How to Evaluate, Purchase, and Get the Most Out of Your EdTech Stack

Meredith Metsker:

Hey everyone, welcome back to the Career Everywhere podcast. I’m your host Meredith Metsker, and today, I am joined by Joe Testani. He’s the Deputy to the President and the Former Associate Vice Provost for Career Education Initiatives at the University of Rochester in New York. Thank you for being here, Joe.

Joe Testani:

Thank you for having me Meredith, really excited to be part of the podcast and really excited to have this conversation with you.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, likewise. I’m glad to have you and I’m excited to talk to you today about how career services and higher ed in general can better work with education technology. Now, I know this is something you’re particularly passionate about. You’ve worked in career services for over 20 years. You’ve been an advisor for a few different EdTech companies, and I know you’ve implemented a lot of technologies over the years.

So you’ve kind of seen both sides and I think that puts you in the unique position of understanding the nuances of both industries and how they can better understand each other and work together. Yeah, plus, I would love to pick your brain a bit on how you evaluate EdTech, how you get that buy-in to make those purchases, how you manage your EdTech stack, and then how you make sure you’re getting the most out of each tool because I know that is very top of mind for a lot of folks right now as budgets get tighter.

Joe Testani:

Absolutely. Yeah, no, I love this topic, love the conversation. So I’m really excited to dig in with you.

Meredith Metsker:

All right. Yeah, let’s do it, but before I get into my more specific questions Joe, is there anything else you’d like to add about yourself, your background or your role there at the University of Rochester?

Joe Testani:

Sure. Well, as you mentioned, I’ve been working in career education for 20 plus years. I worked at public and private institutions throughout my career and like many folks in this area, I stumbled into career education. My senior year undergraduate, I wasn’t using the career center and I went to get a job at the academic advising office actually. And I realized, well, you could do this work and work with people and peers and kind help them in this way. I was a sociology history major, and so I was looking to work with people in some way, shape or form, but didn’t understand that until I had that internship.

And it really changed the trajectory of my career and my experiences afterwards. And I went on to just have just a really diverse set of experiences at different types of institutions which I think really shaped, I think how I looked at education, looked at my own experiences, but also the universities I worked at. So about eight years ago, I got to University of Rochester. I was charged with rethinking and helping the institution think about their career education for undergraduates here at the university, and it was a fantastic ride.

I had an amazing team that we assembled here to do some really great work and really build out our ecosystem. And then about a year ago, I was looking for a different challenge, looking to scale out and how do I make a bigger impact? And I joined the president’s office as deputy of the president. It was a loose job description, I have to tell you. It was like-

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, I’m curious what that entails.

Joe Testani:

Strategic initiatives. And so I had a hand in helping to craft a little bit. So I was good with the ambiguity, but I was really brought on to think about long-term strategic projects for the president as we’re coming out of the pandemic or coming to this next phase of the pandemic. Everything was very much dealing with immediate issues and fires and challenges, and I think the president wanted to look a little further out. How do we start to build some things and think about the long-term benefits and sustainability of the institution?

And so the project that landed on my lap, this is what I work on pretty much daily now is the strategic plan for the institution and drafting that. And we’re about to launch our Balance Possibility 2030 Strategic Plan this summer which I’m really excited about. And I’ve been managing and project managing and leading a lot of the coordination efforts from across institution to put together our goals, objectives, our dashboard for tracking our progress and it’s been a lot of fun so far. A great way to engage in the university in a very different way.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, I bet. And how cool to be so high level and have a hand in creating that overall strategy, and I’m guessing guessing career readiness maybe plays a role.

Joe Testani:

Oh hell yeah. Absolutely.

Meredith Metsker:

In that strategic plan.

Joe Testani:

I was very blunt with the president and with other senior leaders. I said, “Listen, I’m biased, but I think if you look at the landscape of higher education right now, what institution is not thinking about career? What institutions are not thinking about ROI for families and for students? What institution is not thinking about diversity, equity, inclusion, and the intersection in place with social mobility?” So luckily, it wasn’t a very hard sell to really prioritize that.

And so one of our goals focuses on re-imagining student success and the educational experience of undergrads and grad students and a number of our key objectives focus on experiential learning, focus on competency development, future of work. And so yeah, I definitely have some fingerprints on some of the writing that came out of the strategic plan, but I think that’s what we have to do. We have to advocate for the things that we believe are important.

I think that’s what make career services such a fun area to work in for so many years, and I think that’s an opportunity to really elevate the importance of it. I think that’s what I was always striving for in my career, and I didn’t really think this was the type of role I would be in to be able to do that, but here I am.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, what a unique career path. Yeah, and I’m excited to learn more about, again, how technology plays a role in some of those plans for improving career readiness there at the university. But before I get into those questions, I do want to kick us off with a question that I’ve been asking all of our guests on this podcast, and that is what does Career Everywhere mean to you?

Joe Testani:

I think when we were prepping for this, and I was looking at the questions, I think this is something that just conjures up what’s been central to my career, especially for the last 10, 15 years is that I truly believe that their work of career education and preparing students and student success is the entire university’s role and responsibility. It’s not an office, it’s not a person.

So the ecosystem that is established within a college or university both the people that work in the institution, but also the families of our students, the networks that they bring to the table all play integral role in the success of students and what happens to them after they graduate from the institution and even while they’re there. So to me, it’s about the ecosystem and it’s about the support that all students need in order to launch and really have viable thriving careers.

Meredith Metsker:

Oh, I love it. That was a good answer, very concise.

Joe Testani:

Was it better than all the other ones you’ve gotten so far? You don’t have to answer that question.

Meredith Metsker:

I feel like I shouldn’t answer that question. No, that was great. All right, cool. Well, now I kind of want to get into our topic today. And again, that’s how we can better work with EdTech, how higher ed and EdTech can better work together. Now in our prep call, you talked a lot about bridging the gap between higher ed and EdTech. And so based on your many years of experience working in higher ed and implementing lots of new technologies, in your mind, what is that gap and what’s causing it?

Joe Testani:

So a colleague and I, Rose Nakamoto who was formerly at Santa Clara University, her and I talked a lot about this topic and we wrote an article about it on LinkedIn because we were really passionate about it and really trying to help bridge that gap and start to think about how to really close it. I think the first thing that comes to mind is understanding. It seems simple, but I think oftentimes, universities or people working in higher ed don’t understand the business models of our EdTech partners.

They don’t understand the mission or purpose why they exist and what they’re trying to do and the problems they’re trying to solve for. They don’t understand what the motivations are for the work that is happening in the EdTech side. On the EdTech side, I think oftentimes there’s a lack of understanding of how higher ed works full stop. How we make decisions, how we evaluate opportunities or decisions, how we evaluate products and software.

And so I think it’s important as a first step is trying to see how do we really elevate that understanding as both as individuals, but also as a collectively as a community, how do we create a little more shared understanding. Many cases, we have similar missions and purposes that we’re trying to solve for our students that we’re serving. I think there’s a second thing is authenticity and trust. Sometimes there’s an inherent lack of trust of anybody external to the institution and sometimes that’s something that has been bred culturally and other times, it’s something that we’re taking our in loco parentis responsibilities very seriously, and I think it’s something that we take part of.

And the authenticity piece is people are selling product to you, they’re selling a business. And I think that’s part of what we’re selling to students all the time about the value of career services or the value of an education or the value of our institution. So I think that authenticity goes both ways in understanding that and finding that common ground is key. I think language as a third item really matters. And oftentimes we say similar things but we use very different language.

How do we find common language? But I think that’s really important because the language is used a lot of EdTech circles is very different than what might be used in higher ed. And I think sometimes that creates a barrier for understanding or a barrier for just engagement. And lastly, this is I guess a separate podcast topic. What is scrum change management? And I think to me, oftentimes from a higher ed standpoint, we don’t think about changing management, how we want to change behavior or change systems or change student engagement and think about the impact of that change across the ecosystem.

Conversely, I think our EdTech partners sometimes don’t understand that their solutions and their ripple effect or downstream issues that their solutions might create in terms of change for a team or for students. So I think understanding change management from both sides and understanding the impact of the technology I think is really important. And sometimes it’s not given enough consideration that it’s more than just implementing a new technology, that’s the easy part in some cases of the change, it’s all these other pieces that come with it that sometimes we don’t think through, that’s really difficult. It’s challenging, it takes time, but I think those are critical areas. So I think those are some key areas that I think can sometimes add or create the barrier between the two.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. So it’s the different language, that lack of understanding and trust, change management. Did I get all of them? Was that most of them?

Joe Testani:

The trust, yeah.

Meredith Metsker:

And trust, yeah.

Joe Testani:

Establishing that base trust for sure.

Meredith Metsker:

Yep. Yeah, it’s funny hearing you talk about the differences between EdTech in higher ed. It’s very true, I’ve worked on both ends of the spectrum. I worked in higher ed on the central marketing and communications team at Washington State University for about four years and then I left and have worked in several different tech companies before landing in EdTech here at uConnect. And so yeah, I can vouch for the different paces of work, just the different way that things happen, different way that teams work together, the size, the sheer size of a university versus a smaller EdTech company. It’s just there’s a lot.

Joe Testani:

Yeah, the speed is, oh my gosh, we didn’t even talk about the speed, but the speed of change or the speed of work is so vastly different. A lot of folks in EdTech, they’re working on quarters, they’re trying to make progress quarter to quarter and that’s unheard of. We’ll figure out next academic year and talking to folks. They’re like, “Well, you’re going to wait a whole year to implement something new if you know that there’s a problem.” And in many cases because I think that there’s a cycle and that there’s a life cycle of the academic year and the students and the teams, that’s challenging.

That’s a really challenge for I know for folks trying to work with higher education, but it’s also a challenge for, I have always had challenge with that just leading teams over the years about that pace of change and we had to build those muscles in the teams that I’ve had to be more comfortable doing it faster and having a biased action that took time to develop that culturally within the teams that I’ve been part of.

Meredith Metsker:

I feel like I’m going to have to have you back on the podcast to talk about that.

Joe Testani:

I love that topic, it’s a fascinating topic for sure. And you can bring some of my old team members on as well. I’m sure they have their opinions of how well we did that.

Meredith Metsker:

There you go. It’ll be the Joe Testani Episode 2.0.

Joe Testani:

Oh my God, that’ll be amazing.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. So I think we’ve pretty well established what that gap is and some of the things that are causing it. So in your mind, how do we go about closing that gap and fixing some of these problems?

Joe Testani:

Yeah, I think it’s layered. I think first, to me, you have to take a honest assessment of your, from a career center or from a university’s perspective, you have to have some honesty about where you’re at with these topics. How deep is your understanding? What’s your sophistication level on language and understanding business models and technology implementation and change management?

So I think it’s doing a really healthy self-assessment and recognizing or at least trying to rate your level of comfort with those different areas. And this is hard because sometimes being self-reflective is a difficult thing generally speaking. But to have an honest assessment of that, you might think you’re really good at those things. And so how do you get external view of that? How do you bring some people into that conversation and so that is an important self-assessment.

I think on the EdTech side of the equation, it’s really taking a hard look at what’s your value proposition and not only to the students but to the teams that you want to use these products and how does this disrupt their lives because even though you’re looking to create solutions and provide solutions, and that’s the goal of many of the companies that we’ve been able to partner with over the years, a lot of times, it causes disruption unintentionally. And so it’s taking a hard look at that disruption of what it does to the team, people that you’re trying to help because at the end of the day, we both want to help students and have different views on how to do that.

And so it’s taking that time to understand personas, taking the time to understand different stakeholders that are involved in executing or delivering that product to students. But really, it’s taking a step back and doing I think a lot of self-reflection and self-awareness about where you are and then filling those gaps accordingly. What do I need to do to learn more about industry or about the marketplace? What do I need to do to learn more about higher ed? Who are people I can ask?

As many companies like yours, talk to folks and talk to leaders and try to get as much intel as possible to inform them before they launch a product or as they make changes to your product because it doesn’t end once you launch the product. If you’re doing your job well, you’re iterating and you’re expanding the product and you’re having developments and you’re constantly bringing new things to market because the students are changing, and that’s definitely something that has to be built in. And so if we don’t address it at its root, then we’re never going to … We’re always going to keep running into these issues because the product is going to change. And I think that’s something that we should, maybe that has to be the disclaimer.

The product will change. Whatever you buy, the product will change. And that’s important because I think sometimes we think, “I just bought it and now I don’t have to worry about it anymore.” But there’s going to be updates, there’s going to be shift and there should be. And I think that’s an important mindset shift is that there should be change to the products that we purchase because the world around us is shifting and the students are shifting and the needs are shifting dramatically. That is a once again, culture shift, but you have to be understanding of that and start to learn what that muscle is.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, for sure. Earlier when you were talking about how EdTech can disrupt the workflow of a career center or whatever office is using it. And I was just thinking to myself how in EdTech versus any tech world, disrupting is a positive thing. It’s like we’re disruptors, we’re disrupting the marketplace. But yeah, it’s interesting to think how that’s a little different and we’re nuanced in higher ed, you are disrupting and there’s lots of consequences of that. So be mindful of it.

Joe Testani:

I think that’s the language piece. When somebody comes in, they think a big pitch is like, “Oh we’re disrupting how employers recruit students or how students get information.” And the receivers are like, “Well, there’s nothing wrong with it. Why are we disrupting it? Why are we looking to change something?” So that language can create an inadvertent barrier to the conversation just because we’re pitching at it, and that makes sense to your stakeholders of your funders and who you’re going to pitch money to get money from.

If it’s a VC and you’re looking at fundraise, that makes sense because you have to sell, you’re disrupting something to think about market and market share. But I think it’s different when you’re talking to the users at the end of that. I have been doing this for many years and the question is why is the disruption needed? And I think that’s sometimes the first thing that they might ask.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, that’s a good point. I’m like, take notes of that. So I know you were talking about ways to go out and learn more. If you’re in higher ed, how you go out and learn more about EdTech? I know in your case, you’ve advised a few different EdTech companies, correct?

Joe Testani:

Mm-hmm. Yeah, I’ve been on some boards, I’ve talked to some startups and as they’ve gotten off the ground and currently, I’m serving as a higher ed advisor for Reach Capital which is an impact VC out in California.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. Yeah, I imagine that gets you a lot of insider knowledge on how EdTech companies work and how they sell, and-

Joe Testani:

Yeah. It’s been really interesting to learn. I think that’s one of the things that someone working in education, you constantly have the opportunity to learn new things, and so that’s been I think my growth spaces learning, understanding that because we’re all technology companies at the end of the day in this day and age. We offer an education service. We’re University of Rochester, we’re a private university, we’re a residential campus.

So a lot of in-person, but all our students are digital natives. They come in here with a tech stack on their phone that is mind-blowing in terms of what they do and what they use technology for. So we have to think about how technology is integrated in all the work that we do. Whether it’s more backend systems like Outlook and Excel and Word and things like that or if it’s more service delivery that we’re providing something directly to them through a technology partner. So to me, almost wasted energy to resist technology’s role in what we do because it’s already part of it whether you think it or not.

The real question is what aspect of the work that we do and let’s say in career services do we want to allow technology to help us do? And which are the pieces that we want to retain that are inherently human? That are the pieces that we think that people need to deliver and engage in. And I think that’s a conversation that we’re going to have to have more and more over the next few years because the technology is advancing faster and faster, but that I think is inherently that we have to have that conversation because it’s upon us and saying that technology isn’t impact advising or shouldn’t be part of advising is it doesn’t make sense to me because it’s already there and it’s influencing our students more than I think we realize sometimes.

Meredith Metsker:

Mm-hmm. Yeah, for sure. I was even just thinking about schools that use the uConnect platform for example. I hear from a lot of people that they’re pulling up the platform in an advising appointment. It’s not like the platform is doing the advising for them, but it is a complimentary resource.

Joe Testani:

Yeah. It enhances the experience that students can have with their advisor. And that’s I think a great example of being complimentary and elevating the advising you can do for students because then they can do that on their own. But also, it changes the conversation potentially of what an advisor might have with their student. And there’s a lot of things that can do that. So the question is which parts of the work that we’re doing do we want to use technology to enhance or elevate the in-person or the human part of the work that we do?

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. I do want to come back to that here in a second.

Joe Testani:

Sure, absolutely.

Meredith Metsker:

I think we’ve talked a little bit about the why it’s so important to bridge this gap between higher ed and EdTech, but is there anything else you would like to add on that importance on why tech is so critical to the future of higher ed?

Joe Testani:

No, I think that enhancing of the in-person is I think the big thing that’s front of mind for me a lot now is that we have the technology is getting better and different and varied. And so I still believe the work that we do in higher ed, especially in residential campuses, but even commuter campuses or non-traditional students.

There’s still a human piece of the work. And so I’m not a big believer the computers will replace us kind of mentality. But I think that computers can help us and I think we should think about how they help us. And so I think that’s going to be one of the critical questions to focus on over the next few years is where can technology help? And you have to test that.

And I think that’s that idea of prototyping concepts and where it can help. It’s going to be really important for higher ed and broadly speaking, but specifically with career services. We’ve got to start prototyping more ideas to see if they work and see how our students respond to things.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, that makes sense. So going back to what you were saying earlier about where do we leverage technology and where do we leverage human-centered interactions? Yeah, let’s just dig in there. So specifically with career services, in your mind, what do we need to use technology for and what should we be still using humans for?

Joe Testani:

We have to really, I think, think through the intersectionality of the nuance students brings to table, you don’t know what the background of the student is when they show up in your office. If they show up in your office at all anymore, they might be on Zoom, they might be chatting you, whatever it might be. But there’s a lot of questions that I think we still as counselors and advisors, that was my track growing, coming through this industry.

I started as a career advisor working with students, having a caseload of students every day that I worked with. There’s still questions that you have to ask and think about and really pose to students to get them and listen for to probe, right? Because they give you clues when they’re talking about their experiences, whether it’s their background or why they chose to come to the institution or why they’re choosing the major or even their body language when they’re not answering their questions.

So there’s still humanness to that. There was a study done by the Lumina Foundation a couple years ago and they were looking at this whole skills conversation as it pertained to students as they were graduating college. It was definitely at the height of all the technology skills you need, all the technical skills and all the STEM skills. And really their study was looking at what about all these other skills like creativity and human empathy and things that leaders at all these companies that you poll always say those are the skills we’re looking for.

We’re looking for leadership, critical thinking, we’re looking for people to be able to solve complex problems and discern solutions to that. So what about those human skills? And I think the study looked at and purported that the human work is going to be critical in the future. That technology is going to automate a lot of the rote work and things that are a little bit more easy to catalog information, but the work around that creativity and the conversation, empathy still can’t be replicated, regardless of what you think about ChatGPT.

It still can’t be replicated 100% in terms of what an advisor does or a counselor may do for a student. So I think that’s going still remain and that’s going to be a really important piece of it. How do we make connections for them? How do we make connect them to folks and their networks? How do we build those relationships and help them do that?

How do we advocate for them with them? So there’s still a humanist that’s critical there. At the same time, there’s all these other pieces that can we outsource those areas so we have more space to get into those kinds of conversations. Now I’m not advocating for expanding counseling teams or adding more counselors because I’m mostly realistic about that, that’s not going to happen either within most universities.

How do we optimize their time for those kinds of conversations by maybe using technology to offer an outlet for some of these other services that we used to do maybe for students like looking up job boards or trying to find people in the network. They can do that on their own. How do we just inform them and let them do that, but really get them to the core of the harder questions that they have to answer about themselves or what they want in their internship or their first job out of college or five years later.

Meredith Metsker:

Right, yeah. A computer is not going to approach a student with the same compassion and empathy and life experience that a person could.

Joe Testani:

Yeah, and really we can call upon or many years of advising or working with students or just sitting down with them. Many of our students still want to talk to someone about what their anxiety is around these decisions because these are still big decisions and these are anxiety-inducing. If anything post pandemic, they’re even more anxiety-inducing, this generation of college students and what they’re going into in terms of labor market or an economy is even more unsettling than it was five years ago. So how do we support that? How do we help them? How do we help them navigate the complexity of that and the stress that that might have on their wellness?

Meredith Metsker:

Right. I’m curious, Joe, how have you leveraged technology? How have you walked this balance in your work and career services there at the University of Rochester?

Joe Testani:

Pre-pandemic, we were testing the waters. I remember this conversation I had with my leadership team that we had an advisor position open and we were evaluating, do we fill the advising role or do we actually use the money to invest in a bunch of tech platforms that can outsource some of the work? Whether it was a resume review, whether it was something like uConnect.

We were looking at a bunch of different things that had some ticket items on them that would be recurring, and we had a serious conversion. How many advisees does that person see when they were full-time? What is the technology and what’s the scale that we can impact? What’s the problem the technology is helping us solve? And so we took a step back and we evaluate that side by side. And we went on the side of the technology because we thought about scalability.

We thought about how many students we could impact. We thought about the problem that we were having in the moment was we wanted more students to be engaged in services, we wanted more students to be engaged with resources to help them with some of those decisions, and we thought maybe we could do that with technology. So we wanted to try that.

We wanted to test that theory out so to speak to do that. And lo and behold, that was literally a year and a half maybe before the pandemic, pandemic hits and now we’re sitting in with this technology to be able to scale, to be able to engage, do virtually. And so we were positioned really well to be responsive to what was happening because we could offer up a suite of services or suite of products that allowed students to maybe engage at their time wherever they were in the world, whatever the timetable was and engage in with some of the resources that we had.

So that was a really hard choice, but at the same time, a lot of this starts with what problems are you trying to solve? What are you trying to do? And I think it sounds like a simple question, but I don’t know if we always ask ourselves that question enough of why are we doing the work that we’re doing? What problems are we solving for?

How do we scale that because that’s going to continue to be a question we have to answer because our budgets and our resources aren’t exponentially going to increase. We might get things, but I think we have to think about that critically about all the students that we’re trying to serve on a campus and that we’re responsible for.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, I’m curious, what were some of you and your team’s answers to those questions of what are you trying to do?

Joe Testani:

I think for us, we wanted to really think about what were the things that students still needed but were time-consuming for us? Could we find a more efficient way of delivering that? So looking at platforms that were able to give first line of defense feedback on resumes, if that would free up a lot of our advising time so that they could actually have the harder conversations with students. And we can outsource that piece and say, “All right, any student that is interacting with our office goes through this AI-powered evaluation tool of a resume.”

And that gives a good first pass or second pass of some of that feedback that we would normally give, but you could scale that out much broader to a lot more students. And then that makes the conversation with the advisor richer. That was the thesis that we were operating on. We have to see more students, we have to think about the time students need these resources because we found, shockingly the students were waiting for the last minute to engage when they needed something and there’s an application headline and things like that. That’s a real thing.

And if there’s a three-week wait to see somebody, talk to somebody, that’s not going to cut it. And so we had to think about it from the students user experience and as much as we wanted them earlier to prep and do these things, that’s also not always realistic. So looking at that persona, looking at that resource, looking at the work of the advisors, was there job to give specific grammar and technical feedback on resumes to a degree.

Can that be done more officially another way? Now it can. And so that’s something new that we couldn’t do maybe five years ago. So it prompted us to let’s explore that. Let’s just try that out. Let’s see how we can expand some of our impact that frees us up to be with more students and do more engagements and have richer programming or conversations, then that’s worth it. In terms of my mind, it was worth it to think of it that way.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. That reminds me of something Tony Rohrer from UC San Diego said in a recent pod or an earlier podcast episode where she was talking about, she’s like, “There’s so many ways to do large-scale programming or offer resources so that the one-on-one appointments you do still have are more high-value.” It’s like a better use for the student’s time, better use for the advisor’s time.

Joe Testani:

And I think what we sometimes forget is that that’s what students are experiencing and a lot of other things they do in their lives. They don’t wait online for Starbucks. They order it ahead of time and then they show up and they grab their Starbucks and they leave. I know I’m not comparing advising careers to Starbucks, but I think the reality is I think students are looking … I think they’re almost wired and trained to find efficiencies.

I could do something ahead of time, hear better forward I’m walking into it, they’ll do it. And so I think that’s where I think getting in the heads of our students and the experiences they want. And this is where institutions may look very different. The types of students that come to Rochester, I’d be very different than the types of students. I went to Binghamton University where I did my undergraduate.

So they might look very different. So we have to think about the experience that we provide them slightly differently. And so this is where it becomes a little more localized. We can maybe have general ideas, but then what’s the local experience that we want for our institutions? And I think that starts to be where things might shift a little bit depending on the type of institution, the types of students that you’re trying to serve.

Meredith Metsker:

Right. Yeah, that makes sense. I’m curious Joe, what does your tech stack look like? We’re talking about all technology in general and how you use different tools for things. And I’m just curious what your tech stack looks like.

Joe Testani:

Yeah, I did a slide a few last year to visualize the tech stack and we were broken up into different buckets. You have your systems and backend support. So whether it’s things like people software or whatever student system, you have to enter information in about student profiles that most universities have.

You have those kinds of infrastructure systems that are experiential learning bucket where all the different tools we have for students to explore experiential learning, whether it’s forage or looking at things like mind sumo that have tools that are giving students different ways to gain experience in some way, shape or form. We obviously have things that are more exploratory in nature.

One of the tools that provide them exploration tools and investigate what different careers might be. Have our whole networking suite of things. We had a platform that we used people grow for our mentoring program and networking, but also things like LinkedIn and Handshake offer those opportunities to connect with folks. And so they’re part of that as well.

So we take a hard look at all of our tech stack, we have to evaluate that more regularly and we have to think about what is the interplay between these different technologies? Where do we have a platform that can help us aggregate some of that uConnect? Pull some of these pieces together. And so I think that was really helpful to start to have a more of a bird’s eye view.

Not only just a list of things, but also the interplay between some of these platforms and once again, what are they solving for? Is there redundancy there? Are we overspecializing on certain things? Can we expand that out? And so I think it requires us to do a constant evaluation of that year over year. Not just because we’re spending money on it, but once again, students are changing, landscape is changing, our teams are changing. Are we have the right set of tools to complement the work that’s being done?

Meredith Metsker:

Mm-hmm. Are the products changing along with all your students?

Joe Testani:

Right. because what we purchased five years ago, it might not be a very different product now and it maybe doesn’t align anymore with what we wanted to or maybe their purpose changed, maybe they got acquired. There’s so many things, factors that go into that decision-making. So if you’re not evaluating that, you might be missing some of those elements, a nuance that’s happening.

Meredith Metsker:

Right. I’m glad you mentioned the evaluation because I think that’s a nice segue to the next question. So what do you look for when you’re evaluating a new potential EdTech tool or platform?

Joe Testani:

Sure. For me personally, I always start with mission. What’s the mission of the organization? Well, what are they all about? What are their values? What’s the founder about? If there’s a small startup or if they’re a mid-size startup in terms of where they are with their fundraising journey or if they’re being funded. But I think that’s always telling, it tells you a lot about the organization. And if they’re like, “We don’t have a mission.” I think that’s also telling them to drive that. Red flag, red flag, red flag.

So I think starting with that is key. I think it goes back to that question of what problem are they trying to solve for? Because it might not be the same problem I’m trying to solve for. It might look like it, but I think asking that question right point blank of when you created the platform, what problem are you trying to solve for?

I think it’s an important thing to understand because we might assume certain things, but once you ask that question and engage them in that discussion, you might not know, and so I think it’s important to do that. Good example is that sometimes we look at these EdTech providers and we think they’re trying to solve problems for us, the career center, but they’re very much solving problem for our students and we want them to solve our problems, and-

Meredith Metsker:

You’re paying the money, right?

Joe Testani:

No, those are two very different things and I think that can lead to a lot of conflict if don’t understand that. They got into the business to solve a problem students, not for the career centers. And one could argue that, “Well, those are the same thing we were trying to solve problems for students as well.” Not necessarily. And so I think that that question is really critical because it could save a little bit of heartache later down the road if we’re doing that.

I really think it’s really important, this has been a learning curve for me is understanding business models. I have a business degree, I have an MBA. I’ve learned a lot over my career about budgets and finances and things like that, but I’ve had to ask a lot more questions about what is their business model, how do they make money? And that’s not to say you’re assessing viability for investment like a VC would, but you have to understand where their thinking is in terms of revenue generation because I think that to me, that just gives you another point of information to help you evaluate the organization and think about what that looks like and asking a lot of questions about that to understand, get a deeper understanding of that I think can really be something that avoids a lot of problems down the road in terms of understanding because I think we have a lot of misunderstanding.

They’re businesses, they are looking to make money as are we as an institution. We’re here to educate students but we have financial constraints on us as an organization. So I think we avoid the topic of money and business models and things like that from a lack of understanding or because we think it’s not something that we should be asking about, but I think there’s a way to do that that’s not confrontational.

That’s something that’s about learning and understanding and really trying to come to what’s again, that shared understanding of what organizations are. So to me, understanding business models really is important. And it helps because we want to invest in partners that at least they’re viable and at least as best as we can understand that they’re going to be viable, but I think that can be a least under an insight into whether or not they’ve thought through the industry and if they understand higher education and what they’re looking for for their primary market.

And lastly, but definitely not least, what have they considered the user experience of the students, as well as their career centers or higher ed users or whatever other stakeholders are involved. There’s mentors, faculty, whatever it is. What has been their work around user experience? And I think this is a tough one sometimes for higher ed folks to ask about because they have themselves have not done user experience kind of work.

They either don’t have the skills to do that which is understandable, but they haven’t even asked a question and they don’t check with students. They don’t do pulse surveys, they don’t do focus groups, things like that. And so it’s important to build that into practice for universities and for career services, but understanding it from the company’s perspective, have you done this work?

So I think that’s an important piece for them. If they’re building a product for students or for me as a career center, what’s the work that they’ve done to ask questions around user experience and workflows and things like that? That’s a really important piece. So understanding their effort or their investment in that space I think is really critical.

So those are some of the things in terms of evaluating the tools or talking to founders or talking to salespeople. I want to know. I want to know those questions. I want to understand those elements of it to better understand how they’re approaching me as a client.

Meredith Metsker:

So I’m curious, how do you go about asking those questions? Do you just reach out to founders directly or?

Joe Testani:

Yeah, I get reached out by less, a little less so than I used to, but yeah, I get reached out by people trying to pitch platforms and products all the time. And I don’t take all the calls but I do taking the calls because I asking these questions. So I’m very upfront about, “Hey, I have a bunch of questions. I’m curious about, let’s talk about your organization, forget about what your solution is right now and what the price point is and if I need it or not. I want to take a step back, zoom out a little bit, understand DNA and what’s under the hood and understand the foundational elements.”

So I’ve talked to founders before, I’ve reached out to them, I’ve talked to the salespeople before. If they can’t answer the question, it’s usually escalated to a different conversation. I’ve attended forums, I’ve attended sort of things. So I don’t think it’s hard to get that information. You just have to ask the question and be, to me, you have to be curious from the standpoint of wanting to understand and learn it, not necessarily as a gotcha, “Ah, I knew you were looking to charge people for a service that you want to provide.” That’s not the end goal.

The end goal is really just to get a better understanding and assess, “Is this the right thing for me and my students?” At the end of the day, that’s what we’re trying to do because if we don’t do that, we purchase a product, it’s not really the right fit. Either we’re upset with the product or our students are upset with what it is and then it’s just a bad relationship and we have to unwind all the work that went into that.

So to me, it’s just proactively just asking and understanding and it makes it easier in my mind. It always made it easier to work with organizations when there was something that went wrong, when there was a bug in the system, when the system did go down because it always will go down at some point to have a little bit of more of understanding.

“Oh, well listen, I know you’re the company. I know you’re doing X. I know you’re aligned with what we’re trying to do.” So to me, it allows me to have a little bit of grace when I need to have grace and also press harder when I think something’s not aligned with what they said. When you told me that these things were what you’re committed to, this doesn’t look like it’s committed to that to help me understand where the divide is or the disconnect is.

So it’s like dating. You want to ask a lot of questions, you want to get a little bit more understanding and you’re not accusatory or going through this place. I don’t want to ask a lot of questions to get a lot more background information.

Meredith Metsker:

Well, that’s a big commitment.

Joe Testani:

Out of compatibility. You’re looking for that, but I think sometimes we approach that in a very transactional nature, both sides, and I think that can really be damaging to the long-term success.

Meredith Metsker:

Mm-hmm. So I’m curious once you have purchased a tool, how do you go about making sure that you’re getting the most out of it all the time?

Joe Testani:

Oh my gosh, I love this question. So the cheeky answer I’ll give you is that I hired a project manager in my office to make sure we did this really well, and this goes back to that question earlier about how do you commit to this as a solution for your teams. I realized that we had a gap in skillset. We didn’t have someone to think about implementation and evaluation of technology.

So we created a position that focused on implementation and she’s amazing. She’s absolutely fantastic, perfectly fit for the job in terms of her skillset. She was a career advisor in the back. So she had an understanding of the student experience and what that looked like, but she brought a very analytical bent to the decision-making. So I know that seems like it’d be easy answer, but honestly I think this goes back to how do you resource your teams? And if you’re deploying thousands of dollars towards your technology budget or investing that much in your technology, doesn’t it make sense to have someone with a little bit of understanding of project management implementation to optimize that investment?

You wouldn’t hire somebody, a staff member and not onboard them effectively. You would not train them, you would not supervise them. You would do those things with a person. So why wouldn’t you do the same thing with technology? Why wouldn’t you think about onboarding? Why wouldn’t you think about evaluation and why would you think about training of the people how to use the tools that you have there? And this is the hard part. Sometimes we just give it to someone to manage on top of their portfolio. And I was that person when I first started my career.

I was the advisor that was responsible for updating the website, launching a new platform for jobs for my university and still have a full advising load and doing all that. So that was my role because we didn’t have someone dedicated to that work. So that’s how I learned. Honestly, that’s how I learned so much how I got involved in a lot of EdTech partners because I was the person doing all the work on the university end to make sure the platform is being used by my team or the students. So I think that goes more to strategy for leaders to think about what’s the makeup of my team, what’s the investment I have to make, and it may seem tough to make that call, say I’m going to invest in this person, do project management versus advising.

But if you think about your tech stack and how much money you’re spending, you want make sure you’re getting your money’s worth for that. And the reason I think we arrived at a person is because we thought about, “All what does an implementation look like? How do you onboard this product?” And depending on what the problem was or the solution was the product was trying to solve, it could be very levels of integration and complexity.

Something like Handshake for us, it became how we did our work and our business of the office or advising or postings or engagement, all the stuff we were managing there. That’s a bigger kind of implementation plan than maybe a product that specifically is deployed in our classrooms for a specific purpose. So I think it’s a sliding scale depending on what the solution is, but we have to think about what does that implementation look like? What are the possible downstream implications of rolling this out because it interact with any other platforms.

Do we have to make sure that it’s part of our onboarding and training of staff? Do we have to explain to students what it is? How do we market this to students? So really thinking through a lot of those rollout pieces I think is really important. I think it’s the marketing in of itself. How do you get users to use what you’re doing and the platform. I think that something like uConnect is … You can look at it and say, “Oh it’s really easy.” That’s the interface students have and you don’t have to do anything else anymore. No, not really.

You have to think through how they’re going to interact with the platform and what you’re building and what’s the different communities you want to build, and so it’s going to do as much as or as little as you want it to do depending on what your investment is in the platform. So I think how do you communicate that to the users? How do you communicate to students that piece and that’s ongoing because every year you get a new crop of students in, so how do you make it part of their experience with your office?

I think the other big piece is how do you want to integrate into the larger ecosystem at the university and that then it dictates the complexity of it. Are you syncing it into single sign-on? Are you syncing it into a larger university platform like Blackboard? So I think those then require a lot more thoughtfulness and integration, a lot more questions to really examine how do you build that out. So all of those pieces, I think you start thinking about it and how labor intensive all of that can be. If you don’t do those things, it’s really hard for that product or that software, whatever it is to be successful because if you don’t think through all those pieces, then you’re probably not going to get people engaging with it or you’re relying on your advisors to do that.

And that’s a very limited scope of the people that might interact with your office is the people that show up for advising appointments. So those are definitely factors to consider which is why we wind up hiring person to do that because it’s a lot, it’s a lot of pieces. And when you have a tech stack that’s 20 or 25 different products that you’re trying to offer, how do you coordinate all those pieces and be clear in your communication and how you present that to a student user.

Meredith Metsker:

Wow. Yeah. That is quite the investment. But it makes sense if you’re going to invest tens of thousands or however much you’re investing in a tech stack.

Joe Testani:

Yeah.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah.

Joe Testani:

I think so.

Meredith Metsker:

You’re already so far, so deep in, you may as well just have a point person who can answer any questions about it from other departments, from higher-ups, someone who’s an expert.

Joe Testani:

It’s so much. And so what we distribute it often. This person will do the marketing, this person will do the integration, this person will do the onboarding and it works. People figure out how to make it work, but I think if we’re going to continue to invest more and more in technology, we’ve got to start thinking about having a skillset within our units to help manage that, and that’s a different kind of investment, but I think once again necessary as we move forward.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, it seems like a smart investment to me. So once you’ve done this evaluation process and you’ve decided you want to buy a new piece of technology, how do you go about getting buy-in to invest in that? Because I know sometimes there can be pushback or it can be a struggle to find the money to get people to agree to it. So I’m curious how you work through that.

Joe Testani:

This is a tough one. I think this is so variable depending on the type of institution that it is because I’ve worked out public and private and for-profit institutions and it’s so different in terms of the power structure, decision making structures. So I think it’s important, what’s your landscape, how are decisions made, who holds the keys to these kinds of decisions? What are the protocols you have to go through to get a decision made? I think those are really important.

Obviously, ideally you would try to achieve as much independence from those structures as possible, that’s the ideal state. And that’s easier in some cases than others depending on where the office is positioned, but to me, this is all about relationship management building relationships with the people that you know are going to be critical in this decision making. So for us, we want our IT partners to understand what it is we do and the work we’re doing and how technology is a part of that, and the data that we collect and share with the university.

We want them to understand that the deeper their understanding is, the easier it is to deploy products and get things through IT because they have an understanding like, “Oh, this is what the career center does, this is what their goals are, this is the kind of data that they have. This is how secure they’re protecting their data. Oh wow, they have a person that’s responsible for managing their technology.” These are the kinds of things from the IT perspective, once again, they’re looking at it from the standpoint of security, stability, support, what is our impact on us as an IT department?

I think that’s important to start thinking about how do you build those relationships? How do you understand their work so that you can then decide how they’ll understand your work. So to me, the investment in relationships is key. I start with IT because in many cases, all the things we do have to go through them at some point or another as a security measure within the university, that’s going to happen. So I think they’re a key piece of this puzzle in this discussion.

I think the financial piece is, I’ve seen schools get sponsorship for different platforms. I’ve seen them write grants for different … The career services folks are creative if nothing else and try to get money to do different things. So to me, that’s one of the easiest part of this whole equation is how do I creatively get the money? I think the harder part is really thinking about budgets year to year. How much are you allocating to technology? How much are you allocating to the support of technology? That I think is a harder decision, right? Because I think that then goes to staffing, that goes to what you have resources for, that goes to the challenges inherent in our budgets and our understaffed nature of our offices oftentimes to deliver the things that we’re asked to deliver, and that becomes harder and you have to make hard choices sometimes.

It might be that you are committing a portion of your operating budget to technology like we did because we have to say we’re going to spend this much money on our budget, and that just makes sense because this is the students that we can reach with that technology. And so there’s a variety of ways I think that career services folks will find money to pay for these things. I think the approval I think if you’re doing your job well, and this goes more to the broader storytelling of career services.

I think that just greases the wheel for approvals from all these units because if they understand that career education is elevated, do people understand the work you’re doing? The impact? Are you able to show data and outcomes for the work? So this is a much broader conversation. It helps to mitigate resistance when it comes to we have to spend 10,000 on my platform which is in the greatest scheme of things. There’s not a lot of money, we think about the university budget, IT budgets, all these other things. But for us in our office, $10,000 could be a lot. It could be a big portion. I think it was almost that amount that I had when I had my first director job, that was my operating budget, it was like $10,000.

Meredith Metsker:

That was the whole operating budget?

Joe Testani:

Yeah, I had 27,000 students with it and I was like, “Here’s 27,000 students, here’s $10,000. Good luck and I’ll see what you can do with this money.” But you make it work. You try to figure out the ways you can do that and around that. So I think the money becomes easier to ask for an advocate for if your overall value of your office is being felt and you’re doing an effective job at building relationships and telling the story of the work that you’re doing and the value that technology can do to enhance that work or scale that work or impact the outcomes that you’re trying to achieve for your office. So this is about bigger storytelling and that I think helped to mitigate some of those resistance pieces.

Meredith Metsker:

Right. So it’s not only about getting buy-in in real time, it’s building the relationships way in advance. So yeah, unless they have a baseline understanding of what you do?

Joe Testani:

Yeah, and I think this goes to a lot of the work that you’ll have done is how do you elevate the impact of career education? How do you tell that story and the value to university and why students come to universities, families. Some institutions have really thought about that, and so this is what it takes to invest in that and what the trade-offs are, right? I’m not asking you for five staff members, I’m asking you for this much money to do this and to deploy that.

And so I think I’ve used every trick in the book over my career to get people to fund stuff. I’ve had endowed money, I’ve had revenue dollars. I’ve asked people to pay for it outright and made them the sponsor for it for them to cover it. I’ve moved money from salary lines. I’ve used salary savings. Geez. I think I’ve tried everything in the book to keep to pay for things, but that’s what you do. You just make it work, but it all comes back to is it a priority or not and then that dictates how you can make it happen.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, that reminds me of something Briana Randall from the University of Washington said in a recent webinar. She was talking about how she funded her uConnect platform through the student technology fee. So every year, students are charged a small fee to go towards this tech pot of money.

Joe Testani:

Yeah, I tried that once, I got denied, but I tried for sure.

Meredith Metsker:

Oh dang.

Joe Testani:

I was totally gunning for that money. I was like, “Oh, I can charge a dollar for every student and I can get how much money?” So I was like, but you have to learn how money flows at the university. So this is about your understanding how the university works and how well-versed are you in the systems of the institution and how decisions are made of power brokers and money. The more you understand that, it unlocks a lot of different ideas.

I’m sure she found, “Oh, there’s a student fee. How do I position that? Who controls that decision? Oh, the essay, the student association controls that decision. Well, if I just sell the students on this idea as being a value, and guess what? They’re going to vote on this and decide to allocate money towards career education.” You have to understand how that works in order to really position that well for students.

Meredith Metsker:

I feel like career services leaders are some of the best entrepreneurs out there.

Joe Testani:

Yeah. I think we’re forced to, and I think we get exposure to the entrepreneurs out in the world, and I think … And that’s the fun part about the EdTech space to me is that we have exposure and we’re working with these folks that this is what they’re doing. And so we can learn a lot from how we take some of those business ideas and applications and we apply them to our own work. So I think there’s a rich knowledge there that can be shared about how we approach the work internal to our organization that we can learn from folks. I’ve learned some great things about user experience and personas and doing that analysis to better understand how we can work with our students.

Meredith Metsker:

Well, if you ever want to chat marketing strategy, just let me know.

Joe Testani:

Always happy to chat with you, Meredith.

Meredith Metsker:

On the money side of things, is there any other advice that you would give to career services leaders who see the benefit of tech? They understand its ability to help scale, make a better use of staff’s time, but maybe they’re super limited with budget like you were when you had $10,000 in your whole operating budget.

Joe Testani:

Yeah, I think this is going to be an ongoing issue. It’s not going away for higher ed. I think for me, you try to always negotiate for line item budget. I think we always default to negotiating or opting for staffing. And I think we don’t oftentimes build in some operating whether it’s generic operating or targeted operating money and universities are making, and I get more of a bird’s eye view of this in my current job than I did in my last job.

How are we making decisions at a very macro level about finances? Well, that impact. If we give this much money to this unit, what’s the impact of that dollar? Can we demonstrate the impact of that dollar. So to me, if technology offers you the opportunity to talk about impact and scale in ways that sometimes staffing can’t? So I think whenever you can squeeze in a line item or negotiation for operating or technology support, I think you should try. I think we always add that in, so it’s staffing and $10,000 for X to scale the work of that person that I’m hiring.

I think that’s just an important practice. If people don’t do that, I’d like to get into the habit of, because to me, this goes back to how do financial decisions get made at your institution, what’s the higher dynamic and the jockeying? Do you have to ask for? One of my jobs, it’s a $10,000 dollars job. I used to ask. They didn’t give me parameters. They’re like, “Give us your budget for the next three years.” I was like, “Okay.” And I was like, “Is there any parameters? Any limits?” “No, whatever you want.” So I put in the budget like $400,000 over the three-year period. They’re like, “This is crazy. What are you thinking?” I was like, “You told me there was no parameters. This is what I could ask for.”

Meredith Metsker:

Shoot for the stars.

Joe Testani:

Of like, “What do you need?” “Well, baseline, I need two more people and I need this line for technology, do X, Y, Z.” So then it became a negotiation of what’s necessary, what’s critical for the work that you’re trying to do. And so that’s something that you should have to think about. But if you’re not asking for those line items, you’re not asking for that support when you’re negotiating or building in either you’re taking a new job, I always definitely think you should ask for these things as a new job. Say, “I need this line, I need this much money for technology.” That’s what I did when I came to Rochester.

I was like, “I need a fund that can do whatever I want with it to launch some different ideas.” And that was an important thing to ask for because I knew I need something, I need startup capital and I think that, and they gave it to me and so it’s great. Awesome. I can jumpstart, I can get some things off the ground immediately. I don’t have to wait and put a proposal and wait for the next year. So anytime you can negotiate, start a new job, asking for new things, every budget cycle, try to put in line items in there. I think that’s an important piece of trying to build your portfolio and your budget.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. That’s some great advice. It’s all just, it’s very like I said, very entrepreneurial.

Joe Testani:

Well, yeah, I think we got a scrap, right? That’s the important thing.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. All right, well, I think I’m going to start wrapping this up because we’re already a little over time and I want to be respectful of your time. Is there anything else about this topic that you would like to add or any questions that I didn’t ask but should have?

Joe Testani:

No, I loved our discussion. I think like I said earlier, I think we could spend a whole separate conversation around change management because I think there’s so much that dovetails into that. So much of what we’re talking about impacts people’s identities and the workflow of what happens in many offices, and I think sometimes we don’t surface that enough. And I think when we talk about technology, we talk about it as a separate thing, then what does this mean for people in the work that they do? Who they are and how this might change their day-to-day functionality?

I think that’s such a critical piece of this equation that we have to consider and we have to spend time thinking about and both positively and negatively and I think sometimes that we know it’s the right choice to bring this technology, but we know it might negatively affect someone’s job and their value or their perceived value or worth, and that’s important, but that shouldn’t be the reason not to do it. I think that’s sometimes default is like, “What’s going to make this person feel really uncomfortable and then feel less valued so we shouldn’t purchase a technology?” That’s not what I’m advocating for.

It’s more so, “How do you navigate that? How do you manage that?” We get paid to be leaders and manage offices. That’s what we get paid to do, manage to do and figure that out because at the end of the day, we’re trying to support our students and sometimes, those are the hard choices that we have to make, but we can make it work and we can find the compromise in that, but it shouldn’t be a reason not to do that, especially in our current context. So I think those are hard decisions and hard conversations, but we should use a lot of empathy for our teams as well as for the process. But it shouldn’t prevent us from progress in making leaps forward.

Meredith Metsker:

Well said. Some more good advice. Well Joe, if people would like to learn more from you or pick your brain about EdTech or negotiating for line items in their budget, what’s the best way for them to do that?

Joe Testani:

LinkedIn is great. Please, yeah, feel free to reach out via LinkedIn. Always down for a Zoom chat or a conversation. I would love connecting. So yeah, feel free to reach out there. I hope to connect with some folks.

Meredith Metsker:

All right, great. Well now, I’ll end our interview here today with something I’ve been doing with all of the episodes and that’s this answer a question, leave a question thing. So Joe, I’ll ask you a question that our last guest left for you and then you will leave a question for the next guest.

Joe Testani:

No problem.

Meredith Metsker:

So our last guest, Christian Garcia of the University of Miami left this very, very important, challenging question for you and that is, is it still a faux pas to wear white after Labor Day?

Joe Testani:

Oh my God. I’ve known Christian for almost 25 years and so this is very on-brand for him to ask this question and I’m going to have to give him a hard time that I’m the one that got the question.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, he did not know you were going to be the one to get it.

Joe Testani:

No, I know. It’s even better. It’s even worked out even better than anything else. Okay. Is it still faux pas? I don’t think so. I never ascribed to this rule. I don’t really wear white generally speaking, but I definitely, I don’t know if it’s … I think it depends where you live in the country or the world, I think that might dictate some of that, but I don’t think it’s as faux pas as it used to be. That would be my answer to that question.

Meredith Metsker:

All right. Yeah, I was thinking, I’m like, “If you live in Miami like Christian does, maybe you’re going to want to wear white after Labor Day.” It might get too warm.

Joe Testani:

That they also might pay attention to what you’re wearing after Labor Day more in Miami as well. So it’s a conundrum for folks down there.

Meredith Metsker:

All right. Well, what question do you want to leave for the next guest?

Joe Testani:

Oh my God, I had so many ideas for this one. This is probably the hardest question that you presented to me was like what’s one question I want to leave? But one of my favorite podcasts is about movies. And so at the end of his, he does interviews with directors and people that make movies and artists. And so the question you ask at the end which I think is really fun, is what’s the favorite thing you’ve watched recently and why? So I think I’ll leave that for your next guest.

Meredith Metsker:

Oh, I like that.

Joe Testani:

That’s a good one.

Meredith Metsker:

I’m trying to think what my answer to that would be. I was just rewatching Ted Lasso yesterday, for the third time.

Joe Testani:

Have you started the new season?

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, I watched the first episode the other day.

Joe Testani:

Same. Me too.

Meredith Metsker:

I’m excited. It sets up so many things.

Joe Testani:

So many things.

Meredith Metsker:

All right, well Joe, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today. It was a pleasure talking with you and learned a ton and I think our audience will too. So thank you again for lending your time.

Joe Testani:

No problem. My pleasure and great conversation with you today Meredith.