How to Make Career Everywhere a Reality on Campus

Meredith Metsker:

Hello, everyone. Welcome to today’s webinar. For those who don’t know me, I am Meredith Metsker. I’m the director of Content and Community here at uConnect. I also host the Career Everywhere podcast and write the weekly Career Everywhere newsletter. Recognize a lot of folks here in the chat from both of those things and from here in the community.

So today, we’ll be talking about how to make Career Everywhere a reality on campus. As you can see, we are joined by three incredible panelists. We have Nancy Bilmes of the University of Connecticut, Christian Garcia of the University of Miami, and Mike Summers of Lafayette College.

So now I would love to have our panelists introduce themselves. If each of you could just please share your name, job title, institution, and a quick note about some of the Career Everywhere strategies your team has implemented, that would be great. Then we’ll dig into more details later. So Nancy, why don’t we go ahead and start with you?

Nancy Bilmes:

Great, thank you so much, Meredith. Very happy to be here. My name is Nancy Bilmes. I am the director at the Center for Career Development over [inaudible 00:04:08]. I don’t know if too much time has passed to say the basketball capital of the world, go Huskies, but our Career Champion program started in 2019. We launched it in the fall of 2019. To date, we have close to 1,000 career champions, so we’re super excited about that. We’ve scaled our program in several different ways, which you’ll learn more about in a little while.

Meredith Metsker:

Awesome. Thanks Nancy. Christian, how about you go next?

Christian Garcia:

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you Meredith for having me here again. My name is Christian Garcia. I’m the Associate Dean and Executive Director of the Toppel Career Center down here in Miami. And yeah, we’ve been doing a lot. What we call Career Everywhere, is career services is everybody’s business. It’s been our mantra for many years, and we’ve made some major headway, in particular with faculty engagement.

So we’ve done that through our faculty and staff Engagement Hub, which is a one-stop shop for all kinds of resources, information, and ways to engage with the career center through that portal, as well as our live RSS feeds, our awards ceremony that we’ve been doing. It’ll be 10 years next year, which we’re really excited about in a faculty toolkit. So I’ll get into that a little bit later.

Meredith Metsker:

Awesome. Thanks, Christian. Mike, you’re up.

Mike Summers:

Thank you very much, Meredith, and thank you for having me. Hello, everybody. My name is Mike Summers. I’m the Associate Vice President of the Gateway Career Center here at Lafayette College, which, if you don’t know, Lafayette College is a small, private liberal arts college in Eastern Pennsylvania, just west of New York City by about 70 miles. We are the Patriot League football champions this year. So I had a big year here in terms of football, trying to bring some additional swag the campus.

And so, really happy to be here with you. One of the things that we say here is talent’s evenly distributed and opportunity is not. And we have to do what we can to lower and eliminate the barriers to students being able to interact with us. So we’ll talk a little bit about how we’ve put some programs on here to increase student social capital, talk a little bit about how we’ve realigned our counselors into clusters of majors and liaising with the faculty, and a little bit more about how we’re utilizing our uConnect website to really be, as Christian has said, and Nancy said, to really be everywhere so that we can be available and have our resources available for students when they need it.

So looking forward to this afternoon’s engagement, and thank you for having me.

Meredith Metsker:

Awesome. Thank you all for those intros and giving us some context. Before I dig into the individual Q&A with each of our panelists here, I wanted to just quickly give an overview of what Career Everywhere means. For those who may not be familiar, you can find more info in that PDF handout that’s pinned at the top of the chat. But basically, the Career Everywhere concept and movement is all about embedding career in classrooms, across campus, and beyond. So more students have access to the resources they need to build meaningful lives and careers.

It’s about making career conversations possible outside the walls of the career center. It’s about really engaging that entire ecosystem in a university to help students as much as possible. And we typically boil the Career Everywhere movement down to three tenets. So the first is engaging students with career resources before, during, and after college. Two, providing truly equitable access to all students 24/7, 365. And three, shifting the role of career services from sole provider to facilitator. Again, if you’d like to learn a little bit more about Career Everywhere, you can check out that PDF and that PDF handout. And of course, you can always subscribe to the Career Everywhere podcast or the newsletter. Shameless plug, had to throw it out there.

All right, so let’s go ahead and dig into the Q&A. Oh, and we’ve got my cat here, so he has decided to join the conversation. This is Ellie. All right, so as I mentioned, we’re going to be talking about how to make Career Everywhere a reality on campus. We’ll spend a few minutes with each panelist here talking about how they’ve done this, and then we’ll open it up to audience Q&A at the end.

So Nancy, I’m going to go ahead and start with you. You mentioned your Career Champion program. It’s super successful. I think last time I heard from you about this, it was around 800 participants. So just to kick us off, can you just talk about what the Career Champion program is, what it entails, how you built it, all that good stuff?

Nancy Bilmes:

Yeah, sure. So as I stated earlier, our Career Champion program and our Career Everywhere movement launched really in 2019. And the purpose of the program was and is to reduce some of those barriers that Mike had mentioned around access to career development, career opportunities, to allow all students to have information around the importance of career, the value, and how it integrates with them in their chosen major and career and field. So the best way to do that, in our opinion, was to share career information with our uConn community. And initially, that was with our faculty and staff.

And the purpose of that was to provide content, resources, current data, information that they could all use when talking to students because we know that faculty and staff talk to students about career. And that’s a very common conversation for folks to have in advising sessions when talking to faculty, a club advisor, an organization. But then we thought more about it as well and said, a lot of students are mentored by alumni and they interact with recruiters and supervisors outside of the walls of the academy. So after about six to eight months, we also included employers and alumni in our Career Champion outreach.

So now we have a thousand people who get our newsletter that comes out monthly about what’s going on in career at uConn, but also what are the trends in different fields and just the trends around career. And we don’t have any type of workshop or program that they need to participate in to become a Career Champion. And we decided that because the research we did when thinking about our program, all faculty and staff said they don’t have time. So we didn’t want to create a program where they had to watch a webinar or go to a session. We found that because of that, we have a greater number of champions, but they’re still learning, and they’re still using what they’re learning to interact with students. Based on the data and the research that we’ve done, we’ve been able to assess that and have kept our program with a low barrier.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. Yeah, that’s awesome. I know you’ve built some pretty cool resources on your website, and we can talk about that in a little bit for engaging all of those folks. So you mentioned how you started it, but how have you scaled the Career Champion program to, did you say a thousand participants?

Nancy Bilmes:

Yeah, we could be. We’re pretty close to a thousand. I should have looked at the numbers today, but we’re pretty close. So part of the reason is because we don’t have a barrier to be included in the program, but we have a Career Everywhere team within our department, and we have a couple folks who focus on recruiting faculty, as well as all of our liaison. So we have a liaison model where our career coaches liaise with faculty and staff in each school and college. And so, we have those folks also recruiting faculty, in particular. And then we have somebody on our team who works more with staff and recruiting staff. We have an alumni engagement staff member who recruits our alumni, and then we have an employer relations representative on our team who works with the CPR team to recruit employers. So we kind of scaffold it like that to allow for everyone on our team to work on recruiting folks.

Another way that the scaling helps is, to your question about technology, we also have all of our resources on a uConnect community page, our career resource page, our Career Champion resource page. And we do offer trainings. We offer training for faculty, for staff, for all career champions. We have a conference that we’ve hosted two years in a row, but of course, many people can’t participate in those things. So we have built this resource page out so that when somebody does have a little bit of downtime and they were interested in a topic that they couldn’t get to, they can then go back to this amazing resource page and look to see what it is that they might’ve missed. And that’s a great place to keep all of our resources. And it’s wonderful, the partnership. And this backing by uConnect makes it so easy for us to build that page.

Meredith Metsker:

And for those of you in the chat, Ashley was kind enough to drop a link to that resources page, so if you want to go check out, what Nancy’s talking about, you can go to that link. But yeah, there’s trainings, there’s resources, there’s all kinds of information, career your champions. And I love that you have really lowered that barrier to entry because I think as you’ve mentioned before, the time requirement for faculty is just, I’m sure they could feel it’s overwhelming. It’s nice that they just have this 24/7 access to anything they need to refer their students to or just to have those conversations. So that’s really cool.

Nancy Bilmes:

Yeah, absolutely.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. I’m curious, how did you initially get that buy-in from your career champions, especially the faculty members?

Nancy Bilmes:

Yeah, that’s a good question. We reached out to those who were friends at first. We all have friends on faculty, and so those were the folks that initially became career champions. And those are people that we’ve been working with for years. It’s not new to many of them. So that’s how we initially garnered our support from faculty. As we moved on, we have worked with them to share their stories and their information with other faculty members. We have also gone into as many department meetings as we can for those department heads. We’ve gotten some support from our provost who suggested that they meet with staff from the career center, so there’s that as well.

Some of it has been through engagement with folks in creative, in different ways. So for example, we have a question on our first destination survey that says, “Has anyone at the university assisted you with your career planning?” And we asked for a name and an email address. So after that, we reach out to these folks, most faculty, but some staff, and we say, “Congratulations, you were mentioned in the first destination survey. Thank you so much for helping our students meet their career goals. Did you know we have a Career Champion program?” So we do that.

We also have faculty who invite us into the classroom. Many of them are career champions, but many of them are not. So we do the same thing with them as well. And more times than not, you would think that they do know what we do, but they’re fascinated by all that we can offer them to support their students. So we look at this in a lot of different creative ways to recruit more and more faculty to become career champions.

And this summer, we’re actually hosting a faculty fellow institute where we are offering a very, very small stipend to faculty to integrate career into the classroom. And we were partnering with a faculty member to do that. And we were wondering if we would get four. We had four spots. We actually got 22 applications. So you uConn’s a big place, but we were super excited with the 22 applications, and we were able to offer it to 12 faculty members. So we’re super excited about that. And one of their charges is to go out to their programs in their departments to talk about this work.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay, that’s really cool. I imagine, do you incentivize them somehow?

Nancy Bilmes:

Well, for the faculty fellows, it is a small stipend. So that’s how we’re able to incentivize them. And it’s a few hours in the summer, and then we’re going to continue connecting with them during the fall semester where they’re going to also help us with assessment, assess what they’ve done in the classroom, and have their students assess pre, where they were before around the competencies, and then where they are after the semester.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay, very cool. My final question for you here, but what are some of the results or the outcomes you’ve seen from this Career Champion program?

Nancy Bilmes:

So last year, it’s been two years, and we’re doing this again in the fall. We conducted a faculty staff survey. And it was not just to our career champions, but to all faculty and staff. And some of the interesting data that came back was between champions and non-champions. The champions were 48% more likely to understand and know about the NACE career readiness competencies. And there were also about [inaudible 00:19:25] to refer a student to the Center for Career Development. So those are a couple examples of some of the outcomes.

Another one is that our outreach from faculty to have us come and present into their classes doubled in the last four years. So we’ve had a lot more integration, and then some correlations that we can’t prove through any surveys. One of them is our positive outcome rate for our first destination went up from 90, which was at for a couple of years to 92% this year. And the other one is escaping me. We’ve also seen a pretty drastic increase every year for the past three years in students seeking one-on-one career coaching. So it’s not necessarily a great thing because that’s time-consuming, but it’s evidence to the fact that career champions are referring to our office.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay, nice. Those are some great results. Cool. Well, I want to keep us on schedule here, so I’ll probably leave it there for you, Nancy, unless there’s anything else you want to add really quick.

Nancy Bilmes:

Just that the Career Champion program that we’ve built at uConn has really helped us scale our information, our services, and broken down barriers. And even though we can continue to grow, and we can continue to pivot where we need to pivot, it’s a nice space that we have. Couldn’t do it without our partners, though. Across the country we’ve consulted with and gotten feedback from. And we’re certainly willing to pay that back if anyone would like to follow up after the webinar.

Meredith Metsker:

Cool. Awesome. Thanks, Nancy. Christian, you’re on the hot seat now. So to kick us off, can you tell us just a little bit more about your Career Everywhere programs? I know you’ve got several things that y’all are doing.

Christian Garcia:

So Nancy mentioned they started this in 2019, which then got me thinking, when did we start down this journey? And I guess I would have to say is when we kicked off our strategic plan, which was a two year, it was not on two years, it was broken into two five-year plans. So that started in 2015. And we named the plan Career Services is Everybody’s Business because we wanted to make sure that everybody understood what we’re trying to accomplish. And it has become our mantra, and it continues to be our mantra. So for us, again, similar to Nancy, we realized early on that we needed to engage more and more faculty and staff in the work that we do. We recognize that students are having these conversations. And what we have found is that there’s always been this myth that faculty don’t care or don’t want to have anything to do with career.

We have not found that to be true. What we have found to be true is that they feel ill-equipped to provide, or they’re self-conscious about, I don’t want to give the wrong information because they’re experts in their field. And so by providing them with some basic tools and some basic access to resources, it allays those fears and those concerns. So obviously, we have done that through our Career Champions program, nowhere near as scaled as Nancy. And I was telling Nancy Backstage that she’s one of the folks that we look at as a bar. So congratulations, Nancy on the many, just how much it has exploded. But some of the things that we have launched over the last couple years, well 10 years ago almost, is our Toppel Awards, which is an awards ceremony to recognize all the different things that are happening on this campus related to career education outside of the Toppel Career Center.

And so we did this for two reasons. We wanted to recognize those individuals, but we also wanted to uncover what was happening that we just didn’t know. We knew, we had a hunch that there were things happening. And sure enough, we were proven right. And so, that first year that we did it, we just expected a trickle of nominations. I think we had upwards of 60 nominations for all the different categories. We do recognize faculty, we recognize staff, we recognize student organizations, students, both undergraduate and graduate and alumni. To find out all these things were happening right under our nose was amazing because it helped us to identify those champions, those people that were doing amazing work to recognize them rightfully so, they needed to be recognized, but then to also create better partnerships or stronger partnerships between us and them.

So that’s been going on. We’ll have our 10 year Toppel Awards this coming, or next February I should say, which we’re really excited about. We still don’t know what we’re going to do, but I’m sure it’ll be something big. So that’s one of my personal babies. I’m really proud of the Toppel Awards. A couple of years ago, we launched our faculty toolkits, and not really high-tech. What we did was we decided to pull what are the most relevant resources to help faculty engage with us, but more importantly, what are some easy strategies for them to embed this or integrate it into their curriculum? Because I think that’s the other thing that we’ve noticed about faculty or we’ve heard from faculty, is that I don’t have time to devote 20 minutes or even 10 minutes to career. It’s like, okay, that’s fine. There are other ways that you can embed.

And so what the toolkit is, we curated it so that they’re tailored to each of the schools and colleges. And so, the resources are going to be specific to our marine science school versus business versus education, human development, and so on and so forth. And so, it gives them a quick overview via infographic about the Toppel career center, and how we’re set up, and all the just insight into us, but more importantly, examples for integrating into syllabi, examples for ways to highlight career [inaudible 00:25:42], career competencies through their syllabus, but also adding different assignments, extra credit to their already existing curriculum so that they don’t have to change anything. It’s an add-on. Or even just put in the dates of the career in your syllabus.

So anything from very easy to a little bit more advanced, but even the most advanced stuff really won’t take away or alter their course at all. So what we did was, that was sent to all the department heads within each of the schools and colleges. And then they were sent directly to their faculty members from those individuals. We’ll be doing it again this coming fall at the beginning, we’ll send an update. And some of the schools will continue doing it that way. Some of the schools want us to send it directly to the faculty members. We’ll be doing that, which is great.

So that’s been a great thing to put together. Again, it’s a PDF, nothing super high-tech about it. But one thing that I’m really proud of in using the uConnect platform is just, it seems like a while ago, but it’s actually still pretty new, is our faculty and staff Engagement Hub, which is on our custom career content site, which is our uConnect branded site. And it’s all things for faculty and staff. So on that hub, they can find the faculty toolkits, broken down with the different schools and colleges, they can find access to other contacts, whether it’s through our PeopleGrove site that has pulled in. So we have actual mentors, whether they’re alumni, faculty, staff, employers.

We have information and access to career champions, and all the resources that fall under the Career champions program. We have a lot of integrations that we pulled from job market data, through light cast, and so on and so forth. So those are some of the really cool things that have been really great for us, similar to some of the outcomes. I know you’re going to ask me that question, so I’m going to beat you to it, Meredith. And some of the outcomes that we have seen is, we have been inundated, which is a great thing for requests to come out to the classroom, to student organizations.

And again, it’s one of those correlation things. I can’t actually prove it, but it has to be because we are out there more and more. And we often hear that a faculty member heard from a faculty member, colleague, or it’s just really a word-of-mouth. We’re really a word-of-mouth type of campus. So our staff member, Jova, who oversees our outreach, she’s doing a lot. She doesn’t do them all, but we engage all of our staff as well as our career, peer career coaches in doing those presentations throughout campus. So we’ve seen a huge uptick. Similar to Nancy, our career outcomes continues to grow. We just got the results for class of 2023. We’re just at 99%, which is fantastic. It’s the highest it’s ever been, but we’ve seen a lot of great positive movement.

Meredith Metsker:

That’s awesome. Great overview, and thanks for beating me to the punch on the outcomes because I was going to ask you about it. It’s the journalists in me, I have to ask about results, so thank you for that.

Christian Garcia:

Thank you.

Meredith Metsker:

I am curious, Christian, how did you decide to focus on all of those initiatives? How did you evaluate the landscape of the University of Miami and decide that’s where to dig in?

Christian Garcia:

I would love to say that I had this perfectly laid out strategy for, and this year we’re going to do this. And we did have a strategic plan, so it’s not like we’re doing it haphazardly completely, but the faculty toolkit, for instance, that really came out of a meeting I had with the Provost. He invited me out to lunch, and we’re at the Coral Gables Country Club, which is very beautiful. And we’re just having lunch. So we were just talking. He was asking me a bunch of questions. We got to the topic of faculty, and he asked me, he’s like, “How do you engage faculty?” And I said, “That’s a great question.” And that’s like the holy grail for career services, is how do you engage with and really get them to become champions of yours?

And so I talked about the Career Champions program and this and that. He’s like, “Well, have you thought of doing something, just something simple? Some kind of document that you would give to the faculty members that had the resources and ways to engage?” And I was like, “Wow.” Something so small. So from that little interaction with him, came back to my team and said, “Hey, let’s explore this.” And again, innovation doesn’t always have to be super techie. It could be something as simple as putting some resources together, keeping it concise, but full of relevant information that faculty can use. So that’s how that came about.

But overall, I would say the faculty, really outreach and staff really was born out of this whole Career Services is Everybody’s Business. You get to a point in career services where you continue beating your head against the wall. It’s like trying to reach out to students. We will always market to students, obviously. We have our career fairs. We’re going to be at orientation. We have a huge block party that we do, where pretty much all the freshmen come to the career center, which is amazing. But we do all these different things, but that’s only part of the pie.

And we realized we need to stop being scared or feeding into this myth that faculty members want nothing to do with career, that it’s too vocational for them. Do those faculty members exist on college campuses? Of course they do. But I think you’re seeing fewer and fewer of them. It’s just a change. It’s a pendulum swing. And we’re starting to see more and more faculty who understand this. We can’t escape it. I think something that has helped is the fact that there’s been a huge spotlight put on higher education, for better or worse, on return on regarding return on investment, tuition continues to increase. We’re one of those institutions. And so, I think it is tone-deaf for anybody, including faculty, to say, career is not important or that this is irrelevant. Tell that to a parent, tell that to a student. So again, what we have found is that they are open to it. They need the guidance.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay, yeah, I love that. And like you said, the exterior landscape of the discussion around higher ed is just very interesting right now. I think it’s an interesting time for career services leaders, as a lot of the work that all of you are doing, all the incredible work you’re doing is now brought to the forefront. Hopefully, brought more to the attention of senior leadership as well.

Christian Garcia:

This is really, if you think about it, for those of us who are around during the Great Recession, this is our second chance because that started with the Great Recession. And I took over this department right at the Great Recession. So everything that was going wrong was my fault. It’s like all these companies, the banks pulled out of recruiting. I was like, “Oh my gosh.” But to be able to ride that wave in a positive way, there was this spotlight. So we leverage that.

And luckily, we were ahead of the curve in a lot of ways in terms of being out there, trying to be as innovative as possible, not wanting to do career services in the traditional way of doing career services. We did not want to be that gatekeeper. So luckily, we were unscathed. I think there are a lot of career centers, and listen, career centers are underfunded, so a lot of them are hidden, tucked away, and then they have all these expectations thrown on them. So this is not an indictment on career services necessarily, but luckily because we had done all that, we fared well. So this is really our second chance in career services with this spotlight. As negative as it may come across right now with this return on investment and the value of higher education, is it worth it? Obviously, we all know it is, but it’s an opportunity for career services to really stand out if you do it the right way.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, absolutely. Couldn’t agree more. Well, Christian, is there anything else? Any other final thoughts you’d like to add about what y’all are doing with Career Everywhere at Miami?

Christian Garcia:

I wanted to give a shout-out to Keashla Marengo who’s in my office. She’s our associate director for Career Readiness. And uConnect, and I wasn’t paid to say this, uConnect really has been a game changer for us and allowed us to do some of the amazing things that were just making it easier. But all the things are all well and good, but you need someone who is going to help operationalize all of these things. For us, that is Keashla Marengo. She has been amazing.

And so, if this is something that you are still exploring, you just start doing it, do it little by little. But to have someone who can help be the one that’s driving this or steering this ship, that’s going to make things a lot easier. There’s no way. I mean, we could have done it, but it would’ve been much more painstaking. It would’ve taken much longer. And so I know that your uConnect folks will attest to Keashla being amazing. So this is a commercial for Keashla because we adore her, but she’s really has made sure that all the pieces that fit together.

Meredith Metsker:

I love that. It’s a good shout-out. All right, thank you, Christian. Mike, you are up. So can you just start? Yeah. Can you start just by telling us more about all the Career Everywhere related programs you’ve got going on? I know, again, there’s several things your team is focusing on right now.

Mike Summers:

Yeah, very much so. I’d love to share. So one of the things that we did when I arrived here was, had a fantastic team that I inherited when I came here. But one of the things that I noticed that I’m sure we’ve all noticed in higher education is the landscape is changing–and changing quickly. And so, all of our career counselors, career coaches were generalists, meaning they were seeing all four class years, all majors. And in a world that was requiring a greater degree of specificity and knowledge, who can be an expert, or at least close to an expert in everything and all of that? And the simplified answer is it can’t be. So we sat down and really came up with a concept of aligning our career counselors to clusters of majors as opposed to career clusters. And I’ll share that intent move here in a moment.

But one of the things we had to do to make sure that we get off the ground is we had to talk to the provost and talk about what we were going to do because part of the responsibility that would come with this new realignment would be that these individual counselors would liaison and reach into faculty points of contact as determined by the provost, along with the department program chairs. So it wasn’t just we were aligning our counselors to clusters of majors, there was actually going to be a faculty liaison piece in that. And so, we actually got that. And for those of you that are on the call today that are from a liberal arts institution, that’s a little tougher on a liberal arts college sometimes than others. So we made that happen, which was great. And then we also have a center called CITLS, which is the Center for Integrated Teaching, Learning, & Scholarship.

And we had a partner there as well who was really helping us a lot with the new faculty to get them indoctrinated. But we moved to this model of clusters of majors and liaised into the faculty. Because at an institution the size of us, which is 2,450 students roughly, all undergraduate, having our faculty here, it’s an asset on any campus, but really, it’s an asset with a student teacher ratio here. It is a true asset, and that those students really do and spend a lot of time with their faculty because they’re not competing with graduate school students. So all of the projects, all of the papers, all of the publishing is going on with the undergrad students. So we have this tremendous asset here that we really need to leverage. And so, that model was one intentionality of doing that.

And the team sat down, and we were very thoughtful. It was a big change. And we really changed the way we were doing business. It was my first major change as the leader here. And so, I wanted to make sure that I had their trust and that we did it right. Because if we did it right, and I felt we did it together, what that would do is set the springboard to bring in change as we move forward. And we certainly have seen a lot of change over the last six to seven years. Some of it forced because of the pandemic. We can talk about that here in a second. But I needed to have that first one be successful.

And the team really leaned in. Was there a little bit of apprehension? Of course, there was. But once those relationships started to advance and build, it’s really been the springboard for us to be invited into more classrooms, for my employer relations team to pull more faculty in when we’re developing our programs, and bringing their contacts of alumni back into the fold where they can interact with our students and help us bring, as we talk about Career Everywhere outside of Home Call. And so, that was one major initiative that we embarked upon.

The other thing that, as I mentioned at the very beginning is, and I feel very passionately about this, talent’s evenly distributed and opportunity’s not. And there are a lot of students, as we are doing more and more the right thing as institutions to bring more first generation students here, more Pell grant students, giving more students the opportunity to quality education. They are not bringing the same amount of social capital with them to the institution. And really, we collectively own that responsibility to do everything we can to rise the tide. So every boat in it rises to the same level.

Now, that’s not going to happen overnight. It’s going to happen over time. But one of the things that we did this past year to try and do that was, and I also think there’s this myth and there’s this real scared student around this term of networking. They know that they need to do it. They know they need to build that network and how critical it is. But especially for those students that I just mentioned, that’s a really daunting task. It’s not that they don’t know what to do. They don’t know how to do it. They’ve not been in that situation to do it. And so, I had the opportunity to go to one of our other vendor partners had a program two summers ago called Super Mentors, and they really pulled it out.

And it’s really about talking about the concept of you really don’t need one mentor to be your Yoda, if you will, or your guru for life. Although if you happen to organically find that, then that’s fantastic. But really, you want to build, and you already have a network, you just don’t call it that. But how do you advance that network and how do you align those assets as a student to be to your benefit? And it’s really shouldn’t be as intimidating as it sounds. So we threw a networking event this past fall where we brought the co-author of that book here to really talk about that. It was purposely casual. It was outside, underneath the tent, and it was purposely to break bread because I feel like when everybody can sit down over a meal, it reduces the anxiety significantly.

And we really started to advance this concept of you have a network, build it, have a passion of something that you’re working on, and let’s teach you how to go out and do it. And then you start to leverage that and talk to other students about it. So we did it in our first year. I didn’t realize at the time, no one could, that the night we were throwing this event was also the watch party for Taylor Swift and her new heirs to her. So you can imagine, I was competing with that on a college campus. But what I was really proud of is we did such a good job of marketing, partnering with our office as well as other offices across the campus. We actually had close to a hundred students that came there.

And what was an indication to me, and probably the prideful moment of it was afterwards the speaker stayed to speak to students. They stayed 90 minutes after the program to talk to the speaker, which told me we really approached this in the right way. So my goal is, as I’ve heard Nancy and Christian, I’m jealous that your numbers on your programs, our goal is this next go round to continue to double and triple this as we go. And then it becomes a rite of passage, if you will, that they’ll get that opportunity early in their career here so that they can start to build that network. So those are a couple things that we’ve really done to leverage and bring career outside the office. And through our faculty, leverage that and increase that social capital so students have the ability to do that.

And then I would say also, we do just need to be outside of our office and across the campus. We participate, as I’m sure Nancy and Christian do with admissions, with athletics, with programs. Because when you’re there and you’re visible, you start to build those relationships, and then those asks become easier. So those are a few of the things that we’ve done here at Lafayette to take advantage of the size that we have and the programs that we’ve put in place thus far. And we have a number of exciting things on the horizon I have to watch with my team. I don’t want to bring too much change too fast, but want to bring it just the right speed. As I say, we want to be a Corvette going into the turn, feeling like we’re comfortable, not that we’re a couple miles an hour from out of control, if that makes sense.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, no, that’s a great overview. A lot of what all of you are saying,. It reminds me of something that one of our podcast guests, I don’t know if she’s on this call, but Laura Kestner-Ricketts of Augustana College, she always said, “Go with the goers.” It sounds like all of you have done that. You start with the faculty or staff or whoever that you have relationships with. You have them test drive your programs, and they start spreading the word, and then voila, you’ve got the whole ecosystem engaged.

So Mike, I guess for you, what are some of the results, outcomes that you’ve seen since you started implementing these programs?

Mike Summers:

Yeah, it’s a really great question. So I would say the number of classrooms we’ve been invited into to deliver programming, I don’t have the numbers to compare a year over year, but I would tell you that the number of invitations has gone up significantly. I would also say, and like Christian said, I’m not being paid to say this, we are on the uConnect platform. We call ours the Career Resource Central, because really, the analogy that I use, if you’ll allow me a moment, and Meredith, you may have heard me use this before. It’s the Chick-fil-A analogy. Chick-fil-A really doesn’t care where you get that sandwich. They just want you to get it and eat it. Whether you get it through their dining room, through their drive throughs or Grubhub or Door Dash, those are all vehicles to get that to you.

So what I love about what we’ve done with uConnect and our career versus Central is we put everything there so it’s available when students want it and need it, as well as our faculty and our alumni as well. So what I can tell you is our number of visits and our number of clicks through our programming and through our other resources to Career Resource Central has gone up significantly. And that’s an indication students are engaging. Also, Nancy mentioned this a little bit, our number of appointments have gone up significantly as well. But what I really believe and what we’re starting to see is students are leveraging Career Resource Central for the things they need to get at 11 and 12 o’clock at night when they’re going there.

But then at some point in time, they need a human being, they need an interaction. And those interactions that our career counselors and career coaches are having are much more in-depth conversations around discernment, around building the resources they need to pursue opportunities, as opposed to just the standard fare, cover letters, resumes, the introductory things. And I think that’s where I would also say, if you were to survey my career counselors, they would say they’re feeling that those conversations are elevating themselves in terms of the ability and satisfaction of helping our students in those ways.

So I always say there’s no silver bullet. It’s all of the collectiveness of what we’re doing in those areas that’s elevating it. And the work’s never done. We’re in the middle of a campus-wide strategic plan. There’s windows of opportunity we’re going to jump through just like we did through COD, and it’s fun. It’s a lot of fun, but it’s a lot of work. We talked about ROI. Christian, I think you mentioned that. Nancy as well. We’re approaching $86,000 a year. At $86,000 a year, ROI is on everybody’s mind. And so we really have to make sure that we’re getting to them early, they engage with us often, and we meet them where they are, and continue to advance those as much as we can at full speed.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. Awesome. Love that. Love all of that. Some great outcomes from all of you. Well, I want to move us towards the audience Q&A portion, in the interest of time. But before I do that, I just wanted to mention that here at uConnect, we are so proud to work with all of you and hundreds of our other longtime partners. And it’s been so fun to see how each of you have all worked to implement Career Everywhere on your campuses. And it’s been especially cool to see how you use our virtual career center platform as a key part of those strategies.

So on that note, before I transition into audience Q&A here in a sec, I know we’ve got some good questions coming in. If any of you watching the webinar today would be interested in continuing the conversation with us and learning more about how uConnect can help you implement Career Everywhere, just please drop a thumbs up emoji in the chat, and we will follow up with you right after the webinar. I just want to do a quick plug for that.

So now I want to get into some of the audience questions, while any of you are putting thumbs up, emojis in the chat. So I think the first one that came in was from Chris Entringer of Northeast, Iowa Community College. He sent this during your section Nancy, but he was asking, “How are you engaging online students with your Career Champion system?”

Nancy Bilmes:

So we don’t have online students at UConn, but we do have several regional campuses. And although we do have staff at each of those regional campuses to work with our students, we have career staff at each of those campuses. They are utilizing our uConnect platform, which is what we use for our student engagement. And so, I’d like to say Career Everywhere all the time because the students can get career information from faculty, staff, alumni, employers, but they can also get it 24/7 and use the resources that we have on our platform. And again, uConnect has really created a great application, has so much information for students to be able to access the information when they see fit.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay, awesome. Thanks, Nancy. I saw there was another question from Chris. He said, “Any engagement with students, faculty, and other areas like Student Life within your college’s online course portal system versus your public career services website?” He said, “We use our online course Bright Space System to connect with students. This is meeting students where they are at in their college course, Bright Space area.” So I’ll just open that to any of you.

Christian Garcia:

I think what comes to mind, we have a… So we are heavily involved in our first year directions process. So that starts actually even before students step foot on campus as new students. But once they get on campus, we are in almost 90% of all the first year experience courses. And what that means is we have our own session. It is not about here’s the Toppel Career Center. No, we actually, it’s very experiential in nature. They’re not being told these are hours, this is where you can… No, it’s really walking them through what they think of when they think of a perfect job, their ideal job, exploration, introduction to handshake and that kind of a thing.

And then it has a companion online course called UMX. And that is through the learning portal. I would say that’s the extent that we’re doing right now. Our Toppel internship program, it is administered through Blackboard. That’s something we transitioned to several years ago, but I could see there are a lot of opportunities there. We tend to be more traditional as an institution when it comes to learning in terms of, I know the previous question was about online students. We do have some of those, mostly at the master’s level. But there’s a lot of opportunity, and I think we’ll start seeing more of that, which would then create more opportunity for us in the career space.

Nancy Bilmes:

At UConn, we also use Blackboard, and we’ve created asynchronous online courses for students, no credit. There’s zero credit. There’s quizzes throughout through the system, and they can self enroll in the modules, and faculty can also put the modules in their classes. So we’ve had many faculty members who use those modules, some for extra credit, some are integrated into their courses, created this application for the students to self-enroll.

So I don’t have a lot of data or information on how students are doing that, but we do use Blackboard. We’re also in the FYE classes. We go in person as well, but we also have materials and information on FYE, first-year experiences Blackboard site as well. So we do have a presence in our classroom management system.

Meredith Metsker:

Cool. All right. I’ll move on to the next question. This is from Lynn Donahue of the University of Rochester. And Lynn asked, “Are there any examples you have of integrating experiential learning into classes like project-based learning as a way to develop competencies and career skills?”

Christian Garcia:

Well, I could jump in on that, personally for me. So I’m teaching a course that’s part of our Bachelor of Science in Innovation Technology and Design. It’s a new degree program that started two years ago. I was thrown in, asked to teach their internship course. So I said, okay. They told me you could do whatever you want. So that course, the framework is all competency-based.

And so, I’m delivering the ideal, what we’ve always wanted to do in the curriculum. And so it’s two courses. It’s the IT199 for their first internship, and then 299 for their second internship. So it’s very much active learning, discussion-based, project-based. And so my goal, because when I rule the world in terms of career on this campus, is that we’ll be able to multiply that across different schools and colleges. Because the students at the end are not the same than when they first started, just because of what they’re learning. So I would say that’s one example. I’m sorry, Mike, I didn’t mean to cut you off. I think you were going to say something.

Mike Summers:

Oh, no, you didn’t. We are in the midst of a campus-wide strategic plan. And while we’re not doing that yet, I’m highly optimistic, as I’ve been seated on one of the five working groups, that we are going to see a lot more of that talk and movement here, which is truly exciting. I feel very blessed. So we’re not there yet, but we’re on our way.

Meredith Metsker:

Cool. All right. I’ll move on to a question from Mark. He asks, “Do any of you have an instructional design specialist helping you to create these lesson plans and activities?”

Nancy Bilmes:

So that’s a great question. I think I forget who mentioned, we have the Center for Teaching and Learning who are online instructional specialists, and we’ve worked with them for several years. Recently, about a year and a half ago, we were able to pivot one of our positions, and we hired an design specialist within the career center. And she does a lot of faculty. She partners with [inaudible 00:53:28], she attends sessions with… Right now, there’s a May Day, [inaudible 00:53:38] having May Day, where they’re having faculty come in to just enhance their teaching and learning. She’s participating in that. So it’s been great. It’s definitely been a game changer for us. And if there’s opportunities for you to do that, I would highly recommend it.

Christian Garcia:

Same here. Luckily, again, for my course, I’ve had access to these individuals. For the first year that I taught the course, last fall and spring, it was through a platform called Forum. We’re now transitioning that course into Blackboard Ultra. So I have another set of instructional designers that are helping me with that. But we have what we call at the University of Miami, it’s called Pedal.

So it’s a platform for excellence in teaching and learning. And we are actually going to be using them to do some training of our staff, but also our career peers, our student peer coaches, because as I mentioned before, they’re helping us go out there and deliver content to faculty and staff and student organizations. So they’re helping to engage with us on what are good strategies to engage people, especially those first year students who aren’t sometimes the most… they’re nervous, they’re scared to participate. So we want the folks that are out there, making those presentations feel comfortable and learn tips and tricks for engaging the students.

Meredith Metsker:

Cool. All right. So the next question, to be a pretty simple one. It’s from Susan, “Wondering how many staff are in your career offices?”

Mike Summers:

I’ll take that one. We have, not including me, we have 13.

Nancy Bilmes:

I think context is also… Oh, go ahead.

Christian Garcia:

We have…

Nancy Bilmes:

I think context is helpful as well. UConn has 32,000 students, including graduate students, and we have 25 full-time staff and a lot of student workers.

Christian Garcia:

So we have a total of 15. We’re primarily centralized. Some of the schools and colleges have a few, some have one person, some have a few people, but by and large, we are the centralized center. It’s not enough, obviously, it never is, but we couldn’t do the work if it wasn’t… I’m glad you mentioned student workers, Nancy, because we have over 30 that work for us, whether they’re career coaches, front desk, interns, graphic design, social media, we couldn’t do the work without them.

Meredith Metsker:

Awesome. Okay. I’ve got another couple of questions from Chris, and then we’ll probably have to start wrapping up. But Chris Entringer asking, “Have your alumni connections increased with these programs?”

Nancy Bilmes:

Ours have at UConn, because alumni are one of our targeted populations to recruit, to become career champions. We actually just had our first alumni in residence this semester, and it was great. Did some programming, went to some classes, met with students weekly online through a virtual platform. So we intend to do that more and more, and engage alumni, and continue to engage in alumni in career programs and panels.

Christian Garcia:

Same with us. We actually are kicking off an offshoot of our career champions. We’re calling them alumni Career Champions. And really, we’re piloting two things where we’re going to deliberate matching of students to alumni. Those students who are graduating right now or in December, making those matches to be like an accountability coach, not necessarily a career coach.

And then the next phase of the pilot will be alumni to alumni career matching to help alumni at different levels or different stages of where they are in their career. So we’re excited about that. I’m doing a lot more traveling with the Alumni Engagement Office to deliver content and resources, to let students, sorry, alumni know that they have these resources, but to engage alumni volunteers to support students and other alumni.

Mike Summers:

And I would say for us here, for the first six years that I was here, and we changed just a year ago, we were aligned with development or advancement, and connected with alumni relations as well. So the number of alumni that we were working with was substantial, and continues to increase with regard to these programs as well.

We also, I mentioned, have 13 staff. One of that 13 is an alumni career coach, where we offer services to our alumni for life for free. So it’s been a big asset for us. Now, again, we’re 2,400 students, so roughly 32,000 living alumni. So as Nancy mentioned before, there’s the context on that one as well.

Meredith Metsker:

Awesome. Okay. So last question. Do you actively engage prospective students with Career Everywhere and partner with admissions and recruitment?

Mike Summers:

120 500,000%. Yes. Absolutely

Christian Garcia:

Same. Same.

Mike Summers:

And I do it for the right reason, but also admittedly, I would say I do it selfishly. We want to engage with students early and often. What a better time to engage with them than when they’re making their decision. You’ve already got that captive audience. I would take advantage with your admissions office, your whole area over there, Dean of students, I mean, Dean of admission. Take advantage and try and get invited, and be participatory in every one of those things that you can. I know it’s a lot of time, but it will pay dividends on the front end when you get into the back end of it, for sure.

Nancy Bilmes:

Absolutely.

Meredith Metsker:

Awesome.

Christian Garcia:

And that’s when they’re really listening about it. I mean, listening to it. They really want to hear. They want to hear at that point in time more than any other time. You know what I mean? And their parents as well, their family. So yeah, take advantage of that.

Mike Summers:

And it keeps the parent calls down when they know that you got the hands on the wheel.

Meredith Metsker:

And that’s an important consideration.

Mike Summers:

Multiple reasons. For the purity of the reason first, but the other ones are okay as well.

Meredith Metsker:

Awesome. Well, we’re right at time, so I’ll go ahead and start wrapping us up. But thank you everyone for attending. Hopefully this was helpful, and you’re walking away with some inspiration and some new ideas.

And a huge thank you, especially to our three panelists today, Nancy Christian, Mike, just thank you all so much for taking the time to be here and for sharing your expertise. We really appreciate it, and I know the audience appreciates it too.

So again, everyone, thank you for joining. Again, we’ll be putting that post in the community, so if you have any follow-up questions, put them in the comments there, and we’ll see you for our next webinar, which is on May 31st, about strategic planning for the career center, so keep an eye out for that. All right, thank you all and have a good rest of your day.

Nancy Bilmes:

Thank you.

Mike Summers:

Thank you.

Christian Garcia:

Thank you.