How to Use Video to Engage More Students with Career

Meredith Metsker:

Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Career Everywhere podcast. I’m your host Meredith Metsker. And today I am joined by Matt Phillips and Rebecca Davis of the University of Arizona Global Campus. Matt is the Student Affairs Program manager and Rebecca is the Career Services manager. Thank you both for being here.

Rebecca Davis:

Thank you for having us.

Matt Phillips:

Thanks for having us.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. I’m super glad to have you both, and I’m excited to talk to you today about how your team is using video to engage more UAGC students with Career Services. I know video is such a great format for learning and appealing to different learning styles, and I know that figuring out how to use it more effectively is top of mind for a lot of career leaders right now, so this is just great timing. Before I get into my questions, is there anything else either of you would like to add about yourselves, your backgrounds or your roles there at the University of Arizona?

Rebecca Davis:

Absolutely, I can start. Thanks for having us, Meredith. As the Career Services manager at the University of Arizona Global Campus, my team includes both career services advisors as well as our employer outreach team. And so obviously our goal is to connect students with career opportunities in really meaningful ways. So really looking forward to talking about this topic today. I’ve been with the institution in Career Services for eight years, but I have a background in advising, talent acquisition and recruiting as well.

Matt Phillips:

Yeah. I’m Matt. I’ve been with University of Arizona Global Campus. I’m going on in five years of this institution at least. I have a weird academic background. I went to school, undergrad for Journalism, and then I have an MFA in Creative Writing, and then I did some post MFA work in adult learning. And so I work across departments in student affairs mainly with Career Services, but also with faculty affairs, doing stuff related to teaching and learning, and manage various other student success projects as they come up. Happy to be here.

Meredith Metsker:

Awesome. I love hearing how people come to be in Career Services because no journey is ever the same.

Rebecca Davis:

No.

Matt Phillips:

It’s always different. No one ever grew up and said, “I’m going to be a career coach, or I’m going to be a Career Services manager,” right?

Meredith Metsker:

Well, there’s no degree for Career Services. You have to get there from somewhere else.

Matt Phillips:

And usually it’s people who’ve had 20 jobs like me, anyway. I’m kidding.

Meredith Metsker:

Well, that makes you well suited to advise students on all the job options they have. Cool. Well, before I get into my more specific questions about our topic today, I want to kick us off with a question I ask all of our guests, and that’s what does Career Everywhere mean to you?

Rebecca Davis:

Yeah. I’m happy to kick off this question, put some thought into it, and I would say two parts for me. From a student and job seeker perspective, I believe that there are career development opportunities everywhere. For example, opportunities to learn more about different careers, different industries are embedded in our everyday lives among our network of family and friends, what we see on TV, what we read, there’s so many opportunities to learn about what’s out there in the different career paths you can take. And then there’s also constant opportunities to build your skillset, build your resume, whether you are a working professional or a new grad, there’s tons of opportunities to get involved in volunteering or professional organizations, things like that. And then I think from an educator’s perspective, what Career Everywhere means is that I believe it’s everyone’s responsibility in higher education to support students on their career journey.

Matt Phillips:

Yeah. I think that last piece, Rebecca, is where I fall really heavily is, I think the students I’ve encountered at the University of Arizona Global Campus and other institutions frankly too, like state institutions that I’ve taught at, their story is one of overcoming the odds. It’s a story of achieving a degree in the face of adversity. And for a lot of these students where they end up after that degree is the reward, and it starts off that reward process. So I think career is everyone’s responsibility at the institution because it’s central oftentimes to the students’ motivation, and it’s in the best interest of the learner at a lot of junctures in the educational process. I hope that’s a good answer.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, for sure. I always love hearing people’s answers to that question because, and it usually falls along the same lines where it’s everyone’s responsibility. It’s not just something that takes place within the walls of the career center, it’s the whole campus.

Rebecca Davis:

Agreed.

Meredith Metsker:

And beyond even, I mean, families, employers, folks off campus all have a part to play too. Well, so we know that you’re a global campus, so I want to get some more context for the rest of this conversation. So can you just first tell me a little bit about who your students are?

Rebecca Davis:

Sure, absolutely. At UAGC, we have the honor of supporting a very diverse adult learner population that is 100% online. 87% of our students are over the age of 25, 26% of UAGC students are associated with the military. 65% of our students are female, and 47% of our student population are minority students. And so what that means is our students are coming to Career Services in all different phases of their career development. Some students are preparing for a major career change as a working adult, while others may be receiving tuition benefits from their employers, and they’re just looking to move up within their organization, build their skillset, maybe move into management, but excited to really dive into that more today.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, that’s great. Matt, anything to add there?

Matt Phillips:

Probably, the only thing I’d say is just reiterate, it’s a very diverse learner population around career development needs, so we have a lot of first generation college students, people who started working right after high school, or maybe were in the military, or are in the military, and embarking on this journey and trying to figure out what it means for the first time. And so it’s a real challenge for the Career team and for faculty, and for everyone across the institution.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. I can imagine you’re not just dealing with one age range or people who are in one particular place of life. It’s everyone.

Rebecca Davis:

Multiple generations. Yes, absolutely.

Meredith Metsker:

Yes, exactly.

Rebecca Davis:

Moms and their children may be pursuing the same program, or both attending the university.

Meredith Metsker:

I guess, it mimics the workforce, right? Multiple generations, people from all walks of life.

Rebecca Davis:

Very true.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay, awesome. Well, thank you for that context. Now, I would love to dig into our topic today, which is how Career Services can use video to engage more students with career. So to get us started, can you just both tell me a little bit about how your team is using video?

Rebecca Davis:

Absolutely. I’ll start us off. There’s two types of video that we’ve been really excited to use, especially in the post COVID world. The first is Candid Career. Candid Career has been an amazing partner with us, and we’re so excited to share those videos with our students, and Matt will really dig into that today, of how we do that and why it’s important. But Candid Career is embedded in a few places. The first is in our career management platform, Handshake in the Resource Library, but it’s also in our public facing career services site as well, because it can be such a great tool for students who are doing career exploration, whether they’re prospective students, or active students, or alumni. That has been a great place for us to put Candid Career as well. And we also have it in what we call the Student Support Center in Canvas, which is our learning management platform.

And so while students are in Canvas, they can access Candid Career there as well, and faculty do an amazing job of referring students there. In addition to Candid Career, we’ve also seen an increase in popularity with our employer information sessions. So since we’re 100% online, those employer information sessions are all done through Zoom with our employers. Several years ago, we just took a break from them because students were just not attending or not interested. But since COVID, we’ve seen 500 students register to hear one employer talk about their organization and tips and tricks that they have for navigating the hiring process within their organization. And so with those information sessions, like I said, we record all of them, and then anyone who registers receives a copy, and then we also have been more intentional about placing those recordings in different accessible, whether it’s the classroom, whether it’s a discussion post, or even in our resource library so students can continuously access them as needed.

Because the thing is, with our students, not everyone is looking for a job at the same time, so while there may be 500 students that want to hear from an employer in January, we just don’t want that just to be a one and done thing. We want a student a year from now who may be interested in that same employer to hear that information as well, so we are excited to see what the interests that our students have shown in videos over the last couple of years.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, that’s great.

Matt Phillips:

I was going to say, whenever we make something, it’s got to be available 24/7, 365, because I mean, I talked to a student last week. I called her on the phone to talk to her about something and she said, “Yeah, I actually had to take paid time off from work to finish my assignments, and I worked all night.” So she needed access to the classroom to assignments at 3:00 AM, that was her life in that moment. It’s the same with career. You just never know. We have an information session tomorrow with the Secret Service. Not all students can attend, but there are hundreds of students who will want to know that information, and when they’re ready to access it, they have to have hands-on access. So Rebecca mentioned a couple of other places, like if I were to boil it down, I’d say Learning Management System, Canvas.

I’d say public facing resources like our website. And then we use Rise 360 to build a lot of resources and modules, so we have one of our career coaches, Amanda Kozel, collates all of our info sessions into a Rise module. We update it every quarter. It’s available to students, so that’s really impactful, and then the Candid Career video library. The most important thing with that is these videos are in a library. They’re accessible because they have transcripts. We’ve empowered our faculty to incorporate those videos in assignments in the online classroom. So when they’re revising courses, when they’re developing new courses, they have access to Candid Career.

And I collaborate with them to do everything from help them curate videos to build playlists for specific programs of study, and even craft the assignments with them alongside them. So our learners are always looking for, I don’t want to call it bite size, but very impactful content in three to five minutes that they can spring off into any readings they need to do, into any reflective writings they need to do. Videos are a really great way to give students grist for the mill as writers if they’re going to be reflective writing, and it could get them excited about things if it’s pertinent to their program of study and their goals.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. That’s so interesting. I mean, I love all of those tactics that you’re using, but the curriculum embedding thing is so interesting. I am curious, how did you go about letting faculty know that this was available or building those relationships so that they know that there are these videos that they can embed?

Matt Phillips:

So it’s a long journey. I really want to give credit to a former colleague of ours, Nicole Poff, who I think had her curriculum at United States University right now, but she’s also a PhD or doctoral student at Kansas State, I believe. She was one of the ones along with Rebecca that was really integral in establishing relationship with faculty because it’s all about relationships, and getting in on what we call kickoff meetings. So every time we revise a course, we have a kickoff meeting led by an instructional designer or the subject matter expert. And when you get in those meetings, you can say, “Hey. My name’s Matt. I work in Career Services. Here’s what we can do for you. Let’s talk about this if it’s applicable to the learning outcomes of your course.” And when it is, we’ve been able to be really successful, again over eight years of getting faculty to say, “Hey, I want to bring you in on this. How can we partner to make more empowering assignments for students?”

And we’ve really been able, I think, to scale that in a way that’s really meaningful. So if you have an entry point course, I don’t want to get too much into the weeds, but just to give you an example, a lot of our students, if they’re undergraduates, take the same sort of entry point course. It depends on their credit level, but for the most part, we can assume that. We worked with Dr. Theresa Handy and some of her faculty who was the subject matter expert to integrate Handshake signup, PeopleGrove signup into the curriculum as an assignment, and when we did that, we obviously saw an increase. We raised awareness. We’ve created videos for both those platforms to tell students what’s cool about them. We made them on Vyond, and you have 30 students running in 10 sections of that course, as an example, every two months that’s 300 students. You multiply that and it really starts to scale things.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. That’s great, especially having to build those relationships over what, eight or so years, but it truly pays off. It sounds like.

Matt Phillips:

It does. I mean, Rebecca, I don’t know because I feel like there’s always a challenge with career and connecting to faculty, would you say, or am I wrong about that?

Rebecca Davis:

It’s something every university strives to do, build that relationship between Career Services and faculty. And I feel really lucky to work at the University of Arizona Global Campus where relationships are so important, and faculty want to work with us, want to know what’s going on here, what Handshake is all about, or what employers we’re connecting with. And they’re very intentional about helping bridge that gap through classroom assignments, discussion boards, or just in their interactions with students, highlighting the resources that we have available.

Matt Phillips:

There’s also the buy-in piece with leadership. I think our Vice President of Assessment, Dr. Tricia Lauer, she’s been supportive of getting me in all these kickoff meetings. So without that, I mean, I can’t stand in front of faculty and say, “Hey. We want to work with you,” and so you really need, I think, academic leaders to say, “Hey, this matters, and I’m telling you as a course developer, it matters, so let’s try to collaborate.”

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. Isn’t that what career centers everywhere need is that senior level buy-in?

Rebecca Davis:

Absolutely.

Matt Phillips:

It is. What’s cool with online though is, what I’ve realized is you can do a presentation in a freshman orientation or intro to composition course, and that’s great, but you just hit 30 students, or maybe it’s a big seminar course with a hundred, but if I make a video about Handshake, I guarantee you at this point, a few hundred students have seen that in the last couple months, and so it just spirals into a bigger ball of momentum.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. Video is a great way to scale, for sure. So you mentioned that you work with faculty to embed these videos into assignments. I’m curious, what kind of assignments are you embedding videos in? What are some examples?

Matt Phillips:

Yeah. This is like my jam, is that it? My bread and butter. So I had a fair amount of experience crafting assignments from my work in a post MFA program and teaching Creative Writing in various places. But what I realized with the career piece was faculty are very focused on, they go to the professional dossier like cover letter, resume, and they want to do those assignments. And so what you end up having is a lot of… I’ve had three courses and I’ve had resume assignments in all of them. Can we move on? And so I think what we’ve been able to do as a Career team and working in this position is to say, “Let’s have students do things like reflective journals.” So they might have three options in a course where option one is, “I’m in the Applied Behavioral Sciences program, and I already work in the field.”

We have a lot of students who are full-time employed, and then you create a reflective journal exercise that’s maybe career exploration, maybe how are they going to apply the skills they’re learning to their current position, and that’s one exercise. The second option would be, “I’m studying this because I want to be in the Applied Behavioral Sciences field, but I’m not yet.” So that assignment becomes, it’s one assignment, but three choices. The second choice is a little different for that student. And then you might have students who are here for personal development, “I don’t want to work in ABS, but I’m really interested in it,” and they have a separate one. And you use video in all of that. You can curate videos from Candid Career to find specific instances, someone who majored in Applied Behavioral Sciences or whatever field, and they’re working as a consultant, they’re working in environmental studies. How do they get there? Candid Career has all that. So assignments like that, gosh, what are some other ones, Rebecca? I’m trying to think.

Rebecca Davis:

E-portfolio assignments.

Matt Phillips:

Yeah. I would say E-portfolio is a big one. So we use FOLIO, which is a tool where students can build an E-portfolio. It’s integrated with Canvas. And in the Liberal Arts program, students tag their E-portfolio across the curriculum with skills that they’re developing in each assignment. So we worked with Dr. Adrianne Hanson and Dr. Stephanie Fink in our Liberal Arts program to develop a matrix for skills students in the Liberal Arts are using. A lot of that’s hot technology stuff. So our team basically looked at O*NET, and then we looked at the competency model on CareerOneStop, and we matched those things up. And then of course, there were animated videos that the subject matter experts had developed that follow two personas in the Liberal Arts program as they moved through the curriculum, so that’s also another example of scaling with video, and that’s going to run across that curriculum, which is really cool.

Rebecca Davis:

And we worked with the accounting faculty just a few months ago. We brought in an employer who was really interested in, “How can I get in front of your students? How can I get in front of the classroom in a virtual setting?” And so we brought the employer and the program chair and the leads together in a room, and the employer had a chance to talk about their industry insider tips on navigating that industry, possible career paths for accounting that maybe students had not thought about before. And then we were able to work with that program, and they helped us create a dynamic video to embed in their classroom that would stand the test of time, but also highlight what that employer was doing in different career paths as well.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. That’s so smart, and such a great idea for creating video content. Just get it directly from the employer.

Rebecca Davis:

Yes.

Matt Phillips:

The employer info sessions are a really great one because as, like I said, I studied Journalism and I’m used to like, “Oh, let’s make really slick videos that look really good.” And I’ve learned over time that not only is that not necessary, it’s not preferable. I mean, students want to see real people really grappling with these ideas and learning. And so to see a hiring manager at a really respected institution or organization talking directly to you and answering your questions as maybe they’re naive questions in the chat, or maybe they’re really in depth questions, but to see that back and forth is just really powerful for students. So if you’re afraid of video as a career professional, I think it should be the opposite. You can record these information sessions, record these panels, put them on YouTube or in platforms that your students are going to, and they will be receptive to it.

Meredith Metsker:

Right. We all just want something that’s a little more authentic, a little more raw, a little more authentic. It doesn’t have to be a high value production. This needs to be real.

Rebecca Davis:

Absolutely.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. I’m curious, what are some of your most popular videos?

Rebecca Davis:

I would say to start out with interestingly is for the employer info sessions are the federal employers. They bring in the highest number of students and alumni who are interested. And I think part of it… Well, two things we just talked about, its real world application and it also crosses multiple majors. When the US Secret Service comes in or Homeland Security comes in, they’re not just talking to one major, they’re talking to usually all majors. They have something for everyone, and our students, I think, understand that. And so those are some of our most popular employer information sessions.

Matt Phillips:

Yeah. I’d say if I look at Candid Career, I look at the numbers. I think the very broad topical videos are pretty popular. So business, leadership, entrepreneurship, soft skills, hard skills, anything tagged with that kind of content is going to get searches from students and they’re going to watch it. Liberal Arts is a big one. I think a lot of Liberal Arts majors are because it’s so broad, they’re wondering, “What are the actual job titles I can research?” Which is something our Career team helps with, but students can get started by watching videos on Candid Career, and then probably program of Study Wise, Human Services, Information Technology, Healthcare. But a lot of that is dictated by what faculty are using the videos. So I should go back to when they design their courses, they have access to Candid Career with instructions on how to embed stuff. The videos are accessible, and if they are aware of that and choose to use it, then they’re going to have more success with our students watching the videos.

Rebecca Davis:

And it’s funny, as a Career team, as with any career team, we’ve done so many webinars on resume, job search, LinkedIn, the basics, and those remain popular, and there’s still a need for those, and we haven’t stopped doing that, but it’s the real world application is, what’s bringing in the larger numbers for both Candid Career and our employer information sessions.

Matt Phillips:

The other thing I was going to say is students want to see someone who looks like them doing a job that they want to do. We know for small kids, seeing someone who looks like them doing something they might want to do is really impactful. I think it’s the same for adults.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. It makes it feel more possible. So you mentioned some of the results you’ve seen, but in general, what have been the results since your team has gone all in on video?

Rebecca Davis:

Yes, Matt will really dig into the numbers, but we’ve seen a significant increase, at least with Candid Career from year one to year two, and Career Services has a limited budget no matter where you are at. And so we have really tried the last two years to say, “Okay, what are our resources? And let’s use them to their full capabilities. I don’t want there to be any part of the resource that we’re not using or pay for something and we’re not scaling it in a large way across our institution.” And so the goal has really been we need to fully utilize each resource we have, and so I’m so excited that we’ve been able to go all in on Candid Career and videos.

Matt Phillips:

Yeah. I mean, hard numbers I think, so like individual logins, I was just looking yesterday on Candid Career, it’s like 24,000. That’s a lot. We haven’t had it for, I think we’ve had it for two years. And then videos watched over 140,000, 143,000, so that’s a lot of watching of videos. Now, I think the key thing is you’re not going to see that probably on a ground campus because you can’t incorporate that into the curriculum. So we have a real advantage there, especially with entry point courses, which have a lot of students come through. But I think those numbers show raising awareness for career development, learning in the classroom, and just knowing anecdotally how many faculty are approaching us, what’s happening in the classroom. It’s clear that we’re making a significant impact, at least in raising awareness.

Meredith Metsker:

Sure. I mean, it’d be really tough to get in front of, what’d you say, 140,000 students.

Matt Phillips:

Yeah. And even more so I can say when I dig into the Candid Career access points, you can see individual URLs from where videos are being accessed or where Candid Career is being accessed. And a lot of it comes down to, and this is where the individual educator is important because we’ve been talking about scaling online, but a lot of those, a significant majority of those visits come from professors posting a classroom announcement about candid career in their classroom, so that’s the individual educator. They’re not mandated to do this. They’re saying, “Oh, this could be of interest to my students. I’m going to post this for them on Tuesday when we start the week,” and we see most of our traffic coming from that. So the students are paying attention to the individual faculty members.

Rebecca Davis:

And I think we joke in our office about even us as career professionals using videos to learn more, and we go down the rabbit hole and students are doing the same. They click on one video. They’re usually not stopping and just watching that one video, they’re watching more. The next ones that are recommended they keep watching is, I think, what we’re seeing as well.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, that’s great. That has been so well received. I mean, it makes sense. Your students are part of the global campus. They need access to that information. As you were saying earlier, Matt, 24/7, and this being embedded in assignments, I imagine it makes that possible and more accessible too.

Rebecca Davis:

Definitely.

Matt Phillips:

Yeah, absolutely.

Rebecca Davis:

[inaudible 00:29:32].

Matt Phillips:

And it gives faculty, when you’re developing a course, it actually streamlines things because you don’t have to search on the internet, vet things. We already did that, and we say, “Look, here’s a great library. It’s fully accessible. Take a look.”

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. Like, “This is free for you to use. Please use it.”

Matt Phillips:

It comes out of our budget.

Meredith Metsker:

Well, not free for you, free for them.

Rebecca Davis:

And with the transcript piece, that’s made a huge difference as well, being able to offer transcripts to students and faculty.

Meredith Metsker:

For sure. To speak on that accessibility note, in general, why is video as a format so important to your efforts in terms of career development?

Matt Phillips:

I think that is a good question. So I think it’s the scalability, so raising awareness amongst students, faculty, the institution as a whole, but it’s much, I think the human brain is evolving how we absorb information, and so a three-minute video is going to reach for the right content, for the right type of subject matter is going to reach more students in a more meaningful way than a chapter in a textbook. Again, I’m not saying we don’t need both mediums, but I think people are increasingly, but I obviously don’t have research to indicate that. Rebecca, what do you think?

Rebecca Davis:

No, I absolutely agree with the points that you shared, and I think it’s digestible and accessible. I think that’s the key takeaway with that.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. I mean, we’re seeing short form video takeover everywhere else, right?

Rebecca Davis:

Yes.

Matt Phillips:

Yeah. I mean, it’s the same with higher ed, I think, and just education in general, but I don’t know. I wonder, there’s real value in giving students multiple opportunities for success in mastering levels of knowledge or tasks, or whatever it is. So just because we have it in a video doesn’t mean that’s the only place we have it. It’s multiple places through an assignment, and so you need to help all sorts of learners. And then, I don’t know, I think about this a lot, which is that a lot of our students come to us. They’re not the 18-year-old who went from a really great high school to a really great college. They have different experience with institutions, and so having very authentic videos that are approachable as opposed to a hoity-toity textbook written by someone with 10 acronyms after their name, it’s a different type of relationship with the content and the subject matter, and so I think that has more of an effect than we might think.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. I think that’s a great point. I mean, we see it all the time on social media too, what really resonates is not necessarily those highly produced videos. It’s someone flipping the camera around on their smartphone and doing a walk and talk style thing. It’s like as long as the information is good, that’s the important thing.

Matt Phillips:

Yeah.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. Well, I’m curious, what advice do both of you have for other career leaders who want to start using video more effectively?

Rebecca Davis:

It’s really the relationships. Building relationships as always with anything that you want to do within Career Services, or scale within Career Services is to build relationships with different departments who have the capability to share that content, whether it’s the marketing team or it’s faculty member. There’s different ways that those videos can be shared to reach as many students and alumni as possible, so really leveraging those relationships. And I think just showing others the videos makes a huge difference. We can talk about, “Oh, we’ve got all these career resources. We created these modules. We’ve done these webinars,” and they’re like, “That’s great, that’s nice.” But when you actually just say, “Here’s our Candid Career link, or here’s a link to this info session.” Once they sit down and check it out, they’re bought in, they’re sold. So actually showing it to them, it sells itself, and we have seen some buy-in doing it that way as well.

Matt Phillips:

Yeah, I agree. I think getting in front of people and having that relationship where they’re going to listen to you is always a challenge in every industry, higher ed included as open-minded as we all are. And so I would just say, leverage your relationships in a way that empowers others. If you have access to Candid Career, which is not, in the grand scheme of things, an expensive tool, I think sharing it with the right people is really important. At UAGC, when I think of Career Everywhere, I think of some very specific faculty who if I said those two words to them, they’d be like, “Oh yeah, a hundred thousand percent.” Those are the people we go to first with things, because those people are influencers. And so when you let those people influence other faculty, it becomes a cultural thing. So you have to leverage your culture, I think, wherever you can.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. That reminds me of something that one of our previous guests, Laura Kestner-Ricketts said on the podcast where she said, “You go with the goers.”

Rebecca Davis:

I love that.

Matt Phillips:

Yeah, it’s so true. And you have to figure out, we spend so much time as people trying to convince others of things, but it’s much easier if you know the people who are already convinced and then you send them out, and work with them-

Meredith Metsker:

And then they buy in, they get the experience, and then they can tell their peers about it.

Matt Phillips:

… exactly.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, great. Well, that’s some good advice. I think that’s an important point, that it’s not just about the videos themselves or the format themselves, it’s about the relationships you need to distribute them. So otherwise they’re just video sitting in a digital library somewhere.

Rebecca Davis:

Absolutely.

Matt Phillips:

That’s exactly it.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. Well, great. I want to be mindful of our time here, but is there anything else either of you would like to add about our topic today?

Matt Phillips:

Rebecca, you want to go first? Do you want me to go-

Rebecca Davis:

No, go ahead, Matt.

Matt Phillips:

… yeah, I would say there’s been a huge impact on every industry with artificial intelligence and the capabilities. I mean, we just saw recently an article in New York Times about, I think it’s called Sora, this tool where you can write a sentence and it creates a minute-long video. It’s not available to just anybody now, but I think that’s going to continually change multiple industries, especially as it relates to video, obviously. But to try to stay abreast of that stuff is the advice I’d give because you don’t know what tools are going to become available that are empowering to students and educators. And then also, I think your point earlier, Meredith, is a great one. It’s like if you have someone on your campus who can make really cool videos that are just simple and distributable, I think you should leverage that as long as you can make them accessible, and if you can reach 10 students instead of one about important subject matter related to career, who wouldn’t do that?

Rebecca Davis:

And to build off that, Matt, what you said about AI is, I go back to we are trusting where the content is coming from, the content we’re sharing, our students can trust us with and utilizing Candid Career and utilizing the relationships we have with employers, we trust the content. And so we’re happy to share that and students can trust us as well.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. That’s great. And Matt, what you were saying about leveraging other folks on campus really resonated because I mean, of course, most campuses I think have a video team, a creative team of some kind in central marketing. So there’s that option, but you can also make a video and train faculty members, students, alumni, employers on how to just record themselves on Zoom or Loom, or something like that, or they can just record that content and then send it to you. You don’t have to necessarily send a video team out onsite. You can show them how to do it digitally-

Rebecca Davis:

Exactly.

Matt Phillips:

Yeah, you can.

Meredith Metsker:

… or virtually, I should say.

Matt Phillips:

Yeah. And actually we’ve done that actual thing with Commencement multiple times. I’ve managed projects where we’ve had students record messages, and we’ve put them together into a really cool inspiring tear inducing video. But I think with career, I think students love to hear from each other too, and that’s a real struggle for us because we have platforms like PeopleGrove where students connect and Handshake even, but looking for ways to get students to connect to each other visually, it’s still a challenge. So I don’t know. You just gave me some ideas, and now I feel like I have more projects to manage.

Meredith Metsker:

You’re welcome.

Rebecca Davis:

Well, and even during COVID, when we all went home, the Marketing team reached out to me and said, “Hey, we need some career content. We want to put it on our Instagram stories,” or whatever it was at the time. There’s this thing called a Teleprompter App. We will work on a short little script and you can record it yourself, and that was just the beginning. I think for us, it really, like you said, leaning into using video and going all in.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, there’s so many ways to do it nowadays.

Rebecca Davis:

Yes.

Matt Phillips:

Before COVID, we had a studio actually here where I live, and I was able to go into the studio, make videos with people, but what I realized is it was much harder because it’s like, “All right, we’ve got to schedule time. We’ve got to do all this. Okay, are you mic’d up? Oh my gosh, the background’s messed up.” It became much easier to scale video when we decided not to worry that they were slick and perfect, and we’ve had more of an impact on students because we made that decision, or were forced to make that decision during COVID.

Meredith Metsker:

Yep. It can be more effective, and it’s way more cost-effective when you don’t have to worry about microphones, lighting, sound, all of that. You just focus on the content itself.

Rebecca Davis:

Yes.

Matt Phillips:

Yep.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. Very cool. Well, if people would like to learn more from you about how to use video or anything else, where’s a good place for them to do that?

Rebecca Davis:

Yes. You can reach out to me at rebecca.davis@uagc.edu. I’m happy to connect with anyone about this topic.

Matt Phillips:

Same for me, matthew.phillips@uagc.edu. It’s two Ts, two Ls, and we’re all on LinkedIn. Happy to connect with people, and if anybody’s looking for very basic information on how to make videos, cool platforms that make it easy, where to start, I’m happy to talk to people about that.

Meredith Metsker:

Cool. And for anyone watching or listening, I’ll be sure to include their emails and their links to their LinkedIn profiles in the show notes. So at the end of every interview, I like to do this, answer a question, leave a question thing. So I’ll ask you a question that our last guest left for you, and then you’ll leave a question for the next guest. Our last guest was Adam Capozzi of Syracuse University, and he left the following question for you, “If you had a time machine, would you travel to the future or back to the past?”

Rebecca Davis:

I loved this question when I heard it. So futuristic is one of my top five strengths, but I think I would actually travel to the past. There’s several different times I’d love to just visit, not live, just visit, but I would choose the past.

Matt Phillips:

All right. So I feel like this question is a riddle, and so I’m just going to answer in the way… If I had a time machine, would I travel to the future of the past? I’d do both because it’s a time machine and I could just go back and forth. So I don’t know if that’s the answer he was going for, but that’s my answer.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. I think I asked him what he would do in the last episode, and he said he would go to the past, and I said the same things. I’m like, I don’t want to spoil the future, but there are some moments I would like to go back and relive a little bit.

Matt Phillips:

Also, would you like to change a little bit?

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, maybe I’ll go buy some Amazon stock 30 years ago.

Matt Phillips:

Yeah, definitely.

Meredith Metsker:

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

Rebecca Davis:

Go for it, Matt.

Matt Phillips:

We went back and forth on this. Yeah, I’ll go for it. So we’re an online university, and we talked a lot about scaling things and hitting hundreds of students with a resource. Look, that doesn’t negate the value of the individual educator, and so we really see results from individual educators and believe in individual educators. So the question is, tell us about a specific time when you made an impact on one student. What was the situation and what positive impact did you have on them?

Meredith Metsker:

Oh, I love that one. I love hearing about those student success stories.

Rebecca Davis:

Yes.

Meredith Metsker:

So I feel like that’s why people want to work in higher ed. You want to work with those students and make a difference, especially if you’re in Career Services.

Rebecca Davis:

And I think we all have in mind a few of those stories that we really think upon.

Matt Phillips:

Force them to choose just one, whoever it is. They can’t do 10.

Meredith Metsker:

Do either of you have a specific story in mind for that one?

Matt Phillips:

Oh, man. Yeah, of course.

Rebecca Davis:

I think for me, I can think of a few stories, but it’s when I get to meet my student at Commencement, they’ll come by, we have a Career Services table, and I’ll introduce myself and they’ll say, “Oh, my gosh, it’s you. I can put a face to a voice.” Because so much of what I have done is over the phone with students, and so when they’re able to share, “You changed my life. I was able to land this job,” like, “I forgot to tell you I got this job,” is usually how it goes. It’s so inspiring.

Matt Phillips:

Yeah. I mean, career wise, I’ve had a few, but now that I’m more broad student affairs, there’s even more that come up. But I think of one student who was a part of a club I advise, and just her struggle being diagnosed with long COVID and almost at graduation, the last five, six courses, just having a couple of conversations with her, and then advocating for her with a professor, in one case, getting access and Wellness counselors involved to see her maintain above a 3.0 GPA, and almost at graduation now, I am like, “Yeah, that’s why I’m here.” Adult student, four kids, had failed out of school before and come back, so yeah.

Meredith Metsker:

That’s amazing. Those are both great stories. This reminds me of when I worked for Washington State University back in the day on the Central Marketing team, and anytime I got to do a feature story on a student just was so much fun. There was one time I got to interview a, he was a Viticulture and Enology student, and he was also a former army medic, so he had left the military, had always had a hobby with wine making, and he had PTSD. He had enough of being deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, and he’s like, “I want to do something that brings joy to other people. I want to be a winemaker. Wine brings joy,” and getting to tell that story was just so impactful at the time, and it still sticks out to me.

Rebecca Davis:

Yes.

Matt Phillips:

Yes.

Meredith Metsker:

And I’m still a member of his wine club.

Rebecca Davis:

Wine does bring joy.

Matt Phillips:

That’s really cool.

Rebecca Davis:

That’s so cool.

Matt Phillips:

It does bring joy. At my wedding, my aunt left a note for us that said, “Drink more wine. It makes you happy.” He was right.

Meredith Metsker:

Wise words. Well, on that inspirational note, I think we’ll go ahead and wrap up, but just thank you both for taking the time to join me on the podcast today. This was such a fun conversation, full of, I think, really useful tactical tidbits for our audience, so I just thank you very much.

Rebecca Davis:

Thank you, Meredith. Thanks for having us.

Matt Phillips:

Yeah, thanks for having us.