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- May 28, 2019
10 Tips for Building Your Career Services Dream Team
Let’s be honest…working in Career Services can be tough. We simultaneously balance preparing our students to thrive in the 21st Century workforce, persisting in the goal-driven environment that is higher education, and nurturing collaborative partnerships across the entirety of our campuses. We need to be surrounded by the best, and to keep them engaged. So how do we as leaders recruit and retain our “Dream Teams”? Last week a friend and frequent collaborator left the univers
- Feb 20, 2018
Iterate or Eliminate: Making Courageous Choices in Moving your Career Center Forward
There are two common operational pain points that usually stand out in neon lights as I interact with career center teams. In fact they have been around for quite some time, but in this era of change and growth, they are becoming more prominent. Our volume of work is high - often overwhelming We stink at saying no - this perpetuates #1 If this is you, don't feel guilty, feel normal. But the time is now for a new normal. And many are figuring out the amazing benefits of co
- Jan 22, 2018
The Strategic Risk Skillset for Career Center Growth
Starbucks. Netflix. Twenty years ago, who would have thought you would pay $5 for a cup of coffee and access all your favorite TV shows and movies online? If you had recognized how these companies’ innovation would transform our world, you may have taken a risk and invested in their stocks. In fact, if you had invested $1,000 in Netflix just 10 years ago, you would be rewarded handsomely to the tune of over $50,000 today! Yet very few of us are willing to take the risk and in
- Nov 8, 2017
Scaling Career Services (Part 6 of 7): Embracing Change as a Staff
There was an elephant in the room during our Summer 2017 Think Tanks on Scaling Career Services. We saw it coming and spoke directly to it in multiple ways. I think you probably know this elephant quite well...its your Career Center staff team. A well led change process with an agile and committed staff can yield incredible results. But that is not easy to do. It takes a lot of group dialogue and understanding, a good amount of iterating, and knowing that change is more tha
- Oct 5, 2017
The Power of Outside Perspective for Career Services
How many times have you heard the phrase during a search “she/he does not have experience in Career Services or a higher education background”? Alternatively, “how could they possibly understand what we do at our office or institution”? In 2013, Inside Higher Ed published an article urging Career Services to transform the model, going so far as to title the piece, Career Services Must Die. They referenced Andy Chan from Wake Forest, along with other thought leaders and id
- Jul 17, 2017
Solving the Talent Shortage in Career Services: Leadership for Organizational Effectiveness
There’s a leadership shortage in higher education and career services departments are not immune to this shortage. Though we spend countless hours talking about the need for talented, innovative, change agents, it appears little is being done to actually identify, hire and retain these superstars. How can career services do their part to change this? A basic search on higheredjobs.com yields hundreds of vacant leadership positions across the US. Today alone, I counted over 80
- May 18, 2017
Values and Culture: Getting it Right is the Only Shot You Have at Innovation in Your Career Center
Every organization strives to be innovative these days – it’s become an imperative. Innovation is taught, written about in scholarly journals and lectured about. It’s on everyone’s minds. A Google search delivers nearly 50 million returns to the question “where does innovation come from?” Where, indeed; and let’s face it -- higher education is much better at teaching innovation than implementing it. The world of work has changed, and we must, in turn, change how we view our r
- Apr 3, 2017
Replacing “Services” with “Engagement”
What happens when a Research I university granting almost 7,000 bachelor’s degrees each year commits that every undergraduate, regardless of major, will experience learning that makes their studies relevant to their career aspirations, allows that student to start to make a mark on the world while still in college, and develops the skills most valued in the world of work? At the University of Arizona, we’ve implemented 100% Engagement, now in its second year of operation, to
- Mar 3, 2017
Employee Engagement in Career Services: A Preliminary Analysis
The concept of employee engagement is fairly ubiquitous in 2017. A simple Google search presents around 10 million results on the subject, and among those results are numerous studies, white papers, reports, and opinions. The concept was first applied to the workplace by William Kahn in 1990, who argued that engagement was the “extent to which people employ physical, cognitive, and emotional degrees of themselves during work-role performances”. Since that time the concept
- Feb 17, 2017
Build a Team on Purpose: How to Instill Belief
Do you and your team know your purpose or do you believe it? Understanding the difference is critical to building a purposeful team. You've most likely heard this story before. John F. Kennedy was about to give a huge speech to inspire the nation to rally behind the Apollo missions. While he prepared in one of the hangars at NASA he took a wrong turn and found himself in a janitors' closet. Inside, he saw a janitor cleaning his mop. "Hey," said JFK., "What do you do here?" Wi
- Feb 6, 2017
The Art of the Wow!
When was the last time you walked into a space and felt truly inspired? Or had your thoughts and ideas transformed? Or thought to yourself, “Wow, these people really like each other and love what they do…I can’t wait to come back!”? At Toppel, we are all about creating wow moments and celebrations that aren’t typically associated with a university career center. Why? For those of you who know anything about me, you know that one of my passions is talking about organizational