Activating the Campus Ecosystem

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Rose Nakamoto

Director, Career Center

Santa Clara University

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Jennifer Ferrari

Associate Director, Career Center

Santa Clara University

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Given that student career development has not been elevated as an institutional priority nor was it resourced to be integrated into the student educational experience, SCU’s Career Center was inspired to look differently at how to support and meet the needs of all students and stakeholders.​Our new mission is future-oriented, student-driven and community-centered. With a focus on scaling our work in meaningful ways while maintaining the high-touch, customizable support that students seek, one new strategic priority was to focus on creating a coordinated campus network in support of student career development. Our presentation will highlight the launch of our Career Influencers Network and showcase the process from concept to implementation while considering the context of our campus culture. This initiative represented a significant internal identity and mindset shift for our team as well as how the Career Center’s impact and role is perceived on our campus.

We Care About What We Measure

Karyn McCoy

AVP, Career Center

DePaul University

Sharisse Grannan

Assessment, Career Center

DePaul University

If we truly want to understand how we impact the career readiness of our students, we have to think beyond traditional utilization and attendance numbers since improving utilization numbers does not necessarily correspond to improved career readiness. We need to challenge ourselves to explore metrics related to things like confidence, excitement, anxiety and optimism. None of these are easy to measure; however if we only measure what’s easy, we only improve what’s easy. At DePaul University, we are pushing ourselves to go beyond historical measures of career services. We employed a theory of change process to identify a set of connected outcomes upon which we can design programs and services that enable us to achieve our desired goals. This session will outline practical ways to understand career services’ impact beyond just utilization and will focus on how we are measuring things like optimism, confidence and overall career readiness so that we can engage students in more productive and impactful ways. Ultimately, we will discuss how we hope to be able to show the relationship between reduced anxiety, increased confidence levels, and better career outcomes.

Holistic Approach to Applying Social Justice to Student Career Development

Carol Lwali

Associate Director, External Relations 

Seattle University

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Leezel Ramos

Associate Director, Career Education

Seattle University

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The Career Engagement Office team used a three-prong approach to fulfill the mission of Seattle University, “dedicated to educating the whole person, to professional formation, and to developing leaders for a just and humane world.” This presentation will outline the context, conditions, and action steps taken to achieve student learning (Inclusion & Industry Takeover), employer learning (Engaged Employer Symposium), and operationalizing self-accountability (onboarding and ongoing training for career center staff).

Presenters will describe the level of social justice understanding needed to strengthen the impact of student career development programs and services and highlight readily accessible tools and articles that audience members can adapt into their own practice.

Building Campus Partnerships to Collectively Tell the Story of the Career Pathways and Mobility of our Graduates

Becky Hall

Director, Career Services Administration

University of Minnesota Twin Cities

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Dr. Ronald Huesman

Interim Director of the Office of Institutional Research,

University of Minnesota Twin Cities

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The University of Minnesota has made significant strides over the past four years in its first-destination data collections process to tell a more consistent, comprehensive employment and graduate school admissions outcomes story of its recent graduates. These data were new for some colleges, and response rates increased significantly for other colleges with historically low response rates. This initiative was identified as a first, critical step to fill a data gap identified by a task force comprised of leaders in Career Services, the Alumni Association, our Foundation, and Institutional Analysis. With such success, colleges soon began to ask questions about our 5- and / or 10-year alumni career outcomes. This mirrored the next critical step identified by the same leadership task force who’d supported the initiative to fill the gaps in our first-destination data. At the three-year mark, as we began to explore options to gather data on 5-year out alumni, the Career Leadership Collective announced its NACM Survey initiative.

Through a comprehensive needs analysis across our University and engagement with the Collective’s survey team, we partnered with the Collective in its pilot year for NACM. This initiative has the support of senior university leadership and has been rolled out across our five-campus system. 

Hitting the “Mark”: How universities and employers can creatively meet common goals for college recruiting and diversity / inclusion strategies

Seanice Austin

Director, Office of Diversity and Inclusion 

University of Connecticut

School of Business

Kathy Hendrickson

Director, Business Career Development Office

University of Connecticut

School of Business

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Mark Twain, one of CT's most famous literary icons, humorist and entrepreneur, famously said that “The man with a new idea is a crank, until the idea succeeds.” The Directors of UConn Business Career Development and the UConn Business Diversity/ Inclusion will share three creative college-to career programs that have been highly successful in helping employers hit their mark on college recruiting while building college-to-career pipelines for underrepresented students. The goals of this workshop session are to identify new ways to partner with universities and employers to identify recruitment goals and then to establish creative sustainable programs.

Using three core tenets of College Access and Support, Career Exposure and Networking/Professional Development strategies, attendees will walk away with ideas along with data to back up the success. Attendees will be invited to explore innovative partnerships with a lens on providing career development and placement of underrepresented students in a manner that is inclusive of the career development of students of all majors. The three programs outlined have elements of success for all students and are focused on the continuum from freshman to senior levels.

Scaling career curriculum to maximize student learning and staff time

Dr. Rachel Larsen

Assistant Dean of Academic and Career Development, College of Business

University of Nebraska Lincoln

Janessa Hageman

Assistant Director, Career Development, College of Business

University of Nebraska Lincoln

Whether you are teaching eight students or 800, career courses can be taxing on staff. To enhance the quality of the student experience and ensure learning, instructors frequently expend significant time, effort, and resources teaching at the expense of other responsibilities.

The University of Nebraska-Lincoln Business Career Center knows these challenges well. With nine staff teaching approximately 3,000 students yearly, the teaching burden was substantial even before significant enrollment increases. In order to scale career curriculum, we developed and implemented innovative strategies to enhance student engagement and learning while simultaneously maximizing time and resources, including 1) policies/procedures, 2) email/feedback banks, 3) student issue spreadsheets, and 4) peer career coaches.

These simple yet effective approaches provided solutions to the staff’s teaching burden and inspired a rich learning experience for students that still felt individualized. Students reported significant increases in abilities to write a resume (60%), create a LinkedIn profile (40%), interview (20%), and write a cover letter (36%) based on pre- and post-test longitudinal analyses. Employers also reacted positively, rating 98% of students’ resumes as ready/almost ready, and 96% of students as interview ready/almost ready. Staff reported feeling less stressed as scaled approaches limited repetitive tasks and allowed staff to focus on more impactful initiatives. In this session, we will explore best practices that support both students and instructors to help career centers maximize staff time, increase student learning, and think through scaling strategies that can be applied to any institution’s career courses regardless of class size.

Change, Scale, and Leading a Paradigm Shift

Cindy Parnell

Executive Director, Career and Professional Development Services

Arizona State University

Dr. Joanna Lucio

Associate Professor and Associate Dean of Student and Academic Affairs, 
Watts College of Public Service and Community Solutions 

Arizona State University

Dr. Megan Workmon Larsen

Director of Student Engagement, Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts,

Arizona State University

The old way of doing business is out the door! Thinking that students should be served by walking into a physical career center space, to receive services face-to-face, for one-hour by a Master-level professional staff member is out dated, not scalable and risks our students slipping through the cracks of a traditional model. At ASU, we’ve disrupted our ‘old way of doing business’ by owning and driving the philosophy that career services is a ‘presence,’ more than a ‘place,’ that permeates the ASU eco-system and full student experience.

Join Cindy Parnell, Executive Director of ASU’s Career and Professional Development Services, as she facilitates a conversation with two campus stakeholders: Joanna Lucio, Ph.D.-Associate Dean & Associate Professor for ASU’s Watts College of Public Service & Community Solutions and Megan Workmon, Ed.D.-Director of Student Engagement for ASU's Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts. Watts College and Herberger represent some of the most diverse student populations at ASU, admit the most first-generation students at ASU and represent the full socio-economic spectrum of students from the nation.

Redefining career services was a must for fully supporting students in their career development journey at ASU and our two panelists have been key drivers for change in their respective colleges. Join us for a thought provoking and engaging conversation about change, scale and leading a paradigm shift at the largest public research-one University in the nation – Arizona State University.