How Teach For America’s Career Center Supports Alumni

Meredith Metsker:

Hey everyone. Welcome back to the Career Everywhere podcast. I’m your host Meredith Metsker, and today I am joined by Monica Clem. She’s the Vice President of the National Career Center for Teach For America, and she is also a former career services leader at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, which is now PennWest. Thank you for being here, Monica.

Monica Clem:

Yes. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, likewise. I’m excited to have you and I’m really looking forward to talking with you today about what your team is doing there at Teach For America and how you all are supporting and engaging alumni, which I know is top of mind for a lot of folks in our audience. But before I get into my questions, Monica, is there anything else you would like to add about yourself, your background, or your role at Teach For America?

Monica Clem:

Not a whole lot other than I’ve been working in career development in some capacity for over 10 years. Worked in higher ed for about 12 years and joined TFA about two years ago. So I’m really excited to talk more about what we do and some of the similarities and differences and yeah, I’m just excited to dig in.

Meredith Metsker:

Great. Awesome. Well, I’m excited to dig in as well. I do wanna kick us off with a question I ask at the beginning of every episode, and that’s what does Career Everywhere mean to you?

Monica Clem:

Sure. To me, Career Everywhere means particularly in an institutional or an organizational context, but really even beyond that, it means that for everyone that is moving through a system, that at every critical point there is some sort of element that reminds them or makes career development accessible to them. So for me, particularly in a higher ed context, it really means that career education, career development just conceptually the idea of career development, is just part of the entirety of that experience and that that’s done with intentionality, but feels very natural. And in an organizational context, it can take on a lot of different meanings, but again, very similar that it really becomes an unavoidable and just a natural part of the experience, but of course is designed with intentionality.

Meredith Metsker:

I love that it’s all about the integration. Makes it less intimidating too.

Monica Clem:

Yeah.

Meredith Metsker:

When it’s not like the one thing you have to do at the end of your experience in Teach For America or your senior year of college, when it’s just built in.

Monica Clem:

Absolutely.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. Well now I would love to kind of move into our topic today. So to start us off, can you just tell me a little bit about Teach For America and then how your work in the career center there compares to career services in higher ed?

Monica Clem:

Yeah, of course. So Teach For America, also TFA, we’re really a diverse network of leaders. And so what we do as an organization and as a network is really confront educational inequity. We do this by teaching our core teachers for at least two years, and then we work with really an unwavering commitment from every sector of our society just to hopefully create a nation free from this injustice. We often talk about one day, which is the idea that one day all children will be able to access an equitable education, a high-quality education. So once our teachers, our core members, as you heard me mention, the core complete their two-year commitment, they join a network of over 60,000 alumni. So how you become an alum of TFA is completing that two-year teaching commitment. So once you become an alum, you often go on to continue to lead and continue to confront educational inequity in a variety of sectors.

And so really it’s about that mission alignment. One of the many benefits of joining TFA is really becoming part of this incredible community and also having access to career and talent support for the remainder of your career. And so the career center that I lead works to create a baseline of career development supports that are available to all of our alumni across the network, and then also provide some more dedicated talent services to our alumni who are in very mission-aligned careers of impact. So these would be fields like school and systems leadership as well as policy and advocacy. So our work is similar to higher ed career services in that we are trying to serve a really wide constituency base with a set of baseline resources and career supports. And so that’s similar. And of course that’s my background. And then it’s also different because we want to offer more hands-on talent services-focused work, and our population is really diverse and inclusive of very senior level professionals and executives. So we’re not only focused on recent college graduates. We’re working with I would say a broader audience.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. So I didn’t realize that, I guess I was thinking it was largely recent grads that went into Teach For America, but it sounds like it’s a wide variety of professionals there.

Monica Clem:

Yeah, we recruit both recent grads and working professionals. And in any given year, anywhere from 30 to 40% of our core, is actually made up of working professionals.

Meredith Metsker:

Oh, that’s so cool. And I imagine that adds some additional challenges when it comes to supporting such a broad population

Monica Clem:

Absolutely.

Meredith Metsker:

So kind of on that note, you mentioned that you support over 60,000 alumni. So how do you go about supporting so many and what do you do to engage them?

Monica Clem:

Yeah. Well, of course this is one of our biggest challenges. So our footprint is nationwide and as I mentioned, we serve a very diverse audience. So we have to have a really wide view of the career and talent lens landscape to make sure we’re designing resources and initiatives that add real value. So one important thing to know about TFA and how we’re structured is that we have over 50 regionally-based teams in addition to our national enterprise teams. So what that means is that we have a lot of localized strategies that help us reach our mission and our goals. And that’s really important because for us, being equitable in our approach means involving local communities and those who are mostly directly impacted by education inequity in the solution-making process. So what that means for the career work is that there are many regionally based initiatives that support alumni in their career development in ways that make a tremendous impact locally, in ways that make sense there.

And then we also have to create a baseline experience that’s consistent at the enterprise level that all alumni can access, including those who relocate or who reside outside of a regional footprint and so on. So we really approach our design process with that lens understanding where we can add the most value in that baseline sort of ubiquitous range of services. And also wanting to lift up and highlight as well as plug into some of the localized resources.

And so I would say that is where our uConnect platform comes in, because it has really enabled us to make tremendous strides in making our baseline resources accessible to the entirety of our network, and also giving us a vehicle to build some of that contextualized hyper-local content and resources that highlight those regional resources. So prior to adopting the platform, which is our alumni hub, we really didn’t have a good vehicle or a way to do that.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. I imagine it’s helpful to kind of utilize technology to reach all of those alumni all over the country. And then do you have like communities there on the alumni hub that are for those specific regions?

Monica Clem:

Yeah, so the way we approached our hub, as you might imagine being a national organization with such a wide footprint and so many perspectives, you can imagine that we wanted to build our platform in a way that really is inclusive of that full range of perspectives. So the way we approached it was to really launch in phases. Our phase one, which was our MVP or our minimum viable product, was really that first sort of version of our hub, which included some of our, it was more baseline resource focused, so really focused on the national job board and our fellowships all across our footprint and some of those resources that would be considered baseline. During phase two, we really took a very intentional approach to working some of our user experience experts internally as well as our partners with uConnect, and also bringing in several professionals working in those regional locations to help us understand how we could evolve the platform and that next iteration to be inclusive of regional communities.

And so we do have, right now, if you go to our hub, you’ll see our regional and relocation resources where we were able to launch a regional directory and have a lot of those resources available. As we move into phase three, we’ve had our platform for about six months, so our phase three is ticking off here in a couple months. We’re actually gonna begin the process of building a community page for each and every region across our network. And so we will be adding an additional close to 50 regional pages that will be highly contextualized.

Meredith Metsker:

Wow.

Monica Clem:

Yeah. So we’re really excited. It’s a big project, but it’s really gonna expand the value of our platform.

Meredith Metsker:

Wow, that’s incredible. I’m so excited to see all of those community pages once they’re built out. I’m curious, what kind of content or resources are you putting on your alumni hub to reach both that national audience and then also the hyper local audience?

Monica Clem:

Yeah, so I think some of what first comes to mind and some of the most popular resources are our fellowships and our leadership development programs and some of our graduate school partners. So we have some nationally available programs. For instance, my team works with a partner organization to offer a career design fellowship that anyone in our network can join. And we also have so many localized fellowship programs that really meet the needs of the local community. For instance, several of our communities offer school leadership fellowships where the local alumni can be part of that community on their journey to becoming a school leader. So as you might imagine, if you’re an alum, you would want to be able to have an easy way to understand what all of those opportunities are, to filter them to understand when do they open, what is the focus?

And so we’ve been able to leverage the experience module of the platform to actually create a customized… If you go on our platform, you’ll see under fellowships and learning programs a customized list of all of those programs so that people can really access that information much more easily without having to comb through a spreadsheet or something like that. That has proven to be one of our most popular resources among our audience. And then another popular resource is our graduate school partners. So we partner with graduate programs all across the country who offer our alumni incentives, like tuition discounts or deferred admission, application fee waivers and so on. And they do that because of the recognition of the talent and the caliber of our core and our alumni network. And so, again, that was another way for us to leverage, I think in that case we used the organization’s module, and we were actually able to create a list of those graduate programs so that every program has a dedicated page. We were able to brand those pages, include the relevant contact information, and again, add those filters. So those are two of the really early success stories, I would say, of some of the content that’s been really popular.

Meredith Metsker:

Wow, that’s awesome. I love that the response has been so positive to both of those things so far, especially all the jobs and all of that information.

Monica Clem:

Definitely.

Meredith Metsker:

Cool. So Monica, having worked in higher ed career services, how do you think higher ed career teams can adapt some of the strategies that you’re using there at TFA?

Monica Clem:

Yeah, well I think that one area where higher education career services is potentially expanding and trying to add more value is in that area of alumni engagement, right? And trying to identify ways to expand their services to their alumni networks. I know when I worked in higher ed career services, that was always such a challenge, right? Because higher ed colleges and universities have huge alumni bases, and so there’s often a lot of challenges in figuring out, well, how do we offer, what is the right range of services to offer? And then how do we do that, right, with our team, and to meet those audiences as they diversify across sectors. We know that higher ed is evolving in ways that will hopefully bring alumni back to their institutions for some of that continuing education and professional development over the course of their lifetime.

So I think career services could play a really significant role there in helping to support those efforts. You know, forging those partnerships with employers, helping their institutional leaders understand shifts in the labor market and stay ahead of the curve I think could be a tremendous opportunity.

The other thing I would say is that I think there’s really an untapped opportunity to consider building talent services into these types of initiatives. And I just wanna say right off the bat I know very deeply that most career services kind of recoil, professionals in this space, at the term placement. I know I have in the past, because it implies that you’re taking this more active role in kind of placing people in opportunities. And we know it doesn’t necessarily work that way, but I also think it’s true that as people continue to question the return on investment of a college degree, institutions that really consider how they can play a more active role in matching students to career opportunities based on a variety of factors could really stand out in a crowded marketplace.

And I think that there’s ways to do it that is, that are really mission aligned. You know, for example social justice is an area where there’s a ton of interest. It’s highly relevant among students, institutions of higher learning and the job market. So thinking about how you could partner with organizations that are really mission aligned and help build talent pools more intentionally that are filled with those students that are most impacted by those issues, I think could be a way to really disrupt some of those inequities that college students face in that college to career transition and add real value to the institution and increase that idea of relevancy.

Meredith Metsker:

Ok. Yeah, kinda on that note, in addition to that, what do you think are some of the resources or strategies or tactics that would be most beneficial for alumni that career services should consider?

Monica Clem:

Yeah, I think being really focused on the needs of your audience is always really important when you’re trying to provide a service or a resource of any kind. So one tactic that I would suggest is think about building personas based on the research and the data that you have about your alumni and really involving the people who are most directly impacted by the problems you’re trying to solve, I think is critically important. So really if you’re serving students, really directly involving students in the solution making and really understanding the personas of your students. I think the same is true for our alumni. For example, when I came into this role at TFA, we had a lot of evidence that our alumni base wanted career support, but we didn’t necessarily know what career support meant to them, right?

So getting really clear on that required us to really tap into our network and ask them, and we learned a lot from those efforts. And being able to disaggregate that data across lines of identity was really important. You know, we learned that our BIPOC alumni, for example, wanted some different things from us right then and from their network. And so I think career services, our field has a set of best practices and norms that are largely accepted. So challenging those practices, and if you’re gonna expand into the alumni arena by really getting deeply in touch with those people that you wanna serve, and being really curious about what career support really means to them, and then building those personas can probably really help if that’s a direction where you wanna evolve.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. I’m curious, what, what did you all find out? Like what does career support mean to the TFA alumni?

Monica Clem:

Yeah, I mean, perhaps this is unsurprising but what we found was that, well, some of it was surprising, some of it a little less so… So talent matching was absolutely among one of the top things that our alumni wanted, right? Because as people evolve in their careers and they are more solidified on a path, when they’re gonna engage in career development, it’s typically when they want to advance in their career. So there’s typically periods in their time where maybe they’re doing some exploration, but it’s not gonna be the same kind of exploration that they did when they were in college. So that’s one thing I think that’s really important. Another thing that we learned when we categorized out, like we had a variety of things that they wanted. And when we tried to categorize those, it was really a mix of really quick hit, highly generalized, very easy to access resources. So that kind of like on-demand, I wanna grab a PDF or I wanna click a link, and if that was the case, it needed to be pretty general.

And then the other category was very high touch, very personalized, again, like more of that talent matching. And so it really helped us think more about what is the range of baseline resources that are more on demand that people can grab and go. And then what is the right balance of that proportionally to more of this hands-on more high-touch sort of approach to working with alumni. And we’re still building out what that looks like proportionally. But that was really insightful because I think it helped us really in some ways it was affirming for some of the things we were building, but it also helped us really deprioritize things that we were going to think about that weren’t, turned out, weren’t as important. Things like we were looking at potentially like some group career coaching sessions we were looking at video content turned out to be not something people wanted as much. So all that to say those were some of the things we learned.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. I’m curious, what are some of those, like baseline grab and go type of resources that you offer?

Monica Clem:

Yeah, so in some ways they’re similar, right, to what a college or university would offer. We have a resume guide. Our resume guide is very specialized, right? And it addresses some really specific questions that we surfaced through our data efforts. Like one of the things we saw was our alumni were telling us that they wanted more information on how to translate their experience in the classroom to a variety of fields that were still directly impactful in education, but were a little bit different than teaching. So that was an area where we focused and we also saw that there was a lot of curiosity around what is the path, right? What’s the path from being a teacher to becoming, for instance, a superintendent? And so we have already started to work on really bringing together data to map that out visually and create some of those resources as well.

And then I would say other things, like I mentioned of course, that we have all these regional locations, and so people in our network move, they relocate. And so being able to provide just a really easy-to-access document for each region telling you this is your contact, this is who you need to reach out to, things like that have proven to be really popular. And again, like our platform gives us the ability to put those out there.

And another thing I’ll add that has been really helpful for us is having the ability to put a resource, like a PDF on our platform has been really transformational because prior to our platform, we would typically send a Google Doc or we would send a link to something that was hosted somewhere. And then once those links are out there, they’re out there, right? And so oftentimes we were finding people were reaching out to us and saying, Hey, I have this link, but when I go to it, it looks like it hasn’t been updated in a few years. And of course, like that’s not good for anyone. So being able to have us a link that we can actively go in and change and then direct people there has also been really important.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. So I wanna go back to what you were talking about. You know, talking to your alumni, finding out what they want, what resources they need. How do you go about contacting them and getting that feedback?

Monica Clem:

Yeah, so we’re really fortunate at TFA to have amazing researchers in our organization. And so we were able to partner with our research team to help direct some of those efforts. And I would say if this is something that you wanted to do in career services, definitely partnering with your alumni engagement or development team is important because they typically have really robust records that may or may not be part of your native data system. So that was one way, and then that was when we wanted survey responses, right? You want, you have four or 500 responses to a survey, but we also tapped into smaller pools. For instance, our user experience team conducted some interviews with folks that were teaching in the classroom, but were interested in becoming teacher leaders. And so we would go into our data system, pull a report of people who were in the classroom that were perhaps on that path, and just email them or make phone calls to ask them if they wanted to participate in those interviews.

But I would say another really great way to do it, and for us it’s reaching out to those… I mentioned we have these local offices, we have staff who are living in, working in their communities who really know their alumni. And so collaborating with them and not trying to do everything ourselves on our team, but actually reaching out to our colleagues who have those direct connections was so important and will continue to be really important for us going forward. I compare it to when you’re in higher ed working directly with faculty who have those connections, everyone that I think works in that field understands that that’s really key to gaining access to students. So I would say it’s very similar for us. So those are some of the tactics that we used.

Meredith Metsker:

I love that. Thank you for sharing that. So speaking from your experience there at Teach For America and then formerly in higher ed, why in your opinion, is it so important to support and engage alumni?

Monica Clem:

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

You know, some institutions do this in a really formal way through executive education programs, continuing education programs. And it’s also true that you can do it in ways that are not as formal, inviting alums to return to campus and to attend lectures to identify what are some of the new skills on the market that your institution is positioned to offer. And really thinking about the value proposition to your alumni network beyond engagement I think is really important because for a lot of institutions, there is going to be more of a lifelong model in order to stay relevant, where it’s not just come into the institution for four years and then you’re gone, that’s your alma mater. But really thinking over the span of someone’s lifetime, people are working longer than ever.

And so thinking about how you can continue to be relevant to your alumni network and continue to add value to their career throughout their lifetime. Of course it’s easy to say, but I think that is one way to continue to engage them because it might be one of the top ways to continue to stay relevant as an institution.

For organizations outside of higher ed, in some ways it’s similar because we know that there’s a lot of projections around a tightening labor force. We know that by 2030 we’re going to see mass retirements of some of the largest generations of working age people. And so really, I think a lot of organizations when they think about long-term talent needs are really tapping into some of their former employees. We call them boomerang employees, right? And so really being intentional about when employees leave your organization, thinking about are they leaving on a somewhat good note, like is this someone that could be interested in coming back to us in the future? And then continuing to keep them engaged. And again, adding value by treating them as an alum is I think really critically important for organizations that have a long view of building a talent pipeline.

Meredith Metsker:

I hadn’t even thought about that angle of it with the whole boomerang employees thing. I mean, that’s good feedback that career services leaders could give to employers that they work with. And share some of those alumni engagement strategies.

Monica Clem:

Absolutely. And I think there’s ways to be really creative and innovative in this space in higher ed career centers, really thinking about how to partner with some of their key employer partners on engaging alums that have worked for that organization and graduated from that institution. I mean, there’s, I think, ways to get really creative, and I think it’s gonna be really exciting over the next decade to see what evolves because there’s so many pockets of incredible innovation happening both in higher ed, in career services, and in organizations. And if you look at some of some large organizations, I know Deloitte does this, I know McKinsey does it. They actually call their former employees alumni, and they have alumni resources on their websites. City Year does it, of course, TFA does it. So this is not new. This is something that organizations have been doing for a while and I think will continue to do and need to con continue to do over the coming years.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. Yeah, it sounds like it’s going to be necessary as you were saying, as the labor force tightens up, as we have fewer college students graduating. On the career services side, I imagine too that it’s beneficial to engage alumni and to be able to prove that you engage alumni and provide support for them long after graduation because that’s a good differentiator. If someone’s looking at your college and another college, they’re probably gonna choose the one that provides lifelong value.

Monica Clem:

Yeah. And I think it goes beyond things like we think of some of the transactional ways that we often support alumni with resume reviews and things like that, and that’s fine. But I think it’s, we really need to go beyond that too and think about network connectivity, for example. Oftentimes some of the greatest value and some of the most powerful feedback we’ve had from our alum, earlier I mentioned a program we run called the Career Design Fellowship and partnership with an organization called Mission Collaborative. And we get amazing data and feedback from that. And what we consistently see is that our alumni tell us that the power of connectivity, the power of connecting with other alumni, that they have this shared experience, right? Of having been through TFA, having this shared commitment and just knowing what they’re experiencing in their career, right?

We all experience moments of uncertainty. We all sometimes feel stuck we all sometimes feel unsure, especially with the pace of how work is changing. I know we’re all now in this moment of AI and trying to figure out how is this gonna affect us? So I think normalizing that by really facilitating connectivity in your network between individuals is so important. What we have found is that anywhere from 60 to 68% of our alum that engage in these sort of shared experiences say that they made a new connection in their alumni network that they’re going to continue. And so, again, I think the role that you could play beyond being a direct service provider, but also just being a facilitator of connectivity is potentially really exciting.

Meredith Metsker:

How would you recommend career services teams in higher ed approach that,? I assume it would be the partnership with the alumni association, as you mentioned, but how can they be that facilitator of the connections?

Monica Clem:

Yeah, I think this is happening in certain institutions, right? But I think there’s this movement away from alumni engagement just through social events, right? Or opportunities to bring people together for affinity and really thinking about how to create value and meaning in those interactions, particularly post-pandemic, right? When people are maybe rethinking their willingness to travel or their willingness to be in space with others and their time and so on. So I think creating those, and it is possible to create these experiences virtually it’s probably worth noting. I work from a home office and I have for two years, I lead a fully remote team. And I think the remote culture that we have at TFA is amazing and incredible. So I think the way that you can facilitate some of those experiences for us, we decide, and of course you can do it yourself or with a partner, for us doing it with a partner to solve a problem, which is this idea of feeling, in that particular example, the fellowship I mentioned. It was really to help people get unstuck in their careers.

So finding something that is relatable and easily identifiable that your network might want to be a part of, and then providing really clear outcomes upfront. We also found that that was incredibly important in our research. When we were thinking about facilitating programs and offerings for our alumni, we learned that they were far more likely to engage if it was really clear upfront what the outcome was gonna be. So I think if you’re wanting to create these spaces, designing your programs around something that people are experiencing, maybe something that meets the moment, right? Like we launched our program during the Great Resignation to really kind of meet a moment in time, and then just being really clear and succinct about what people are gonna get out of that experience, I think is really important. And then bringing people together and having the experience and then measuring as an outcome, some of that connectivity and whether that added value, I think is what I would recommend.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. Yeah, that’s great advice. And in general, you’ve offered a ton of advice already in this episode, but is there anything else? Any other strategies that you would recommend career services use to better support alumni?

Monica Clem:

Yeah, I mean, I just wanna say up front, I think that this is for a lot of career centers, this is challenging, right? Because we know that I think this year there was a bump in investment across the board. I think I just saw some data on that. But by and large, most career centers are not the most well-resourced on campus, right? We know that. I remember being, I have been a one-person office, right? I remember being in that position of feeling overwhelmed by the real needs of thousands of currently enrolled students and then tens of thousands of alumni. And so I don’t think it’s realistic to just suddenly say, well we’re gonna just start serving alumni with no interrogation of your resources and your ability to do that. So if I was to offer any advice, I would say probably it’s important to start by thinking about what can you deliver in a way that is scalable, but not adding a ton of labor, right, to your team.

And I do think there are ways to do that. I mentioned partnering with organizations that specialize in some of the things that maybe your team doesn’t, doing revenue share agreements with some partners in those spaces that can facilitate some of those programs. And then again collaborating with your alumni engagement team, because I think they’re really tapped into what alumni are saying and what they need. And beyond that even if you were wanting to start really small, just thinking career centers often are present at the front end of the student experience. You know, we go to new student orientation, we’re part of matriculation and some of those experiences. So thinking also about how could we be part of some of those alumni experiences, whether it’s homecomings or some of the events that your university is hosting, just not necessarily to be there to provide a service but to network and to hear from alums about what might be most of value. I think is maybe those are some places probably to start.

Meredith Metsker:

Right? It’s just about reminding them that the career center exists, that it’s still here to help you. Okay. I would think that probably another strategy that a career center could use is if they have, like if for example, they do have the uConnect virtual career center for current students, there’s lots of ways you could adapt that to offer support for alumni, create communities like you all are doing, specific to alumni. I know when I first started working here and saw what the platform could do, and especially saw our labor market insights module that will show you like compensation data, I was thinking as an alumna, that information would be super helpful if I ever need to negotiate a salary either in a current role or in a new role. Like that would be just a little thing, but it’s a resource that current students and alumni could both use.

Monica Clem:

Yeah, absolutely. In fact, now that you say that, it made me think of some of the things we’re tackling in phase three, and that is one of them. We do have the labor insights tool and right now for the MVP launch, we embedded it into some of our community pages. We’re actually gonna restructure that as we’re gonna name it as an alumni benefit, right? Because it is a benefit, right? Being able to go in and to get that data so quickly and easily is an incredible benefit. So we are going to characterize that differently, right? And really help people understand when they see that, what it is and how to leverage it. And that would be an example of something that’s scalable but isn’t gonna require a lot of labor from your team.

Another thing I think that’s really helpful to leverage is the people widget on the platform. So on our platform, the way we’ve decided to use that is actually as a connectivity tool and a way for alumni to put themselves out there, right? And so we actually invited our alum to opt into that, to be featured there. And we have seen just a tremendous amount of interest. And it’s a way, I think, to not just feature your alumni, right? But to also show or help alumni meet each other. And so that’s another way that we’re leveraging that. I think thinking more about the digital tools that you have and how can they be expanded or even edited in some ways to be like an alumni version. All of that I think could be done pretty easily. I think it’s easy to underestimate the value of things that we might take for granted to someone else, right? And so yeah, I think that’s great.

Meredith Metsker:

So, Monica, I’m curious with this work that you’re doing, it’s clear that there’s a lot of transferable skills, there’s a lot of overlap between your time in higher ed career services and now your work for Teach For America, but there’s also a lot that’s different and that’s new. So I’m curious, what would you say about these types of roles emerging in other fields, like outside of higher ed?

Monica Clem:

Yeah, I mean, I’d say first of all I think it’s so exciting, right? And I loved working in higher ed. I love higher ed. I think I’ll probably eventually find my way back. But even in this work being able to still contribute to, I think most of us who do this kind of work, we do it because we’re very mission-driven to help people achieve their goals, right? Achieve their dreams and find success, whatever that means to them. And so being able to do that in a, perhaps a wide variety of contexts, I think is really amazing. I do think, as I alluded to earlier, that there are gonna be more and more organizations… we’re kind of interesting cuz we’re kind of on the periphery of education. Like we work directly in education, but we’re not an education provider, so we work in ways that are highly intersectional with education.

So there’s a lot of overlap and certainly there are a lot of organizations that do that, right? There are a lot of nonprofits that work on equity in education college access and things like that. So not just in those types of fields, but also I think in the private sector and other organizations. I think there’s just gonna continue to be a need to engage people in their career development, right? Whether that’s internal, like you come into an organization and you get on a career development pathway so that you have a long career with that organization. Or I mentioned earlier that boomerang phenomenon. So I would say people who work in this field think about how your skills are transferable, but also think about how you could partner with those organizations. You know, one of the things I’m thinking about moving forward, I mentioned earlier we have a lot of graduate school partners. I’m meeting with one this afternoon, right after this meeting.

And I really love the thought partnership with our higher ed partners on how to engage our network. And one of the opportunities that I see that I’ve been thinking about is how do we find those alums that are their alums and our alums, right? We have lots of alums that then go into that institution and earn a master’s degree, and now they’re sort of like dual alums, and how do we work together to engage them? You know, I mentioned earlier that those opportunities to think about some of your highest priority employer partners that might hire a ton of your graduates, those graduates become your alumni and potentially their alumni. And so I think there’s just so… certainly I don’t have all the answers. Like these are just things that really spark a lot of energy for me. And I would just say this is something that I think is gonna continue to evolve and change. So yeah, it’s been a fun journey.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. And an interesting one too. I think these trends and what you’re talking about in that career development is happening in a variety of ways. It just plays into this whole concept of Career Everywhere.

Monica Clem:

A hundred percent.

Meredith Metsker:

It’s everywhere. It’s in nonprofits, it’s in companies, it’s in higher ed. And it’s all part of this larger ecosystem of trying to connect people to meaningful work.

Monica Clem:

Yeah. And really doing it in ways that are as equitable as possible. You know, constantly trying to improve these systems of equity and access across… it’s also intersectional, right? Like access to education, access to career opportunity, and thinking broadly about where we can add value and kind of plug into those different places, I think is an exciting evolution in the field more broadly of career services or career development.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. Agreed. I’m excited to watch the evolution. Well, Monica, is there anything else you would like to add about our topic today about supporting and engaging alumni?

Monica Clem:

No, just that again, I’ve been doing this work now for a couple years. I don’t necessarily consider myself an expert. I’m still building my learning and understanding, and I would love to hear from anyone in the network that is also working with alumni. I know there are so many institutions that are doing incredible work in this space and I would love to hear from them and thought partner with them as well. And so if anyone would like to reach out, I always welcome folks to connect with me on LinkedIn. That’s probably the best way to do that. And would love to stay in touch.

Meredith Metsker:

All right. And for anyone watching or listening, I’ll be sure to include a link to Monica’s LinkedIn and then also to the alumni hub that she mentioned earlier in the episode. So you can go check that out if you want. All right. So Monica, I’m gonna close this out with this answer a question, leave a question thing that I do at the end of every episode. 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. Okay. So the last guest was Leonelle Thompson of Williams. And she wanted to know what your entrance song would be, like if you were a baseball player getting up to bat, or you were about to be introduced for a public speaking gig, something like that.

Monica Clem:

Yeah, so you shared this with me briefly before we connected today. And I think I shared with you like, this is probably gonna be the hardest question for me to answer. I’m so athletically challenged, I can’t even envision myself coming out to any kind of song. And even though I do a lot of public speaking, I always get so nervous ahead of time. So it’s hard for me to think about it. So I’ll just tweak the question a little bit. I’ll just talk about my favorite… the new Ellie Golding album came out recently. And I’ve just like been listening to that on repeat and repeat and repeat. So when you first said this, I was like, thinking about the different songs on that album, but yeah, I don’t know. I think I would prefer no entrance song. It’s a little too much for me. That’s not really directly answering the question, but yeah.

Meredith Metsker:

No, no, that’s great. Maybe it’s not an entrance song. It’s like you’re listening to the whole album hyping yourself up before the public speaking gig. Like you’ve got your headphones in. Yeah.

Monica Clem:

Just walking around. Yeah. Getting, getting excited.

Meredith Metsker:

There you go. Love it. So what’s a question you would like to leave for the next guest?

Monica Clem:

So a question that I love to ask, especially people in this profession, is what did you want to be when you were six years old, when you grew up? And how how different is that from where you are now? I always love to ask that.

Meredith Metsker:

Oh, that’s a good one. I’m excited to hear the answer to that one because I feel like, I mean, no one got a degree in career services. Most people didn’t necessarily know that that’s what they wanted to do until maybe they got to college themselves.

Monica Clem:

A hundred percent, definitely was my story.

Meredith Metsker:

Cool. Well, I’m excited to ask that of the next guest. And Monica, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today. This was a really fun conversation and it’s great to get another perspective on the podcast. So just thank you for sharing your time today.

Monica Clem:

Of course. Yes. Thank you for having me. And I didn’t mention this earlier, but another thing I’ll just offer to this audience is if anyone’s curious about TFA at all for your students or our Ignite Fellowship, please feel free to reach out to me. I’m always happy to make those connections as well.

Meredith Metsker:

There you go. You heard it here. All right. Well thank you again, Monica, and I hope you have a good rest of your day.

Monica Clem:

Thank you.