some great traction with building out our communities based around our schools and colleges and we know that’s just the start with utilizing the system to our advantage. Handshake.

Handshake resources, everything that comes with that platform. We’re really diving into that as much as we possibly can. We work very strategically with our client relationship manager. She’s absolutely fantastic. And using the resource section to use templates, recommended guides for our students as well as staff to be tapping into.

Social media, Instagram. This generation loves the clickable scrolling nature of social media and being able to capture content, so we put a high emphasis, as well as our campus partners, on trying to be as live and active on it as possible. So, that’s daily stories, posts. Got to give credit to one of our schools and colleges, our College of Visual and Performing Arts, they do a great First Destination Survey Fridays through their Instagram streams, which is highlighting students that are completing their surveys, and it’s really shown them like, “Hey, this is what is going on out there. Let’s get you doing the same exact thing as they engage with students. Let’s promote your successes.” And they’ve seen major jumps in their overall engagement scores because of that.

We also make some unique aspects a part of students participating in events. So, Handshake profile completion as part of the student experience application. So, we run a great deal of immersion programs, which is bringing students, not just locally and regionally, but to New York City, Boston, D.C, Atlanta, and they can’t apply for these programs or be considered until their Handshake profile is completed. Or if they need to be receiving funding assistance to be doing these opportunities same thing.

LinkedIn is a big player for us. We run several, what we call LinkedIn Wide Programs across our campus each year, and we have fantastic alumni from that organization that are willing to give their time and talent to come to the university two to three times throughout the course of the year and do everything from classroom visits, small group conversations, one-on-one discussions, talking about brand presence and the importance of making sure your online profile matches how you’re portraying yourself on your resume. Doing everything from the alumni networking tool, connecting with organizations, recommendations on blog posts that they can be associating. So, there’s a lot that goes into that.

From a professional development technology standpoint, besides the obvious of utilizing tools to really support student professional development goals like VMock, we are a VMock school for resume building. We also attempt to always engage to bring folks back to Handshake, because I keep on mentioning for all other resources and really vice versa.

For an example on that, direct from VMock, emails periodically go out to our students to remind them to update their resumes before attending a career fair or applying for a specific opportunity that we’re highlighting. But then also encourage our career advisors to engage by redirecting students back to creating new appointments in Handshake once they receive these emails.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay.

Yeah. Sounds like you’re using a wide variety of technologies there at Syracuse.

Adam Capozzi:

Yeah.

Meredith Metsker:

And I want to dig into, unsurprisingly, your new Career Hub on the uConnect platform. I’ve looked at it, but for those who are watching or listening, can you just walk us through how you set that up considering your decentralized model?

Adam Capozzi:

Yeah.

Not surprising, we wanted to put our schools and colleges at the forefront. We wanted to make sure that when you Google Syracuse University Career Services, you’re going to be generated right to a page that’s showcasing all the benefits and all the opportunities that are at a student’s fingertips.

Now, in our previous setup, you had to do a lot of layers clicking, going to several pages to be finding, “If I’m this student, this is who I should be speaking with.” Now it’s going to be right at your fingertips. From the moment you click on the page, it says, “Find your career center.” We have ourselves listed in there, but we have all of our schools and colleges technically situated as their own communities.

And then within the schools and colleges pages, we have learn more aspects, dedicated content from blog posts, information on programs and events, and labor job market insights. Data optimization is going to be coming into play in the near future, but really what the students should be worrying about and/or thinking about not just today but over the next several weeks, because a lot of times, honestly, out of mind. Students will see something right there and they’re like, “Oh, well I’ll sign up for that in three weeks. No, we want you to be looking at it right now so you can be active in participating and secure your spot.

We’ve seen very positive initial reactions from our schools and colleges on the evolution of the site and what’s being done for themselves, but we have so much now capabilities of tying all of our technologies together under one central hub. And we never had that before, so we’re using this right now to tie in the Handshakes, the VMocks, the Big Interviews, the GoinGlobals of the world all onto one space where our students now can have access to it in one single scroll. They don’t need to be going to several different websites to be finding all the same content.

So, as much as we can keep them in the site, keep them engaged, it’s going to allow us to be looking at the data, be looking at the metrics to see what pages are actually succeeding right now, so we can actually tap into be putting more content or really pushing that further into email communications or using the email threads through the system to help better engage with them. Or looking at them from the standpoint of, are these pages not getting the same clicks and visibility? What can we be doing to alter it so more students are visiting them?

The employer piece, we have additional more content on there to be highlighted how they can really be working with our Syracuse University Career Services Network. And I love the aspect of it, we can tie into other departments, other areas of our campus. We use this time today to talk about faculty engagement, but we do so much more outside of the faculty engagement. We work with different departments from the staff perspective, whether it’s our student engagement office, our registered student organizations, affinity groups. They’re all going to be able to be finding their own content right there.

And we do a great deal of work with our Alumni Association, so our alumni being able to come back to the page or our Office of Alumni engagement, looking at it and seeing all the important content that they should be aware of, things that could potentially generate ideas for partnerships and collaboration.

So, it has been great. We are one month into it. We just had our one-month call with our relationship manager who is amazing. We couldn’t be more thankful for her. Looking at the data we’ve never been able to before is something that’s really setting us up for success for the future.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, that’s obviously great to hear for us here at uConnect, but I think it’s just so cool how you all set up that site to really, as you said, be the central one-stop shop hub for all things career services for Syracuse, regardless of what college you’re in.

Adam Capozzi:

Yeah.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. Like you said, people probably aren’t Googling, “College of Arts and Sciences Career Services,” they’re Googling, “Syracuse Career Services.” And now there’s this one location to find everything they need.

Adam Capozzi:

Exactly.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, that’s great. I’m excited to continue to follow along with your story and see how folks continue to receive it there at Syracuse.

Adam Capozzi:

We’re excited. As I said, a lot of positive traction conversations going on, and I know this is only going to be the start.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. Yeah, for sure.

All right, so Adam, you’ve already offered a lot of great advice, but I’m curious, is there any other parting words of wisdom, other advice that you would want to give to other career services leaders who are trying to implement Career Everywhere in this distributed decentralized model?

Adam Capozzi:

Yeah, I would say now more than ever, we’ve really got to be aware of the evolution of the current student population, how we need to evolve with them. Just in the last several years, even before the pandemic, the needs, the wants, the areas where we really need to be assisting them has drastically changed from my time as an undergraduate student eons ago. So, knowing that how we need to change our methodology and advising as well as the types of events and programs that we’re running, that’s going to be my first thing. Just making sure you’re keeping an eye on industry trends, but doing maybe even conversations with student workers or sending out surveys to your campus to be figuring out what are you seeing or what are you not seeing? What do you want us to be doing to really help set you up for success?

Information sharing at the highest level is probably another important piece that I always like to say, and that’s not just with students, but that’s all areas of your campus community. You might have a very strong relationship with one department and or one faculty subset, but you need to do that with everyone. So, it’s over communicating in some instances, that additional visibility through those visual signs as I mentioned, but making sure that you are deliberately pushing out the content in a manner that is not overbearing, but consistent.

And if you don’t have a dedicated marketing person associated with your team or office, like we do not have a dedicated Marketing and Communications person, it’s extremely important to create a strong working relationship with your university’s College Marketing and Communications Teams. They’ve been fantastic collaborators in not only helping us get our brand new site up and going from the internal side, but helping us with trying to cater towards those two graphics. What are students really taking time to be looking at from the social channels or from the visual board standpoint? Really giving us a better understanding of like, “Hey, this is going to be working with one area of our campus such as our health and wellness area, and we’re seeing positive returns on investment. Let’s potentially try that.” And coming together, seeing what works being open to us of what potentially needs to be altered. That’s something I definitely recommend.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. Solid advice all around.

All right, well I do want to be mindful of our time here, so Adam, is there anything else you would like to add that we haven’t covered?

Adam Capozzi:

No, I would say if any school in college is looking to be moving to a decentralized model or is in the process of that evolution, patience is key. I always say creating those customized relationships with the schools in college career offices is probably one of the most longstanding pieces of my work that I do here in central career services. You need to really be curious to understand the needs of the schools and colleges and their goals for student engagement, because one aspect of recommendations for a part of our campus is not always going to work for another. So, that patience, curiosity, and just making sure that you’re doing your best to be a good collaborator and communicator.

Meredith Metsker:

Yep. That’s the key to any good relationship, right?

Adam Capozzi:

Yeah.

Meredith Metsker:

Communication, partnership, collaboration.

Adam Capozzi:

Totally.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay.

Well, if people would like to connect with you or learn more from you, where’s a good place for them to do that?

Adam Capozzi:

Always love to connect with individuals on LinkedIn, email as well. My email is associated with my LinkedIn profile. It can also be found right on our brand new website underneath the team, so don’t feel like you can’t reach out. I’m always looking for new connections.

Meredith Metsker:

Great.

And for those watching or listening, I’ll be sure to include a link to Adam’s LinkedIn profile and his email in the show notes, so you can check that out.

All right, so Adam, at the end of every interview, I like to do this, answer a question, leave a question thing.

Adam Capozzi:

Yes.

Meredith Metsker:

So, I’ll ask you a question or last guest left for you and then you will leave a question for the next guest.

Adam Capozzi:

Perfect.

Meredith Metsker:

Our last guest was Chris Entringer of Northeast Iowa Community College and he left this question for you.

To AI or not to AI? What is your team doing with AI and career services or how are you using it?

Adam Capozzi:

Yeah, that’s the million-dollar question, I feel, right now.

I would say to AI, but in the sense of being, it utilizes a resource but not as an overall guiding tool in all aspects of your work. I’ve talked to staff members as well as campus colleagues where I’m using it right now and others is with email messaging and recommendations on email titles in your language that’s really going to captivate our student audience.

I just had a great conversation with a colleague at another institution where he used AI for a creative email tagline and what it spit out actually provided them a gigantic boost in overall student click rate…

Meredith Metsker:

Nice.

Adam Capozzi:

… On messaging. So, that’s been unique.

And I would say from my team and our campus community, we’re overall really dipping our toes into it still. It’s evolving conversations amongst our cross campus groups and how we can really and should be implementing it into our day-to-day work with students and employers, as well as speaking towards it on the importance of students using it, as I said earlier, as more of a resource rather than an overall guiding tool to be getting the work done.

Long story short, I’ll say maybe check back a year from now and I might have a better formalized answer for you with this.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah.

I feel like we’re all just trying to figure out what AI is, what ChatGPT is, how do we use it, what’s ethical.

Adam Capozzi:

Yes, totally.

Meredith Metsker:

A bunch of question marks right now.

Adam Capozzi:

Yes, very much.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay.

All right, well what question would you like to leave for the next guest?

Adam Capozzi:

Yes. I want to make this a little fun and I want to see what the next guest has to say.

If they had a time machine, would you travel to the future or back to the past?

Meredith Metsker:

Oh, that’s an interesting one.

Adam Capozzi:

Yes.

Meredith Metsker:

What would you do?

Adam Capozzi:

I think I would go back to the past.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah.

Adam Capozzi:

I’d be very interested to see some additional unspoken unseen aspects of history that we can’t just easily flip into a book on or find a quick Google search or Wikipedia search, and actually be there present in the moment, some of those big game-changing moments of time.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah.

I think I would be the same way. I don’t think I would want to spoil the future by going to the future. Instead, I would want to see some of those historical aspects or even just go relive some moments of my life. I feel like I’ve forgotten a lot of little details, so it’d just be fun to go back and relive things.

Adam Capozzi:

Very much so. I couldn’t agree with you more.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. I love that. I love a good, fun question.

Adam Capozzi:

Awesome. Glad I could provide that to you and I’m really looking forward to whoever you have next and seeing what their answer is.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, me too.

All right, well Adam, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today. This was such a fun conversation and I think it’s going to be very valuable for our audience to hear about a different unique model there that you have at Syracuse University.

So, thank you for taking the time to share your knowledge.

Adam Capozzi:

Oh, thank you. I do appreciate this opportunity.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah.

Yeah. Well, we’ve been glad to have you. It’s been great and I just hope you have a good rest of your week.

Adam Capozzi:

You as well. Thanks again.