Strategic Planning for the Career Center

Meredith Metsker:

Hello, everyone. Welcome to today’s webinar. I am Meredith Metsker. I am the Director of Content and Community here at uConnect. I also host the Career Everywhere podcast and write the Career Everywhere newsletter, so you may have seen me there.

Today, we will be talking about strategic planning for the career center. As you can see, we are joined by three incredible panelists. We have Josh Domitrovich of Pennsylvania, Western University, Kelli Smith of Binghamton University, and Mike Summers of Lafayette College. Now, originally, we were supposed to have Audra Verrier of Loyola Marymount University joining us today, and, unfortunately, she was unable to due to illness. So, many thanks to Kelli for stepping in at the literal last minute to help us out today.

Kelli Smith:

Happy to be here.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. Yeah. We’re so glad to have you, Kelli. I’ll be sure to follow up with Audra on what she would have shared today when we have her on the podcast here in the next few weeks.

I will have our panelists introduce themselves in more detail here in a couple minutes. But first, I just want to cover a few quick housekeeping items. Of course, if you want to introduce yourself in the chat, feel free to do that. Just say what institution you’re from, where you’re based. We always love seeing who is joining us in these webinars.

First, this session is being recorded. We will add the recording to the event page here in the community after the fact. I’ll also add it to the new video library space in the Career Everywhere community channel in the community.

Second, as you should be able to see at the top of the chat, I’ve shared today’s agenda, along with a PDF handout with links to additional resources. These resources include things our panelists might talk about or show today, along with some other resources like any podcast episodes they’ve been on or articles they’ve been cited in, things like that. So if you want to learn more about today’s topic or any of these panelists, be sure to check out that PDF pinned at the top of the chat.

Next, if you have questions throughout the webinar, please put them in the chat. That will be the easiest way for me and the panelists to keep track. I will be spending about 10 to 12 minutes with each panelist, asking them how they’re approaching strategic planning for their career centers. Then, we’ll open it up at the end to audience questions, so be sure to think of those questions as we go.

And finally, after today’s webinar, I will be publishing a post in the community with some takeaways from the webinar and then a prompt to ask any additional questions you might have in the comments. Our panelists here know to keep an eye on the post in case they are tagged in any of your comments. So if you think of more questions later or we just don’t have time to get to your question during the webinar, please share your questions in the comments of that post and we will keep this conversation going.

Okay, I think that’s it for housekeeping items. I think I’ve talked enough. Panelists, let’s have you introduce yourselves. If you could just, again, please share your name, your [inaudible 00:03:13] work, a quick note maybe about your strategic planning approach, that would be great, and then we will dig into more specific details later on. Josh, why don’t we start with you? Josh, I think you’re muted maybe.

Josh Domitrovich:

[inaudible 00:03:31].

Meredith Metsker:

There we go.

Josh Domitrovich:

Okay. Josh Domitrovich from Penn West University. Excited to be here today. Penn West, if you haven’t heard of us, we’re a newly integrated institution in Western Pennsylvania. We have three campuses, Northwest, Southwest, and kind of central Pennsylvania. We have a shared service model and office model where one campus, one administration, one staff, one faculty, one service. We support about 11,000 students across those three geographically separated campus locations and on the online population students.

Our team’s comprised of eight professionals. We’re actually hiring one, shameless plug. If anybody’s interested, we have one open at our Edinburgh location. We have three GA’s and about 10-ish student workers at a time. For our strategic planning, what you’ll learn today is we really try to break it up into three different sections.

We always have an end-of-the-year… we call end-of-the-year review meeting. We kind of celebrate what we’ve done and kind of close our data. That transitions then to more of a formalized strategic planning process, which I’ll talk about. Then, every single year we also do kind of functional area reviews, and I’ll talk about what those look like. I’ll share a document with you I’ll walk you through and try to provide a lot of detail in case anybody needs any. That in a nutshell is what we’ve done with Penn West, and I’m excited to tell you a little bit more here.

Meredith Metsker:

Awesome. Thanks, Josh. Kelli, why don’t we have you go next?

Kelli Smith:

Great. Thanks, Meredith. I am on here, as everyone knows. I’m pinch-hitting a little bit, but very glad to be on here. It’s really wonderful to see the number of different people in the participant list, some familiar faces and others I don’t know, but glad to be here.

I’m the Assistant Vice President for Student Success at Binghamton University. I’ll be having my 10-year anniversary this Sunday of all things. I came in initially as the director of our career center. I now have oversight for also a couple other areas but am still really pretty closely involved with both our office and just in our field.

Our institution, if you’re not familiar with Binghamton University, is part of the state of New York system, part of SUNY. We’re a Research I institution and one of the four primary academic centers. We serve all of our students. We have a centralized career center that serves nearly 19,000 students now. We’re a growing institution as well.

And our career center has really grown over time. We, when I started, were, I think, at 14, and we’ll be with some new positions that I can talk about later that we’ve gotten this year. We’ve gotten, I think, six, actually seven, new positions. We’ll be at 30 by the time we get fully staffed. It’s just a little bit about me and our institution.

In terms of my approach to strategic planning, I’ll talk about that a little bit more in detail. But I think the one little bit that I would say is it just really often depends on where your organization is, where the institution is, and also where your staff is in the process. I can talk about how that has evolved for our team over the last 10 years.

Meredith Metsker:

Awesome. Thanks, Kelli. All right. Mike, you are up.

Mike Summers:

Good afternoon, everyone. I am Mike Summers. I am the Associate Vice President for the Gateway Career Center here at Lafayette College in eastern Pennsylvania. So geographically, we sit literally right on the Delaware River. We’re about 75 miles from downtown Manhattan, so if that orients you a little bit about where we are. We are an undergraduate institution only of roughly 2,750 students, liberal arts, and engineering. A little bit of a unique combination there, one of the unique identifiers of us as an institution.

We also are Division I athletics, and 23% of our students are Division I student-athletes. Ra, Ra Patriot League football champions this past year. That’s a shameless plug for our football team, but lots of other really strong athletes here at the college.

Very similar around strategic planning to Josh. We just got done with our two days of our planning meetings where we do an end-of-year review where we do planning and goal setting, at least the start of for the next academic year, so we just completed that process. And as I’ll share a little bit later, we’re in a little bit of an interesting and really exciting situation and position here at the college around the timing of this for this year. I’ll share that in a little bit more detail as we go through the webinar. So great to have everybody here, and thanks so much.

Meredith Metsker:

Awesome. Thanks, everyone, for those great introductions. I think that gives us some good context as we move into the rest of the discussion. On that note, I’ll go ahead and move into the Q&A part of today’s webinar. I know we’ve got a lot to cover in only an hour, so I’m going to do my best to keep us on track here.

Again, I’ll spend about 10 to 12 minutes with each panelist, and we’ll cover, again, how they approach strategic planning, what their plans entail, who’s involved in the process, things they’ve learned and so on. Then, we’ll open it up for audience Q&A at the end. And again, feel free to put your questions in the chat as we go along.

Josh, let’s go ahead and start with you. I’m going to just open it up with the big question. What does your strategic plan look like, and how did you approach the process?

Josh Domitrovich:

Sure. Appreciate it, Meredith. I think it’s really important to set the stage and really think about what it means to do strategic planning. Sometimes it’s often looked at like a scary process or an intimidating process. But at the end of the day, the way we try to break it down at our institution is you need to understand what your mission is. You need to have goals to support that mission. You need to be assessing what you do. That’s really the three central components of what we try to think about in planning, and that could look very different for each university and even each department, as Kelli already mentioned in her opening.

I think for Penn West, we’re in a really unique opportunity and a position where we’re newly integrated. The strategic plan just got placed, but we’ve had a president, and then an interim president, and now we’re hiring our first official president all within two years. I’ve been in three separate divisions, and I’ve had seven managers in those two years.

To have a plan, there is no… The plan is there is no plan in a way. In some cases when you think high level, we’re just still trying to figure it all out as an institution. And that’s scary, but what we try to do is be proactive in nature and think about how can we still strategically plan in a little turbulent environment as we kind of settle as a new institution. That’s kind of the context I think is really important.

But what we try to do is we know that there’s a strategic direction and plan that Penn West has created initially for their first three years. We’re about halfway through it. This new president, when they come in, they’re likely going to either do a 2.0 or they’re going to press reset and do their own, so we have to be very sensitive to that as we do our planning internally.

I’m going to share my screen for you and show you what our summer planning has looked like. I’m a visual learner, so I want to be able to share that with all of you in hopes that that might be helpful for you as well. I should be sharing. I got the thumbs up. Excellent.

I wanted to give this context because I think wherever you are in the whole grand scheme of strategic planning, whether you’ve done it before or you’ve never done it, this can be helpful. These are the things that we’ve learned. As Mike just mentioned as well, we both kind of operate in a end-of-the-year type of celebration. What we did on May 15th, we held about a 90-minute meeting with the team. We brought everybody together, and we were very intentional about celebrating what we accomplished that past year. So every single staff member of our eight, they were asked to present at least three positive things, three positive accomplishments for the year. That could be personal, could be professional, but it was all kind of related to what it is that we do and how we support the institution. I don’t think we do enough about sharing the positive, so that was something we were intentional about.

Shout out to Troy Hopkins for the idea of the virtual game. I asked in the community, “Could somebody give me some virtual game ideas?” I selected Troy’s, so thanks, Troy, if you’re here. We did a little known fact game, just a little icebreaker. We learned a lot of cool things about the team.

Then, what we do at the end of the meeting is really talk strategy about what we’re going to do in the summer. Initially, the idea was to hold a formalized SWOT analysis as a strategic plan, but then we got two positions approved to hire. We heard that a new president was coming in, and we’re going to be onboarding a new software, and we thought, “You know what? That’s enough. Maybe we don’t try to throw strategic planning in the whole mix of things. We’ll just operate in our what we call functional area review planning,” which in our mind is our own type of office strategic planning, and I’ll talk about that here in a moment.

But what’s really important in that end-of-the-year meeting is we always make sure that the staff wraps up the data collection. Then, after that meeting, we do the analysis, the directors in the office, to be able to associate and connect it to the assessment plan that we submit to the institution. We look at this year-in-review meeting as the starting point of any planning that we’re going to do in the summer for that next initial year. So, I think it’s really important. This kind of sets the stage for the way we operate.

I do put here in shaded gray, so a lighter gray tone. This is the plan that we had when we were going to do the SWOT analysis, the official strategic plan. But again, we postponed it until we see what the president’s new initiative is and what they might align. You can take a look at that. It was a course over a few weeks. We were going to spend dedicated time to go through the SWOT analysis. If you’re interested, I created an Excel teams matrix that everything was coded properly so when you filled it out, it had instructions and everything worked together. If you want to nerd out with me, I’ll happily share that with you. If anybody’s interested, throw it in the chat, let me know, and I can share that later. But I won’t spend a bunch of time on it today, but we will be doing that here in the near future.

What we really focus on is what we call functional area reviews. Little context here first. Whenever we became Penn West, we had three existing institutions, three existing career centers, and existing staff. It was really important for us to think about respecting those cultures while we’re trying to create a new culture and what were the strengths that everybody was bringing in and to create the new opportunity that we could be as Penn West.

When we were doing that, we quickly identified that there were some key areas that we needed to have to be intentional with our efforts for Penn West, and those were those four at the top. Somewhere in the office, there are a number of staff members who do career coaching responsibilities, employer relations. We have an internship center that helps students go through the application process for for-credit experiences. Then, we also underlined outreach and events to be more promotional to really make sure we get our messaging out there.

What we do every single year now is that we have staff who are leads, we call them functional area leads, in each of these areas that they work through their own type of mini assessment of what’s occurring and what are they going to plan to improve for the next academic year. They are aware of who they are, but what the process they go through. It’s a four-part process, and you should be able to see it all as I walk through it now.

Part one is we ask that functional area lead to solicit as much information from the entire team as they can. We want feedback on what worked well that academic year and related to career coaching or what maybe didn’t work well that we want to try to improve. It’s the lead’s choice in how they want to gather that information. Some of them they send out surveys and the team takes it on their own time. Others, we hold dedicated time in our staff meeting and then they can actually gather feedback that way.

What we ask them to do is make sure that they cover these four areas. What were some good things that happened in the last academic year? What were some changes that were implemented from last year to this year? Are there any areas that they want feedback on? So maybe career coaches are really struggling with an area and they just want to brainstorm with the team first before they actually go and dig into trying to make some decisions. Then, of course, anything else, open discussion and feedback that they want.

Based off this gathering of information, then the functional area lead takes it back to their mini team. For the staff that have career coaching responsibilities, there’s four of them. Those four get together, and then they draft out a functional area recommendations report of, “Here are the things that we want to do and improve this next academic year.” Each of those functional areas does that, and then what they’ll do is they’ll share out that report back to the entire team.

Because the mistake that we made last year that we didn’t make this year is that we didn’t do that necessarily sharing and educating outwards in the team, and there was a lot of overlap or miscommunication in terms of a decision the employer relations team made would ultimately impact the career coaches and they weren’t prepared for that influx of the request. That share-out was really a really important learning lesson from last year, so that’s why we make an intentional effort now that once they have their report, they present it at a staff meeting, everybody gets feedback and understanding how it might cause a ripple effect in the other areas. Then, ultimately, the last part of the report is they’ll finalize it, and then that’s what their goals are for that academic year.

When we think about strategic planning, all these things align with our general mission in the office. Then, these are the short-term goals that are trying to help us accomplish the long-term goals that we set as an office, which there were two, systematic integration inside the curriculum and the co-curricular experience and then bolstering up our experiential learning and internship opportunities for students. That’s what Penn West wanted. That’s what our two major focuses are. Then, these goals that the team are creating funnel back into those two main goals, and then I ensure our two align with the university plan, and I’m the one out there trying to market, and sell, and educate others externally at the university on what we’re doing.

Essentially, that is it in a nutshell. That’s the way that we attempt to operate our planning. I wanted to be able to present maybe a different spin of what you might think is strategic planning. This is strategic. This is planning. It’s just it doesn’t have the term strategic planning in it necessarily, but there are unique ways that you might be able to do it. So, I hope this was helpful for you to be able to see. Mary, I don’t have my chat. Were there any questions or anything or…

Meredith Metsker:

There is a lot of people who would really like to see that Excel spreadsheet, so you’ll have to share that with me afterwards and I can make sure to include that in the post webinar-

Josh Domitrovich:

That’s good.

Meredith Metsker:

… post I’ll put in the community because there’s a lot of interest. But yeah, I think that was a great overview of just how you all are approaching your strategic planning process. I’m curious, I always like to know what lessons you may have learned or anything you learned that you might apply that the next time you do this or advice you’d want to share with the folks who are here today about the strategic planning process from your perspective.

Josh Domitrovich:

Yeah. I mean, as where I sit in the organizational chart, kind of like upper-, mid-management, I think it’s really important for me to understand the landscape of what’s going on above me and also ensuring that we’re connecting to that, but creating an environment where the team is able to really create ideas and feel passionate about the work that they’re doing and how that all connects.

I hope what you saw through my very quick outline and presentation is that the team drives this entire thing. This is their ideas. It’s their thoughts. It’s their perspectives. Then, I’ve already kind of set the tone with the two major goals that has been really positive feedback from the team, that they feel like this is their plan, it’s not my plan, because they’re the ones who need to execute it.

I’d say from a large standpoint, if this is something that you’re looking to do, make sure you have the team buy-in but you understand what’s going on in the landscape of your environment and how you’re able to advocate and connect the dots. It’s really, really important at a high level because then that allows for maybe more funding, more budget opportunities, being able to be sitting at tables that you’re not supposed to be sitting at maybe from an organizational standpoint.

The biggest blessing of Penn West so far, although it’s been frustrating to have seven bosses in two years, is having seven bosses in two years. I’ve been in three different divisions. We’ve been able to prove ourselves in every division and really not be changed, which has been a good thing. We’ve been able to kind of cross-pollinate and make a lot of different moves. So much of it has been because the team’s been flexible and it’s really been because we set a plan and we’re sticking to it to make the changes.

Meredith Metsker:

Awesome. I love that. I think that’s some good lessons learned, for sure. Well, in the interest of time, I will probably move on. But really quick, is there anything else you want to add, Josh, before I take us over to Kelli?

Josh Domitrovich:

No. I will make sure I have the Excel to go for everybody. And if there’s any time that remains, I’ll happily share it for anybody that wants to stick around. I can walk you through it. But if not, that’s good. I’ll look at the chat and see if I can answer any questions if anybody has them.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay, cool. All right. Kelli, you are up next. I’ll just kind of kick us off with, again this kind of the same question. So, just what does your strategic plan look like, and how does your team approach the process?

Kelli Smith:

Great. Thank you. From my vantage point, I’m kind of coming at this a little bit differently in this sense that I have basically that ten-year span. When I very first started 10 years ago, our office was in need of… I think I was hired in part to come in and shake things up a little bit, do things differently. I was very fortunate to have a team that was ready for that and ready to do some things really differently.

In a pretty quick amount of time, my first summer, we did a lot of work around creating a strategic plan at that time. Then, at that point, it was a five-year plan, and we had a retreat. It was much like what Josh was saying, wanted this to be coming from the team and the staff in many ways.

But I would also add that I think sometimes you come in as a leader and you are aware of some things that are expected. You may have some of the things that you are coming in that you’re kind of hoping to achieve. You often have a university strategic plan. We’re very fortunate that our university strategic plan that I came in with at the time and has basically remained as the same because we’ve had the same president this entire time. Both high-impact practices, as well as career outcomes built in, and one of the priorities we could also really align with that as well.

While the main point of our summer retreat… Which thinking back, I remember it very well, even though it was 10 years ago. I remember the joy I had when the staff were coming up with some different things that I knew I was really hoping would happen, but it kind of came from them, as well as some of the data that we were gathering from partners from across campus.

At that time, it was a very different situation than what we’re in now. We were really expected to kind of reinvent how we were doing things, reinvent our perception on campus by stakeholders, students, everybody. It was a little different. I guess when I was thinking about this and the little bit of time I had today, what was very different for us at that point was because we had a much more external expectation, we did do more of shopping around what our plan was in a way that we didn’t in our most recent version, which I’ll explain in a minute. But at that point we came up with areas of priority and metrics and some different things, and I feel like did a pretty okay job, thankfully.

But in around 2020… And at that point, a different person, our director at that point, really wanted to create a strategic plan to help the team. It’s time to throw out the old. Let’s try and do some new things. She really did an excellent job of working with the team in a more internal way, I would say. In part, that made sense at that time because we had made a lot of progress and, frankly, to some degree, sometimes when you’re going through pretty tremendous change, I think you really have to be in tune with your team. That was a different approach in that it was a lot more internally driven and a little less member checking of the campus employers, students, and that kind of thing.

You can see what that plan was. It was started the process around 2020. They worked with an external consultant, Andy Seperli, who I’m guessing many of you are familiar with. He came and worked with everyone to eventually create three pillars, which are in the document in the PDF that Meredith provided. Then, three teams were formed around each and to develop the metrics for all of those.

What we did very recently, because our office… So it’s almost like a third iteration, but to be honest, a much more low-key approach very recently, just a couple weeks ago, is really just a two-hour check-in of where we’re at. Our particular year this year has been yet another… And I’m not complaining because it’s been a great year, but we’ve gotten a lot of additional resources from largely our state who has prioritized internships especially, so we really benefited from that and gained five new positions, four of which will be industry specialists, and then one that’s focused on high-impact practices and especially hips. Then, one of the colleges decided instead of having their own person that they’re going to have a Fleishman staff member housed in their downtown campus.

It has been fantastic, and I recognize, especially when I know many colleagues are going through budget cuts, we’re sort of the opposite, but it also meant and needed to acknowledge with the team searches and just thinking through these different things. And we had the most one-on-one appointments that we’ve had ever in this past year with our existing staff. It’s been a very busy year, and nobody was really… Even though we’re probably technically due for another new round of strategic plan, the team’s just not there right now.

What we did instead is just schedule a couple of hours to really especially check in on our mission vision and values, which for us have been incredibly core for the work that we do, as well as identify some priorities for the next year. We had set up some exercises, came up with some different themes. We have a fairly unique shared leadership style within our career center right now where I have a role and we have two senior associate directors. The three of us are right now in the process of… It’s essentially like qualitative research, if anyone has done that, where we’re coming together with our themes and we’re going to do some member checking with our staff in a couple weeks’ time that are our priorities for the next year.

One of them looks pretty clear to be, of course, internships. That is, for us, huge. In part, it’s externally driven as well, but we also know we really need to make some progress there. But also, one of them is around storytelling. We have made some good progress in the past 10 years within our campus. I feel grateful every day for the team we have and also the work that they do that’s constantly innovative and just doing new things. We’re building a skills lab so that we’re really focused on skills-based hiring and leveraging our employers and alumni for that. But a lot of times there’s so many things going on, we’re feeling like the campus sometimes forgets and maybe even takes for granted some of the things that we’re doing. Storytelling is one of those.

I can share a document with Meredith that frankly is not quite up to date now because one of the stats, for instance, which one of the podcasts she had shared about our early engagement, we went from 28% to… At the time, in the document, it’s 70-some, but we just hit 80% engagement with all of our first-year students. That kind of thing is really important to get out to campus and is the kind of thing that was in this document that we had commissioned. It’s basically top 10 innovations of the Fleishman Center so that we can share that with campus because we rely incredibly on our partner offices across campus and colleagues not only for gaining resources but credibility and ensuring that they’re referring students into the pipeline of support.

But we have, because of the pillars in that document, really been able to address and make some progress on some different things, such as the early engagement. And frankly, uConnect was key in that and having tailored information for our students and being able to identify them. But also, some of the work that we did helped us in that strategic plan leverage new resources when this new money was coming this way from SUNY. I’ll leave it at that for now. It’s fairly high level, so I apologize. I don’t have great graphics and documents to show on the screen like Josh did, but hopefully that’s helpful.

Oh, and how many students? We have just under 19,000. We do serve all students from really, frankly, prospective students on until up through Ph.D. level. Saw that from Dr. George question.

Meredith Metsker:

Cool. Yeah, I was going to pose that question to you if you didn’t see it though. Thank you for adding that additional context. Just thank you for that overview in general. Similar to how I kind of wrapped it up with Josh, is there any lessons or advice that you would like to share or anything else you would like to add before we move on to Mike?

Kelli Smith:

I think one… Well, two bits of advice. One I see Gerald, who’s an amazing Binghamton alum, had asked a question that I will respond in terms of… you know, to his question as well as yours.

Our first plan was extremely outward facing, transparent, shared with constituents, meetings with deans, so I would have it ready. But also did a little member checking with them before we revealed the official. This last round was really not that way. The team at the time just felt that they really wanted it to be their plan and owned by them.

Our campus is just constantly trying to innovate and do new things and be the best. We’re very excited. We were just listed as a public Ivy by Forbes and an institution with students that employers crave. That kind of thing really drives our institution a lot in part because I think we have pretty decent metrics, but we don’t have the name recognition nationally sometimes, so we’re always trying to do some different things in that regard.

Fortunately, now with our reputation, at least across campus and with students, is pretty strong, so we didn’t feel the need to have to have it be as outwardly facing. And frankly, you all have it, you have what we use, but it’s not anything that we really post terribly publicly. We do post our mission, vision, values everywhere, and we try to have that constantly at the forefront, but we haven’t really… This round, like we did the first time when I was here starting in 2014, really been that outward facing with this last round.

But I will say one other thing. This was something I learned at my first professional job out of grad school around strategic planning, and that was when I was at Georgetown, we really believed, and I saw it in action, that if you don’t dream big and you don’t have it out there on paper and share it with leadership, it’s pretty hard to make it happen. A lot of times it’s so… Yes, go Joyas.

A lot of times it’s very important to have what you might call shovel-ready projects. We always hear about that. But it’s also really important when you have this in your strategic plan, maybe you have a donor that is coming in, not only helps signal how important this work is and what you’re doing to accomplish that work, but it also helps you sort of set that agenda much more. I guess that’s the only other thing I would share.

Meredith Metsker:

Cool. Awesome. Thank you, Kelli. The mission, and values, vision webpage that she mentioned is also linked in that PDF that’s pinned at the top of the chat. Just an FYI.

All right, Mike, we are going to move on to you. I know you all are doing something a little bit different. You kind of approach things a little differently there at Lafayette. I’ll just sort of pose the same question to you. What does your strategic plan look like, and how did you all approach that process?

Mike Summers:

Okay. Well, excellent. Let me set, as Josh and Kelli did, a little bit of a background. What I didn’t share at the beginning is we have 14 staff here in the Gateway career center, which I always tell prospective students and families for a school our size of roughly 2,750 students, that’s quite a support staff for our students.

When I arrived here, have a tremendous staff. Knock on wood, I think we’ve had maybe two turnovers since we’ve been here, and I don’t think we’ve had any turnover in the last five years. I attribute that to them, not me, but I think we’re a really cohesive team and work together a lot. For the first five and a half years that I was here, we were aligned with development. I always say the funny thing, the interesting thing about career centers, is we’re welcomed everywhere but we really don’t fit anywhere. We had a mission, vision, and values for the division, which largely we could see ourselves in to some extent.

But essentially, we were on the island by ourselves. Every year, as I referenced earlier, we would go through and we would set… We had a mission of our own, and we would set our own goals, and we would evaluate, set the strategy, set the goals, and then measure them each and every year. The team did a fantastic job of that through the planning meetings that I just referenced, took place yesterday and the day before.

One of the things, and Josh mentioned this a little bit and Kelli, too, is I really saw it incumbent upon myself as a leader here. I had such a great team that I inherited, but what we didn’t have was we really weren’t seen and the work that was being done here wasn’t really seen widespread by the leadership of the college by our alumni who are so strong and supportive and the board of trustees, all of the people that was there. So, I really saw it as my job and took five to six years to really get out and develop, and build, and nurture those relationships knowing that at some point in time there was going to be an opportunity in there somewhere, or a couple of them.

Under our previous president, we didn’t have a strategic plan. As a college, we had a strategic direction and that strategic direction, anything that I’m criticizing, but it was affordability and distinction through growth. It’s hard to see the career center in that strategic direction. In building those relationships over that five years that I referenced, we also shifted about a year ago out of development into student life, and it’s been a nice integration into student life to try and get closer to the student with the work we do.

Well, that five or plus years of building those relationships really started to pay off under our new president who just completed her third year. We’re in the middle of a massive campus master plan project, as well as a college strategic plan for the first time since 2007. We developed, or the steering committee of the college developed, five themes or thematic areas that will become the strategic plan of the college. One of those working groups I was actually invited to be a participant on. And as a result of that, we just presented our work, which is why I can’t share anything with you in writing yet, but will once it’s finalized and signed off, was part of that as experiential learning, internships, externships, job shadows, experiential learning for students that will actually have a monetary dollar amount recommended to the steering committee. There’s not a single doubt in my mind that had we not been, me as a leader and my team doing the great work they were doing, been invited, number one, to be sitting at that table to even have that opportunity to make that significant ask in that strategic plan moving forward.

As we started to do that, the timing was really serendipitous in that we started to come into our strategic planning in the last couple of days. Now we’ve got the college that’s going to have five thematic areas, so we developed our new mission and our departmental priorities up against those five themes or thematic areas of the college so that we get to set those departmental priorities not just on an island by ourselves, but really in alignment with what will be the direction of the college for many, many years to come. And by creating those departmental priorities under those five themes, it ensures that we can do what I think is really essential today, period, but especially career centers, is create the ability for us to be very nimble and be able to change from year to year as everything is changing so fast.

What I didn’t mention is as a part of our planning process, Josh and Kelli referred how important it is for the team to be a part of this planning and to own it because they’re the ones who execute it. Our two days of planning are split up between my employer relations team meets individually on day one, the counseling and coaching team meets individually on day one. They work on their year-in-reviews, start to develop their goals this year against those five thematic areas, and then in day two we come together. And when we come together, we start to share those, encapsulate them all under one document, this discuss, challenge, iterated, all of that happens in that second day that allows us to come out of that with… Not in its totality, as I always say, it’s in pencil at that point, but we’ve got a lot of our goals and strategies for this next year down on that paper.

What’s so exciting about this year and what makes it a little bit different is we’re not on that island by ourself anymore. We’re now aligning that to the strategic themes of the college, which to Kelli’s point as well, I think will set us up much better not only for us to be in alignment with where the college is going in terms of its direction but will also allow us to be a part of the campaign that will follow and the dollar and the fundraising that will take place to make some of these things that we’re trying to support underneath there a reality.

I really am as probably as excited as I’ve ever been around the great work that’s always happened in this team working together, but I feel like it’s much more cohesive, much more in alignment, and will allow us the opportunity to be nimble and go in the direction we must go to support our students. As they say, if we keep students as our north star, they’re the center of everything that we do, we will make the right decision. It also gives us that permission now with those thematic areas to say no to things that don’t align with that. I think that’s also something that’s really, really important because it’s easy to say yes to a lot of things when you don’t have a clear set strategy and direction, and I think we will have as solid and concrete one as we’ve had in my six years here going into this next year and it’s really, really exciting.

That’s a little bit about the serendipitous timing that’s coming together in this year for us and the Gateway Career Center here at Lafayette. It’s a little bit about what we’re doing here around strategic planning. It’s very, very exciting.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, yeah, sounds like it. You’ll have to definitely share your plan once you guys get it all finalized.

Mike Summers:

Absolutely.

Meredith Metsker:

I’m sure lots of folks here will be excited to see that. Mike, I’ll kind of pose the same question that I shared with Josh and Kelli in that, what are some lessons that you and your team learned or have been learning in this process? Just any advice, any lessons you want to share or just anything else you’d like to add?

Mike Summers:

Yeah. I mentioned it at the beginning of my talking points a little bit. I think building relationships, and that’s with faculty, with administration, with board of trustees, I think that’s where you get your support. That’s also where your roadblocks are.

One of the things that has happened for me, in all candor, I think board of trustees are easier for me, administration’s a little easier, faculties tends to be the tough one sometimes. In building those relationships, I’ve now been extended an ongoing invitation to attend faculty meetings. I think the extent to which you can get in with the other stakeholders across the campus and as well as your alumni, that’s where you’ll get your support that will allow you to bring your strategic planning and goals to life and support and bring the resources to bear that will allow you to accomplish those. I think that’s critically important, and that would be one piece of advice that I would have.

And the other, and both Josh and Kelli said this, it’s about the team. I said you get the right players around the table and in the right seats, they’re the ones that will ultimately do the work. I think then it becomes, number one, they own it coming out of it. Then number two, you become that support and guiding star to get them the resources they need to be successful. Then, when they feel supported, they become more invested. And as they’re more invested, the likelihood of the success being even higher is right there at your fingertips. That’d be a couple pieces of advice that I would give.

Meredith Metsker:

Awesome. Great. Well, thank you, Mike. And thank you, all the panelists, for all that great information. I just want to say here at uConnect we are so proud to work with all of you, and you’ve all been longtime partners of ours. It’s just cool to hear how you all approach strategic planning. I know uConnect plays a role in all of your strategic plans in terms of how you engage students and engage all the other stakeholders in the ecosystems you’re trying to reach.

On that note, before I transition into audience Q&A here in a sec, if any of you watching the webinar today would be interested in continuing the conversation and learning more about how uConnect can fit into your strategic plan, can help you engage more students, like it’s helped all of these folks, please fill out the form in the chat. My colleague Ashley Safranski will drop the link. Do that in the chat here shortly.

While folks are doing that, I will go ahead and kick off the audience Q&A. We’ll get to as many questions as we can. But if there’s any that we don’t get to, we’ll put them in the comments in the post in the community after this and, again, continue that conversation.

The first question is coming from… Let’s see. It says, “How does leadership course correct a proposal if the feedback and proposed direction is not necessarily aligned with the higher level direction or needs?” I’ll pose that to all of you. Feel free to jump in. A good question.

Josh Domitrovich:

I want to underscore a comment that Mike made that I think is critical when we think about planning. If you heard Mike, the work that went into strategic planning happened years ago. It’s relationship development. It’s getting into rooms and having conversations with a lot of people. I think for us at Penn West, that was so critical to ensure that I’m able to present what the team wants to do out and cast that so people can understand it, and it allows me to quickly do an analysis of where that might fall on other people’s priorities in different divisions. So that way when we do present a plan, it’s already been out there in its own way and I’ve already been receiving feedback along the way, if that makes sense.

I think that’s part of this discussion. It’s getting out there, having conversations. We call it a listening tour. We go around and we have conversations. We truly try to understand what’s going on there to help it inform our decision so that when I take it to the provost, who’s my boss now, I already know what he’s going to tell me because we already had the conversation or where the hang-ups might be. But if it were to happen and there were to be something that maybe needs to be course corrected… We just always make sure that any decision that we make is backed by some significant amount of data or that there’s a significant amount of rationale as to why we’re proposing the plan and how it aligns with everything else that’s going on at the institution to try to make it as bulletproof as possible.

But what I have found to happen, it’s not questioning what we present, it’s, “Oh, by the way, what about this? Have you thought about adding this to your plan?” That happens more to us than it is disagreement in a way. It’s more of, “We really want to go in this direction, too. How can you help do that? Does that fit in your plan?”

The other point that I’ll underscore that Mike said was the term that we… or the saying that we say in our office, “Learn how to strategically say yes,” which is essentially saying learn how to say no. So when people are coming to you, we have to really be intentional with what we say yes to now more than ever.

It’s funny, we have 11,000 students. We only have eight staff. And you can compare that to the colleagues on the screen. So better or worse, it doesn’t matter, but there’s work that’s involved that our team has to spread across that we have to be really smart with what we agreed to. It’s just the way that we are. In a budget turbulent environment that we’re in, that’s the reason we integrate it. So, it’s so critical that we’re smart with what we choose to do. That’s my take on it. Oh, you’re muted, Mike.

Mike Summers:

I’ve only been in higher education, gosh, almost nine years. But I would say in my nine years, historically, we are great at saying yes to new things and not letting go of any old things. It’s also giving your staff permission to say no or not now, I think. And knowing that you’ll sort of be that protector for them to be able to do that, and it allows you, I think, ultimately, once that muscle starts to develop in them to be able to say, “No, I don’t think we should do that because it doesn’t align with that priority. It doesn’t drive that initiative.” That muscle grows, and I think you not only get deeper engagement from your staff, you get really good, insightful, concrete goals and objectives that you go after that you can then defend.

Josh, as you’re talking about, you have the data that defends what you do, and you’re able to say that, I assume. But it’s a muscle that has to be developed because it’s one that I don’t think… It’s either been non-existent or atrophied because I think sometimes we’re fearful of doing that, but giving your staff permission to say no or strategically say yes. I like that, Josh. That’s a much more positive way to say it. But that’s one thing that I’ve really tried to work on over the six years plus I’ve been here.

Josh Domitrovich:

That muscle memory is so important for our team. The amount of the time that I had to spend with the team to say it’s okay that you say… Right?

Mike Summers:

Mm-hmm.

Josh Domitrovich:

You don’t have to say yes to that or why did you say yes to that? It was like a complete culture shock for them that I was coming to them and saying, “Why did you say yes?” because they just felt they had to. So, I would agree with Mike. That was such a good point, Mike.

Kelli Smith:

I will just add on to what you’re saying. That’s the tricky balance. I feel like that many times… I mean, whether you’ve been in the field in higher ed nine years or 30, I feel like we are terrible about saying no to things.

I’ll give an example. Last summer, I created a Google Doc for people to anonymously, and all three of my teams, to throw out ideas of put out to pasture, so things that we don’t any longer feel like make sense or that we want to do. I got one sort of idea and then one sort of commentary. And that’s among a team of, I don’t know, at least 45 people at the time.

In part, it’s a challenge because we often get to a point where we’re hiring people that are high performers that want to be excellent, we want to be the best at things. Sometimes it’s also you having to work with your team members to, much like what you were saying, “I know you love this project, but are we getting the ROI on it that makes sense?” At the same time, the balance that’s tricky is that, I think historically… And sometimes we’ve stepped into organizations where this was the reputation of if you are tending to worry so much about boundaries, and so much about saying no, and not being able to at least strategically say yes for certain things, you get into a really difficult situation.

For me, I guess your original question, Meredith, I mean, I would hope we wouldn’t have anything that is really not in alignment. It might be a little different or a little different take, but one of the things I really love to do is if I hear that, “Oh, the Provost really is thinking that an FYE program is something we need to bolster,” well, let’s hook onto that, right? It might not be in the strategic plan of the university, but we know we’d have a champion.

Another mantra when I very first started was let’s focus on the champions, and it’s true of strategic planning as well. Find the people within your university community and sphere, and sometimes that’s alumni, to help champion some of these ideas and elevate them, celebrate them. That’s, I guess, the only other thing I would add to what was already said.

Meredith Metsker:

Awesome. Great answers. Thanks, team. I will go to the next question, which is from Gerald Pang, so our distinguished Binghamton alum here. He asked, “At what point do you integrate feedback from campus community and constituents into your strategic plan?”

Kelli Smith:

Can you repeat that? I’m sorry, Meredith. I was looking also at the chat.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, he asked, “At what point do you integrate feedback from the campus community and constituents into your strategic plan?

Kelli Smith:

Well, just quickly, my answer is very quick. Again, it’s going to depend on the point in time where you’re at, at least for us and the way we did it. The first round when we were a lot more external, we did a lot of work around the strategic plan, both within our team, but also working with my vice president and a few other key players.

But then, before it was finalized, before it was going to be published on paper or on our website, did a round with different individuals across campus to really do what I just call member checking and just saying, “What do you think? Do you see anything missing? Do you see anything off?” And we didn’t do that. The team chose to not really do that as much last time, and there’s good and bad with that. We do have one item that one of our partner offices has kind of said, “Well, what about…” And it’s already kind of out there and published, so it makes it pretty tricky.

So, I do tend to believe that it’s very important. But again, where the team was at the time, they just really felt like they had to take something and own it and go forth. But I would say definitely at least some point before anything is published, but it’s very good to do some different, whether it’s survey, input, “What things do you think we need to focus on?” When I initially did my rounds with deans when I first got here, kind of asking them what their perceptions are and you can really use and leverage that when you have other people bringing things up. And then you’re going to have a lot more credibility, I think, oftentimes in your plan when that input is there from the beginning. There’s, of course, a multitude of ways to get input. But doing that also in the beginning and helping sometimes inform the team on what perceptions are from students, peers, employers, alumni, it’s really, really helpful. Sometimes we have our own blind spots.

Josh Domitrovich:

Yeah, Meredith, I don’t want to add too much because I think Kelli covered really a good section of it. But what I would say is, Gerald, to answer that, be careful with the feedback that you receive and who you ask it from. Because I think you could ask for feedback from a lot of different people, but if you don’t trust those people or those people have no idea what you do anyway, did that really matter when you ask for the feedback? Be intentional with why you’re asking for the feedback, whom you’re asking to the feedback from. That’s not to say people are bad at this place, it’s just in general it’s really important that you know who you should go ask information to.

For example, when we have our plan, like 75% of the way, we have a career readiness committee on campus that I created where there’s a faculty member from each academic department and program that sit on it. They volunteered to sit on it. That’s the group I go to first because they’re the ones who wanted to be a part of the career journey, so they’re my first outlet. Then from there, it’s deans and others or some staff members that might engage in student affairs. I would say ask why do you want the feedback and who are the right people to get the feedback from, and then let that drive the potential change that might happen to your plan. That’d be my only asterisk on what Kelli said.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, I think that’s a great point. It’s always hard to create something by committee, as they say. All right. Well, we are a minute away from time, so I think I’ll cut the Q&A off here. For those of you who put questions in the chat, thank you. I will post those as comments again on that post that I’m going to put in the community shortly after this so we can keep the conversation going each… I’ll have each question be at the comments so we can just answer those questions in the thread. Again, if you think of more questions later on, again, put those in the comments on that post.

But, just thank you, everyone, for joining us today. I hope this was helpful and you’re walking away with some inspiration and new ideas heading into the summer. And a huge thank you especially to our three panelists. Josh, Kelli, Mike, just thank you all so much for taking the time to be here and share your expertise. We really appreciate it, and I know the audience appreciates it, too.

So again, thank you, everyone, for joining. If you’re going to NACE next week, I will see you there. I think Mike and Kelli will also see you there. Unfortunately, we’ll miss Josh, but maybe next year. But yes, thank you all again, and have a good weekend.