How the University of Oklahoma Is Building a Career Ecosystem

Meredith Metsker:

Hey everyone, welcome back to the Career Everywhere podcast. I’m your host Meredith Metsker, and today I am joined by Justin Morris and Robin Houston, both of the University of Oklahoma. Justin is the associate director of employer relations and Robin is the executive director of the Career Center. Thank you both for being here.

Robin Huston:

Thank you so much for having us. We’ve been really looking forward to it.

Justin Morris:

Happy to be here.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. I’m so glad to have you both. And I’m excited to talk to you both today about how your team is implementing Career Everywhere and building a career ecosystem there at the University of Oklahoma.

Now, this is obviously super relevant to our audience here at the Career Everywhere podcast. And I know you’re doing a lot of cool things. There’s lots of grassroots efforts as I think you both described it. So I’m looking forward to digging into this topic. But before I get into my questions, is there anything else either of you would like to add about yourselves, your backgrounds, or your roles there at OU?

Robin Huston:

No. I mean, I guess I would say how long I’ve been here. So I’ve been at the University of Oklahoma Career Center for 11 years-ish. 10 in my current role. And have seen our office go through a huge, huge change from when I got here and to where we are today, which we’ll talk about more down the road. But yeah, I’ve been here a while and I’m excited to talk about Career Everywhere with you today.

Justin Morris:

My timeline is very similar to Robin’s. I’ve been in the career center for almost 11 years. And in my current role, almost 10. My team oversees all the recruiting efforts at the university and manages our employer facing relationships. We focus on propping up experiential learning opportunities for students and just try to connect them to as many opportunities and the talent acquisition game as we can.

Meredith Metsker:

Awesome. Thank you both for that context. That’s really cool that you both have been there for so long. I imagine that gives you lots of, well, institutional knowledge, but also lots of historical context on how you moved into this Career Everywhere-focus and some of the things you’re doing now. So again, we’ll get into that in just a few minutes here.

But before I get into my more specific questions about our topic, I do want to kick us off with the questions that I ask all of our guests here on the podcast. And that’s what does Career Everywhere mean to you?

Robin Huston:

I’ll go first. For me, it sounds silly, but Career Everywhere is exactly what it says. So I want to know that career and professional development is being talked about in every little nook and cranny of this university, not just in our office.

And it’s funny, always when I think about Career Everywhere, I have this weird visual that pops up into my head and it’s almost like the Brady Bunch boxes. And then in each box I see a different scene from the university. So it could be a professor in front of a classroom and talking about career. It could be office hours with a faculty member and a student in one of the boxes. Then maybe there’s a career fair in a box. Then could be two students just sitting and talking about an interview that one of them had and feedback, things like that. But really it’s just when I imagined it, I imagined it being talked about everywhere it could possibly be talked about here.

Meredith Metsker:

I love the Brady Box or the Brady Bunch analogy. I’m imagining it in my head. That’s great.

Justin, how about you?

Justin Morris:

Well, for me, with my job being so employer-focused, I think about it in terms of opportunity. And we worked on a very large campus, but this idea really rings true for a campus of any size where you’re always going to have some students who don’t connect themselves to the opportunities that are presented by their career center no matter how big or small it is. And it’s a difficult proposition for students who don’t necessarily have a great idea about what they’re going to do with themselves to locate those services and to utilize them, but also connect their process and their job search to those things, and the understanding of a need to develop competencies for professional development early on. And that effort in Career Everywhere is kind of bringing everybody into that conversation early into the circle of professional development because our goal is equity of opportunity for all students on campus, not just the ones that know what they want to do when they declare their first major.

Some of them might end up in a different major and maybe even a different college, but we want everybody to be connected to equity of opportunity, and that really is what it’s all about.

Meredith Metsker:

I love that phrasing, the equity of opportunity. And I am one of those who switched their major. I think lots of people do. I switched from English, freshman year to journalism, sophomore year. And journalism was far and away the better fit.

All right, cool. Well now I would love to dig into our topic today, which is again, how you’re implementing Career Everywhere and really building that career ecosystem on campus and beyond. So to get us started, I’m just going to go right into the big question. What are you doing to build that career ecosystem there at OU?

Robin Huston:

I think to really even start to answer that question, I have to give you a little bit of context about our office and where we are today and where we started. Because about three years ago we were an office of 10, and we’re now an office of 20 plus. That was a huge opportunity for us as a staff and to see the growth that we could have but try to figure out now what does this mean. We’ve got all these people. Now what do we do?

So one of the first things that we did was we hired a consultant to come in and do a strategic growth analysis for our office. So we had the career leadership collective come in and work with us and meet with faculty, staff, deans and everybody in our office and then had them give us a plan for what they thought would be the best series of next steps for us as an office as we grow.

And so out of that came this idea of Career Everywhere and scaling everything that we do for university of our size. But how do we do that? Even with 23 staff members, you still can’t do everything that you want to do. So we got together, our leadership team especially, and we put together a three-year strategic plan. And Career Everywhere was at the center of that, and really is at the center of everything that we do. So that’s kind of how it all got started. And I’ll let Justin add to that.

Justin Morris:

Sure. The idea of building the plan was just one component of it. And the second part of it though is like, how do we sell this plan? How do we create a argument to use at all levels in the university? And that starts at the top obviously with support from our administration, but also at the college levels, making sure that college level leadership at the dean’s level and the department head level are all aware of what this is and that it is an accessible idea. And this is before we even really start influencing the professional development of students at this level.

So it felt like a big lift in the beginning, but Robin’s point about the strategic plan was really the key to that. And then just taking the effort to go about spreading the word about it and effectively selling it to our stakeholders around campus just so we could get the work started.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay, yeah, that’s great context. And I am curious, just to provide even more context for the listeners, how many students do you have there at OU that your team of 23 is working with?

Robin Huston:

I don’t even know what the official number is today. It’s more than 20,000. We’re a centralized office, so we do serve the entire university. We serve undergraduates and graduate students, PhD students, anybody who happens to need our help, that’s what we do.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. So that’s a pretty high ratio of-

Robin Huston:

Yes, it is.

Meredith Metsker:

… student to counselors and career coaches.

Robin Huston:

Yeah. You can imagine when we had 10 people on our staff, I mean it was crazy to think about the work that we were trying to do with just this little tiny group of people.

Meredith Metsker:

Oh man, I can imagine. I mean that’s amazing that the university was investing in career services and doubled your team size essentially.

Robin Huston:

Yep.

Meredith Metsker:

Mm-hmm. Well and-

Robin Huston:

That’s sort of unheard of.

Justin Morris:

Yeah. And this idea of trying to… Even though we staffed up so much, the idea of making sure that students come to us, this sort of older paradigm of thinking and career services, we realized that that needed to change because it wouldn’t matter if we had 100 people in our office. Our counting metrics, how many appointments do we have, how many students are coming to see us in our office, that still doesn’t really crack the code of the problem that we mentioned initially, which is the higher performing students are going to be the ones that come see us, and those aren’t the ones that need the most help. So how do we reach those students that are falling through the cracks, which percentage-wise is a pretty big population?

And I can say this as a liberal arts grad who had three majors before I graduated. The liberal arts students, 30% of our student body are not necessarily thinking about this in an organic way when they’re studying. They’re not necessarily working towards a degree and a major that encourages them to focus on professional development. So trying to figure out how we could, again, crack the code of reaching these students and building this into their spaces so they could start thinking about and learning about career in a scalable approach from our office was really the only way that makes sense for us to reach the students and try to create that equity we’re looking for.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, that’s really helpful information, especially about just trying to reach those students that may not know about the career center, especially first-gen students who may not have that social capital or even just the parents to tell them, “Hey, the career center exists. You should go use it. So yeah, that makes a lot of sense.” So on that Career Everywhere topic here, what are some of the things that you are doing to build or to implement Career Everywhere and build that career ecosystem?

Justin Morris:

Right. So this was the second part, right? So we made this really great strategic plan and we know in general what we want to do over the course of three years and what we want to build, but how do we operationalize that? And we realized that the big thing here is awareness and its outreach. So let’s do a road show. Let’s figure out how to go tell the people what we need them to know. And one of the recommendations in the strategic growth analysis that the career leadership collective did for us was focus on one-on-one relationship building.

And you have to start small. No matter how big your university is or how small your university is, you have to try to get these winnable moments. So we sent out our advisors to take people to coffee. We asked them to identify people in their respective areas where they advise, try to identify some people that are thinking about this work and take them to coffee. And in taking them to coffee, ask them for advice, ask them, “What can we do for you to support what you’re already doing? How can we provide you with resources and information and support that will kind of push this concept further into your curriculum?” And these conversations are not just with faculty, they’re also with staff. And again, upper level leadership. It could be really anybody in the university whose work impacts students. And if you think about it, that’s really everybody.

So in our first year, we deployed our team. And it could have been anybody from our entire office doing this if they had a contact they wanted to try to bring into the fold. Take them to get coffee, have a conversation, put a consulting hat on and ask, “What can we do for you?” Let’s get their buy-in by asking for their advice. And we will talk a little more about this in a little bit I think. But we saw some really good results there in trying to seek out people that were already doing some of this work and recognizing that we weren’t going to bat a thousand so to speak when it comes to bringing people in. But we saw some good movement there and made some really great relationships with people.

We did this when it comes to implementing career into curriculum. But also we sent our events team out to do the same thing, to talk to different departments about what can we do to help you and support some of this competency building through events. What sort of events would you like to see for your students? What would work best in terms of learning styles for the students that you see in your population?

And we also did that with our experiential learning coordinator. We lean really hard into experiential learning at OU and understand that it’s a huge growth area just in the world of work and has become so much more important. So we sent our coordinator around to talk to people about converting student jobs into substantive learning opportunities for experiential education and have seen some growth there as well. Basically we’re trying to show people that this scalable concept is accessible, it’s easy, and there is support from us to get this done and to make these spaces that the students are studying, in which the students are studying, places where they can start to get some of this early career education.

Robin Huston:

I was just going to add to what Justin said with some of the other things that we’re doing the last May, which was I guess really the end of our first year of this strategic plan. We had a very small Career Everywhere workshop for student affairs staff. We started with student affairs staff because for one, we are part of student affairs and we know that that’s a really nice group of people who are like family to us and we thought, “Let’s start with the friendly people that we know and see how this goes over.” And so we did it. It was just a two and a half hour, I think, workshop. And it went really well.

And so then from there, what we’ve decided to do is we’re building on these coffee chats that we’ve been having and we’ve really cultivated this huge list of faculty and staff from all different areas of the university. And those are the people that we are inviting to this Career Everywhere Symposium, which we’re having on April 1st. And so far, the buzz around the event is really good. We have a lot of people have said they’re coming. And that’s going to be a much longer… Not too long, but a longer experience. We’re going to get everybody in one space together and we’re going to have career and professional development conversations and we’re going to keep working on this idea of getting buy-in from the faculty and staff and getting everybody on the same page. That career and professional development doesn’t need to live in our office, it needs to live everywhere. So we’re excited. I hope it’s good and I hope we can report back to you that it went well.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, my fingers are crossed for you. I know the event hasn’t happened yet, but I’m just curious, what’s on the agenda generally speaking?

Robin Huston:

Oh, there’s a lot. I mean, we’re going to do the high-level overview of our office and the services that we provide because oddly enough, so many of these people that we’ve taken to coffee really had zero experience with our office. They don’t know what we do, they don’t know what resources we have. And so this grassroots effort of getting people to understand what we can offer is really important.

So we’ll start with an overview of our office, our resources that we pay for that everybody has access to that they don’t know they have access to. We are going to do some pretty deep conversations about the NACE core competencies and the importance of the competencies for our students.

We have an employer scheduled to come and talk about how they use the competencies in their work with interns. I’m excited about that because I think we know that faculty and staff will probably look at an employer out there talking about all of this and think, “Okay. Now they really know what they’re talking about.” We know too, but they must really know what they’re talking about. So that’ll be fun.

And then we’re also going to take the opportunity to introduce probably our biggest Career Champion that we’ve formed a relationship with on this campus and let her talk a little bit about the work that she does with students and how she partners with our office. So yeah, it’s going to be… And then there will be an hour of over lunch of discussion at the tables. We’ve got table topics. And so a little bit of everything.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, that sounds great. I’m excited to hear how it goes. So yeah, you’ll definitely have to fill me in.

Okay, cool. So it sounds like you have these symposiums, you have the coffee chat. Are there any other tactics that you’re using to implement Career Everywhere?

Robin Huston:

One thing we haven’t really talked about is just the thinking in our office that has completely changed for us, and that’s what Justin mentioned earlier. We know that this getting students to come to us is not really a sustainable idea. It doesn’t work, it’s never worked. It doesn’t matter how many people you have on your staff. But what we’re really focusing on is going to where the students are.

So we have sent our advisors out, they go and the office in different areas on campus so they can meet with students. We’re trying to make sure that we find the students because they’re not going to find us, so we’re finding them. So if it means that we find them through faculty and staff or we find them because we’re out in a whole different location, that’s just another area that I think has helped us a lot with getting career out into the other spaces.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, I love that. It reminds me of something that was brought up on an episode, she’s a couple of years ago from, Jessica Best in January at the University of Oregon, Lundquist College of Business. Jessica was talking about how… She’s like, “I know it sounds intense to embed career assignments into the classroom, into business classes.” She’s like, “But in our mind, that’s improving access. If it’s a requirement, then every student is exposed to it regardless of if they work a job after class, if they have children or a family or other responsibilities. They still get that same exposure.” So this makes me think of that.

Justin Morris:

So true. That’s exactly it. That’s exactly it. You used the word, the equity model. It’s so important. And we recognize that employer feedback tells us actually that the students that have better access to this professional competency development have better experiences in their internships. And as full-time employees, they show up ready to work and they know what’s expected of them. And I think it’s the secret sauce for getting students ready once they graduate to get the career into the curriculum.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, absolutely. And we know that that readiness conversation is definitely in the public eye these days as we talk about the ROI of higher ed and yeah.

All right. Well you’ve both shared a little bit about how you’re building this career ecosystem, but is there any other strategies or tactics you want to share before I move on?

Cool. Well now I would like to dig into the why. So why have you prioritized investing in Career Everywhere and really building this ecosystem? Because I mean, it’s a lot of work. So I’m just curious, what’s your why?

Robin Huston:

Oh gosh, there’s so many why’s. The biggest why is that we know that the career conversations are happening. We want to make sure that the people that are having these conversations are actually armed with the knowledge that they need so that they can actually have productive conversations in that a faculty member doesn’t get blindsided with these questions and they’re like, “Well, I don’t know. I don’t know.” So I mean, that’s a big part of it.

Another piece, and I have to say for us, and we talked about how the growth of our office, part of that came from the fact that the regents for our higher ed in Oklahoma, we have a handful of new regents. There was this really cool thing that happened. They started asking questions about career, which has never happened before, not since I’ve been here anyway. And they want to know what do we doing at the university at OU to help this and do this work with our students and what are the outcomes for these students? And they started asking these real pointed questions. I think the president started thinking, “Oh, I better start really thinking about this too.” And so it just became this snowball effect of these questions being asked, leading to somebody saying to me, “Hey, we want you to come in and do a big presentation for the president and leadership about what you need to have this really robust best-in-class career center.” And that’s really how a lot of this all started. That’s how we got the money to bring in the consultant to do our growth analysis.

And so the why came from different reasons, but sometimes the why, when you have the people above going, “Hey, this is really important,” that pushes your mission forward a lot faster than it would have otherwise.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, I bet. I’m just thinking every other career center leader listening to this episode is probably going, “how do I get that opportunity to present to my president, get that budget?”

Robin Huston:

Right.

Justin Morris:

Well, and then the emphasis on workforce development at the state level too is sort of coinciding with this effort from the regents. Our governor has really thrown down the gauntlet in terms of what are we doing to prepare students in Oklahoma to prepare them for the workforce and how do we retain them, which are, those are two different things. But for our part, the workforce development component and particularly trying to utilize the NACE core competencies to create that was really boosted by all of the attention that Robin mentioned that we were getting. It didn’t necessarily change what we believed about professional development, but it certainly added a lot of fuel to the fire and gave us some momentum that we could utilize to build out and grow.

But I did want to make a point about the scope of it to any other career center leaders that are listening, particularly if you’re part of a small institution. These are things that you can do without being heavily resourced if you’re able to make a plan to do so. And really the concept itself is accessible across any budget or size of team. It just might change your timeline a little bit. But we’re doing important work as an industry. And I feel like the concept of Career Everywhere and approaching it that way really is scalable across any size university.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, that’s a great call out, especially because our guest two episodes ago is a team of one. So I’m sure he will appreciate knowing that some of these tactics are scalable for him too.

Okay. I’m curious, Robin, so when you got that call that you were going to be presenting to the president, did you have that plan in your back pocket? Like, “If I ever get this opportunity, I have this list of things”? Or did you create your ask after you got that call? I’m just curious.

Robin Huston:

100%. I never, ever imagined in a million years that I would get that call. So I didn’t have anything prepared. I’d been here a long time and even before I’ve worked here now, I worked here many years ago for a couple of years right when I moved to Norman. And so what happened? And that was like 2003 and 2004. When I came back however many years later, we weren’t very different from what it was like when I left in ’04. I mean, we had a little better technology, but that was about it. So no, I mean, I never thought I would have this ask from the president. It was kind of exciting because we got together as a team and we just started, “|Let’s start doing some benchmarking. Let’s dream big. Let’s think about what we could do.” We’ve always said, “Oh, if we had more people, we would do this or that.” And now we’ve got this opportunity, so let’s build it. And luckily I had time, they didn’t say, “We don’t want to see you tomorrow.”

So we put together a really awesome presentation, I thought, and I presented. And then I didn’t hear anything for a little while and I was like, “Okay. Well, we got to do that.” And then all of a sudden one day I get this phone call and they said, “Okay.” They said, “Let’s do it.” I was like, “What? Do what? What are we doing? Oh.” And so I was a little bit… Sort of like my mouth on the floor, like, “Well, okay.” And I remember telling the staff, “Hey, we got the go ahead to make this happen.” And it was exciting.

It’s been a really fast few years with the hiring and we were on this… We’re going to hire everybody. We’re going to hire 12 people over the course of 18 months. And so we started writing job descriptions. And then all of a sudden I got a phone call that they said, “Actually, they want you to hire everybody right now.” And so we went, “Oh, okay.” So we literally hired 12 people in the span of about six months, right, Justin? I mean, it was fast. It was crazy.

Justin Morris:

Challenging, to say the least.

Robin Huston:

Yep. But exciting.

Meredith Metsker:

Wow. Yeah, that’s a lot of hiring. We’ve done some hiring recently here at uConnect and I can’t imagine doing 12 in six months.

I don’t want to keep going too far down this rabbit hole, but I am curious with those 12 people, keeping this Career Everywhere goal in mind, what were the positions that you added?

Robin Huston:

Well, we sort of touched on… Well, a big one that we had wanted for a long time was a data analyst for our office because we needed to be able to tell our story in a way that we can share it with everybody. So we hired a data analyst who’s created a beautiful dashboard for us that everybody at the university is using in different capacity. So that was great.

We knew that we wanted to up our events staff so that we could create more and more of these career community events and more of the Career Everywhere idea that we won’t want to just have a career fair. We want to have niche events all during the year. And then we hired… How many advisors did we hire Justin? Three or four?

Justin Morris:

Yeah. We increased our advising staff by more than 50%.

Robin Huston:

Yeah. I’m trying to think, did we hire anybody else besides… I think that was it. But yeah, it was a lot.

Justin Morris:

Well, I just want to add, the other focus, and I mentioned our experiential learning coordinator, who we’ve been sending around doing some consulting, that was an area of growth that we knew needed some extra attention. And we managed to hire somebody that has taken this early idea of what we think experiential learning coordinator job duties should be. And it’s turned it into this way bigger job. And so now we are doing what I would consider as an office cutting-edge work in our industry in terms of utilizing experiential learning to elevate this idea of competency development and embedding career into curriculum.

Meredith Metsker:

That’s really helpful to kind of hear what types of roles you were investing in and how that plays into the Career Everywhere goal.

I keep thinking of all these different other topic ideas. I’m like, “I’m just going to have to have Justin and Robin back on so we can dig into some of this other stuff.”

Justin Morris:

We’re here for it.

Robin Huston:

We can do it.

Justin Morris:

Yeah, let’s go.

Robin Huston:

Another thing we did was we added a really awesome staff member who loves social media and all things marketing like that. And she has really upped our game when it comes to getting the messages out to the students. And really, she understood better than anybody has in the past, I think, where we need to be getting the word out and how to do that. And so she was another addition that has just made a tremendous growth for our office.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, it’s a good reminder to us all that it’s not only what your message is, it is where you are sharing it.

Robin Huston:

Right. Right.

Justin Morris:

Absolutely.

Meredith Metsker:

And kind of on that note, I wanted to go back to something you said earlier, Justin, about how a lot of your efforts are going into selling this concept. How are you doing that? I mean, I know there’s this symposium, there’s these coffee chats. Is there anything else you’re doing to get that buy-in and sell this idea of Career Everywhere?

Justin Morris:

Well, I think that the roadshow stuff, the legwork is really… You mentioned it, the coffee chats are really the bread and butter of that because it’s one thing to send an email or any kind of messaging where somebody can read something and see what it is. And what we’ve learned is, and this is probably true everywhere, that what people glean off of an email or any kind of messaging really is limited with how much takeaway there is and how much it sticks. And we really want to be able to explain why this is so easy and not just why it’s important. Because you could… It’s really easy, I think, to say like, “It’s important for students to prepared to enter the world of work. That they know how to work on a team, et cetera.” Anything that you could learn with competency development through the NACE core competencies.

But explaining the why and explaining the how is so much easier if you can just sit down. And this is the scalable approach that fits across any size university. If you’re an office of one, you can still have those conversations and be strategic about who those people are. Robin mentioned our Career Champion that we’re going to highlight in our symposium. That’s another thing that we’re doing, is we’re building a career champions program. And that is going to be part of our year three success that we’re hoping for in cultivating these relationships that we’ve established on the front end and then building these things in to the curriculum in these classrooms and these spaces where the work is being done and actually recognizing people that are doing this work as career champions.

Well, if you’re an office of one, the advice there is to do what we did, in that find the people that are already doing the work. Who do we know on campus that already says things that show that they care about career or that does things that show that they care about career? Who’s supporting these concepts already around your university? That takes so much weight off of the lift.

This person that we’re highlighting in our symposium does incredible work through her Office of Student Success in the College of Arts and Sciences, which is the biggest college on campus, but has a small staff of her own and needs support. Well, there’s a natural fit there for us to work together. So we have an advisor that has dedicated quite a bit of time in cultivating this relationship. Now she’s the biggest promoter of the things that we do in our office in her space. Trying to get that bandwidth in the student’s attention span in an era where messaging is so important, but everybody’s trying to do it, there’s no airspace there. But they see this person in their spaces where they study. They go see her for help. And our advisor goes in offices in her space sometimes. That was an easy win for us just in the sense of somebody was already having these conversations.

So that I think is key. There are other things that you can do to support this effort, but creating those relationships and cultivating them in a way that provides support and mutual support has been really beneficial for us.

Robin Huston:

The other thing I think you can’t really even quantify, but obviously if you can get buy-in from the top, you’re going to be really set up nicely. And if you can do that, that’s great.

So one of the things for me, I’m doing my own road show. And so I go and I meet with the deans of each college. One of the things I’ve done is I take my laptop and I share with them the dashboard that I mentioned earlier, our student outcomes dashboard. That leads to great questions from the deans to me about, “Well, why are these numbers lower for my college than this college?” And so you get into these really deep conversations about what does student success look like and what do we need to be doing to make students successful. Which then leads me into explaining to them about Career Everywhere and the importance of the deans talking to their faculty and staff about the importance of Career Everywhere.

And so we’ve had a few. I think there are two deans that I met with that pretty much sent out the invitation to the symposium and said, “Everybody not teaching at that time needs to go.” And that to me felt like a big win because when the dean tells you to go, you’re going to go. So I think the buy-in has to come from everywhere. It can come from the deans, but it can come from a one-on-one meeting with the faculty. But anywhere we can get it, that’s what we’re doing.

Meredith Metsker:

I love that. That’s so effective and amazing that you have the deans buy-in like that and say, “Hey, you’re going. Please go.”

Robin Huston:

I love it.

Meredith Metsker:

Awesome. Well, we kind of touched on this a little bit earlier, but what results and benefits have you all seen since really going all in on Career Everywhere?

Justin Morris:

Well, I’m going to circle back to the experiential learning component. As we all know, experiential education is a really hot topic right now in our industry. And it’s not just with the conversations that we’re having, it’s the conversations that employers are having with us. And part of our roadshow is in setting our experiential learning coordinator out. And she has really capitalized on some opportunities to spread this idea into practice.

Very specifically this semester, she’s managed to cultivate a relationship along with one of our advisors with a professor in criminology who said, “Okay, well let’s give this a shot.” And the idea that she presented was, let’s embed some micro internship opportunities into the curriculum of the classroom. Let’s get some employers in here and let’s connect them with students for some project-based learning so students can kind of get the experience of working with these employers on a professional basis, but also something that they could put on their resume. And it’s gone great so far. We’re halfway through it. Early returns are very good. Our employers are happy as well, which is another big win. We’re strengthening those relationships along the way. And we’re going to evaluate this piloted program this summer and then try to scale it more in year three of the strategic plan.

But this touches back on this idea of a Career Champion because the other thing that our coordinator is doing in helping facilitate these projects from a consulting standpoint, not necessarily an operational standpoint, but from a consulting standpoint, which is a big thing to consider when you’re thinking about bandwidth for your staff. Just getting things started and letting them run it is the way to do it. That in and of itself is, we hope, going to create great feedback from this faculty member and maybe somebody else on their team is going to say, “Ooh, that looks doable. That’s not as hard as I would think it would be.” Because again, you get back to this messaging problem, where if we send an email saying, “We want to do this thing with you. Here’s how it works,” it could seem like it could potentially be too big of a lift for a faculty member. But because of the road work that was done initially, this professor thought it was doable.

So we’re really looking forward to that being something that spreads and self-sustains going forward. And we want to build on that every semester where we can.

Meredith Metsker:

That’s an amazing result. It seems like in general, one of the major benefits from all of your efforts around Career Everywhere is just really strong relationships all across campus at all levels with your employers, with your students.

Robin Huston:

Yeah. I think what you just said about relationships, one of the coolest benefits that I’ve seen from this is the advisor. So when we first started the coffee with a career advisor, it was really scary to them. It was like, “Oh, I’ve never done this before. And faculty sometimes don’t seem like they’re buying what I’m selling. Do I really have to take somebody to coffee?” And so after we got past that initial, we did some coaching about what does this look like, they started to love it. And we had to actually get a second coffee card because there was always somebody out having coffee and we’re like, “Well, maybe we’re going to need three or four.” And then other people on our staff were like, “Well, I want to take somebody to coffee. Everybody’s going out and having coffee. That looks like fun.” And so the excitement in our office, I think, was one of the biggest positives to come out of this whole Career Everywhere idea because we really energized their work and sort of how they’re going out and meeting with faculty. And that was fun to see.

And then the only other thing I would say is there’s just this kind of interesting buzz right now around this forever wear idea. And when we had to reschedule the symposium because of weather, there were a lot of people who reached out and said, “Oh no, I actually teach. It’s on a different day of the week. Now I teach, but I’m going to see if I can get a sub.” And I was just so excited to hear how many people were really… It wasn’t like they went, “Oh, thank God I can have that day back now.” They were actually really bummed that they didn’t get to have that experience. So they were excited about it. And to me, that feels like we’re doing something right.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, absolutely. That’s a great signal.

Robin Huston:

Yep.

Meredith Metsker:

Cool. Well, I mean you’ve already achieved so much with these programs, but what are your goals for the future of Career Everywhere there at OU?

Justin Morris:

Well, the three-year strategic plan is going to end, right? This is a finite plan, and we’re right smack in the middle of it right now, so there’s still work for us to do. But what we want to see at the very end is self-sustainability. We’re feeding all of this energy into this project for that specific reason. And we’re hoping that if we can get enough career champions involved and we can have enough of the right people in the right spaces latching on to this idea of this scalable approach and it’s accessible and it’s doable, and this isn’t going to take up half of my class time, and we have advisors that are willing to have these early conversations, it grows on its own. And then we step into much more of a consulting basis with them where they can call and say, “Hey, we’re working on this idea. What do you think about how we could expand it this way?” Well, then our focus is coaching at that point.

I want to give another shout out to the career leadership collective. There’s a term I always use when I talk to people about this, and it’s this concept of good friction. If you think about the career journey, you’re familiar, of a student from the early stages to the end, you think about it like a road, well, a lot of times, myself in particular here, I’ll pick on myself again, I didn’t think about career until my last semester of my senior year. So I didn’t have an internship. I didn’t know that I should be thinking about those things just because it wasn’t part of the journey that I was on.

So part of building the Career Champions program and scaling out services into the spaces where students study and are advised is you create these moments of good friction along the road, speed bumps if you will, where if a student has a question about career, they’re going to ask their favorite professor during office hours or they’re going to ask a trusted advisor. And those are areas of good friction along the way to our office.

So if a student can get that question answered there, that’s great. Everybody wins. They don’t have to come to our office. We don’t have to focus on counting stats for our one-on-one appointments to know that the job has been done well. And if a student needs more advanced help with the job search or career in general, then that advisor or faculty member can pass them further down the road, past that point of good friction to our office. And then we are there to help them at that point.

So what does that do? That thins the herd in terms of the number of appointments that we see with students that maybe don’t necessarily need to talk to an advisor in our office if it’s just like a basic resume question or a, “Where can I look for jobs? How do I get on Handshake?” It saves those appointment spaces for students that really need more advanced help who maybe don’t have the detail that they need in their resume or need to talk about the job search in a more involved way.

So it’s a win-win for everybody when these points of good friction are created along the career path for these students from the beginning. And a sustainable model, a self-sustaining model for us at the end of our strategic plan, that’s what the ecosystem looks like. We are helping manage the ecosystem through a consulting form rather than direct involvement. It really feels like we’re going to get there, especially with the growth of our symposium attendance this year, and hopefully turning it into a much bigger thing at the end of our journey in year three. So we’re really hopeful, but that’s, I think for me, sums up what I think we were looking for.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, that’s great. Robin, anything to add?

Robin Huston:

No. I mean, the one thing, I have this really big dream of after we get through our strategic plan, that these Career Everywhere symposiums or workshops become something that becomes a college-led event. And so we do this one this year, and then we probably do it again next spring and hopefully it’s twice as big. But then after that, if what Justin said is coming to fruition and we’re creating these Career Champions, then they should be able to do this themselves.

And we have people on our staff, so we have liaisons to every college so they could work with our liaison. And I want to see these Career Everywhere trainings happening in the colleges so we can be more specific about those students and what type of students they’re working with. And we can get a little deeper into the resources and ways that they can use this idea for their students. So that’s just sort of my big goal, is that we hand this over to the colleges at some point. And I don’t know, we’ll see if that happens.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, it’s all about that thing Justin was talking about . So I was wondering, I was curious what your goals were for the symposium specifically. Either you spread it out to the colleges like you’re talking about, or it’s going to have to become this massive production where you record or live stream everything so that all the faculty have access to it. And that’s a big undertaking.

Robin Huston:

It’s interesting to think about how we can tailor it to different populations of students because like we were saying, not every college is created equally in terms of career and professional development. And so different colleges have different needs for their students. And so I think those types of events could be much more impactful than a big giant one that’s very broad. But this is how you have to start, so.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I’m sure colleges in the more liberal arts vein have different advice on career pathing than computer science where it’s pretty linear.

Robin Huston:

Or business.

Justin Morris:

Absolutely.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, business.

Robin Huston:

Exactly. Yep.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. Well, I’ll kind of start wrapping this up. I want to be mindful of our time here. But what advice would you give to other career leaders who want to invest more in Career Everywhere and build a career ecosystem on their campuses?

Robin Huston:

I think for me, best advice I could give would be just to get started. It feels really big. And especially if you have a small staff, it feels like a very big undertaking. But honestly, if we had known more about Career Everywhere prior to our staff growth, we could have gotten started. We just didn’t know we needed to get started. We weren’t there yet. So really, it’s almost like you take these baby steps and you do what you need to do to get the ball rolling. And then once you do, then everything just seems to start falling into place. It takes work, but getting started is the hardest part.

Justin Morris:

Yeah. Just to add to that, at that beginning point, make a plan. We chose a three-year window for this as far as the trajectory for the things that we wanted to do because we were trying to be realistic about how long it was going to take us to build these relationships.

And Meredith, you said it. To me, the center of this entire thing is relationship building. So be relational, but make a plan. So when you do talk to these leaders in these colleges at the dean level or at the director level, or if you’re trying to lead up in your own organization and you’re trying to sell this idea to your own dean, have a plan. Be able to zoom out for them to 30,000 feet and show, “These are the areas that we know need this, and here’s how we want to do this over time.” This is scalable to whatever level of resources you have. If it’s a smaller staff that’s going to take a much more incremental approach, adjust your timeline accordingly. And just know that if you build that scalable plan, it can work in any environment.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, I love that. And on the note of having a plan, maybe in case the president ever calls you and says, “Hey, I’m considering giving you a lot of money,” have that plan in your back pocket.

Justin Morris:

Yeah, that’s right. That’s right.

Robin Huston:

Right.

Meredith Metsker:

Ask Robin about what needs to be included.

Robin Huston:

Right. I’ll share my presentation.

Meredith Metsker:

All right. Well, is there anything else either of you would like to add before I start closing this out?

Okay. Well, if anyone watching or listening to this episode wants to connect with you or learn more from you, where’s a good place for them to do that?

Robin Huston:

For me, probably email is the easiest way to go. I’m also on LinkedIn. You can message me that way. But email is probably the best.

Justin Morris:

Same for me. I’m all over both of those all of the time. So connect with us on LinkedIn for sure. And let’s keep up with each other, but reach out whatever way works best for you.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay, perfect. And I’ll be sure to include links to both Justin and Robin’s LinkedIn profiles and their emails, so anyone watching or listening can reach out.

Okay. So now at the end of every interview, I like to do this answer a question, leave a question thing. So I’ll ask you a question our last guest left for you. And then you’ll leave a question for the next guest. So our last guest was Allie Danziger of AscentUP, one of our partners here at uConnect. She left the following question for you. “What was your first internship experience and what did you gain from it that’s helped lead you to where you are today?”

Robin Huston:

I can say I never had an internship, and that’s not surprising. I went to a really, really big school and I just sort of got lost in all of it. So I’m just like, “Let me just get my degree and let me get out of here.” And nobody ever talked to me about having an internship.

But what I would say is, had I known… So I always had jobs in the summer. I never didn’t work, but I always worked. And if I had known about something like the career competencies, the NACE core competencies and what those were, I would’ve actually been able to use that information to articulate what I got out of my work experience. And it almost wasn’t an internship so to speak, but it was something that I could have talked about in a much more useful way on a resume or in an interview. But none of that was a thing when I was in school. This is all new.

And so not having had an internship, it hurt in a sense but I also got out of school not having any idea what I wanted to do because I didn’t have that guidance either in school. So that really makes me think what we’re doing is the right thing to do because I don’t want… And my daughter’s in school here right now, and I don’t want her to get out and be like I was when I graduated.

Justin Morris:

I agree with everything she said. My story is the same. I had, as I mentioned before, very little to no knowledge about career development or the job search or the internship process until I was about to graduate. But the lack of the internship has led me to where I am today in the sense of recognizing the critical nature of experiential education for all of our students, for everyone.

And you mentioned linear career paths from students in business and STEM. We need to make sure that the students that don’t have the linear career paths are aware that this is not only beneficial to them, but accessible, and there’s more than one way to get there, and we are here to help you do that. That really drives the impetus behind this entire thing. It really drives it that we want students to have equity of opportunity when they come to the University of Oklahoma. And for us, that is how we define our success.

So not having an internship probably hindered me the same way it hindered Robin in the sense of I didn’t really get that professional experience ahead of time, but it also informed my current thinking about how important it is.

Meredith Metsker:

I love that for both of you. It makes sense how you ended up where you are and you have unique insight to offer students.

Okay. Well, what question would you like to leave for the next guest?

Robin Huston:

I mean, we thought very long and hard about this and really wanted to come up with something that we thought would be thought-provoking. And I went back and forth for… So I don’t know. Where do we end up, Justin?

Justin Morris:

If you make a pot of chili without beans, is it actually chili?

Meredith Metsker:

I love that so much.

Justin Morris:

So chili beans? No beans?

Robin Huston:

I mean, that led us to a big discussion between Justin and I about the answers. So I am telling you, this is thought-provoking.

Meredith Metsker:

All right. Did you have differing opinions?

Robin Huston:

Oh, yeah.

Meredith Metsker:

Oh, I love that. Well, I will be sure to pose that question to our next guest.

Cool. Well, thank you both so much for taking the time to join me on the podcast today. This was a really fun conversation. We covered everything from Career Everywhere to chili, I feel like that’s all encompassing. But yeah, thank you both so much for taking the time and sharing your wisdom.

Justin Morris:

Thank you for having us.

Robin Huston:

Thank you. Yeah, I really appreciate being asked on the show.