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- Jun 19, 2018
Social Innovation for the Future of College Career Education (Part 2): Lessons from Early Social Inn
I gravitate toward everyday leaders who are trying to be courageous in the way they lead. I get the joy of hearing their stories and helping many of them in the university career services field. I am grateful, and inspired often. To me, leadership courage is humble boldness in the face of uncertainty, fear, or unpopular notions. Courage almost always comes about because of multi-dimensional personal or societal problems, and is usually employed for some sort of freedom. St
- Oct 16, 2017
Bridge to a Dream Job
As we host our BIG Dream Gatherings on university campuses around the country… we inspire students to think about and clarify their big dreams and goals. As a result, I get a lot of questions about identifying and attaining dream jobs. I often surprise students when we start to discuss this topic because I’m quick to say their next job probably won’t be a Dream Job. In fact, I let them know that if they truly want to go after a Dream Job… they’re probably first going to need
- 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
- Sep 27, 2017
Scaling Career Services (Part 5 of 7) Hooking into The Campus Ecosystem
Partnering on a Program (with 1-2 other offices) was the career services trend of the 90's and early 2000's that really shaped how we connect with the campus. Today, the pressures and needs have evolved, and partnering, while still good, can only go so far. Many are taking it a step further and hooking into the campus ecosystem in various ways. This can lead to scaled impact. The picture for this post is one I took on a family trip up to Bear Lake in Rocky Mountain National P
- Sep 7, 2017
Resourceful as an Entrepreneur: Hidden Budget and Resources for Career Centers
It was a beautiful morning walking into the Denver Center at Colorado State University. Coffee in hand, laptops closed, mind ready for expansion, thirty-five leaders in career education and technology settled in to discuss how we scale what we do. Entrepreneurs are obsessed with scale. Our credo is to find a problem, test a solution, determine if it's repeatable, and scale it. One of the most discussed limitations of scale in the startup community is access to capital. “If on
- Aug 7, 2017
Doubling Down on the Impossible
In June, the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) held its annual conference in Las Vegas, NV. I saw colleagues lose $50 at the slots and others win $150 at the blackjack tables. Still others, myself included, stayed away from the casino’s flashing lights and ringing bells because we wanted to avoid losing money – and the subsequent explanation to our spouses. Recently I began reading Michael Lewis’s book, The Undoing Project, and learned about Amos Tversky
- Jun 12, 2017
Rising Above the Internal Challenges of Leadership
For the past six months since the Career Leadership Collective launched, I have been reading pieces from amazing leaders. I have read or watched content about re-imagining career services, trust, cultures of innovation, the art of wow, disruption, and employability. I wrote my own piece as well on fighting for your vision and team. Yet as I read each piece, I can’t help but feel the weight of the people I am tasked to lead and also the people that I serve or work within the U
- May 31, 2017
Up, Down, Sideways: The Unique Mid-Manager Role in Career Services
This post is a recap of our live video Accelerator that took place on May 15, 2017. If you are interested in a stimulating staff training video for mid-managers on your campus, or if you prefer seeing and hearing from people in a high impact, authentic, and inspiring way, you can access a recording of the live Accelerator. Mid-level managers in career services have a voluminous and strategic role that serves as the essential pivot between an office's vision and operational e
- 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 17, 2017
3 Mindset Shifts to help New Career Services Staff Succeed
Beginning a new job can be charged with an odd combination of excitement, fear, and anxiety. You’re pumped to start this chapter of your professional life. You’re scared of all the new stuff you’ll be required to learn. You’re worried about fitting in (or worried that your boss is worried), catching on quickly, and excelling in your role. These feelings are all completely normal. While you probably won’t be able to extinguish all of them in your first week or month, you can m
- Mar 23, 2017
Anytime Access gets Personal
It's fresh in my mind; the big question that shaped our future growth. Three or so years ago we were in the midst of a career staff retreat activity that had us thoughtfully studying a large wall where we had placed 63 career learning topics under 4 categories. We decided to shrink the number of topics to only the essentials for student career learning. Over the next 6 months, we valiantly argued the list down to 51 topics. Still quite voluminous. The Big Question What stoo
- 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 15, 2017
The Era of Disruption
The language of jarring change is all around us—from dramatic start-ups in the emerging sharing economy, to risks associated with the tech bubble, to a political climate steeped in the language of shock value. And this language has found its way into our own vocabulary as career services and recruiting practitioners. Just binge watch your way through the early seasons of Mike Judge’s HBO comedy, Silicon Valley, and you can count the words that have quietly, sometimes noisil
- Feb 14, 2017
Beware of the Success Assumption
Whenever I’m leading discussions on recruitment, retention and engagement of new employees, I often caution leaders and organizations to “Beware of the Success Assumption.” I offer the same warning to college students who are preparing to enter the workforce. Beware of the Success Assumption. It’s dangerous. It’s subtle. It tends to be in our blind spot. The Success Assumption can hurt a leader’s ability to connect with a team member or employee. It can also hurt a new emplo
- Feb 8, 2017
The Growth-Mindset Workplace, Part III: Purposeful Training and Development
It was August, 1995. A freshly minted college graduate, I had just accepted a job as a public-school teacher and was attending my first professional development training program the week before classes started. I sat in the auditorium with an optimistic attitude as the first workshop began, all the more so since the topic was “Leading Dynamic Classroom Discussions,” the hired speaker a noted expert on the topic. I spent the next 3 hours listening to someone lecture on how to
- Jan 31, 2017
The Daring Needs of Career Services Today
On January 1, 2017, The Career Leadership Collective was born out of what we hypothesized was a large stirring around the globe for fresh career services and innovative leadership. At the risk of sounding like a college student, we were freakin' blown away to see over 3,500 people engage The Collective over 12,500 times in under a month; to see well over 100 personal emails from colleagues in nearly every US state, Canada, Australia, The Netherlands, South Africa, The UK and
- Jan 30, 2017
No is the New Gritty
Grit, according to Duckworth, Peterson, Matthews, and Kelly (2007) is a positive non-cognitive trait based on an individual's passion for a particular long-term goal or end state, coupled with a powerful motivation to achieve their set objective. Through perseverance, gritty individuals overcome and achieve goals despite obstacles or challenges. Plainly stated, grit distinguishes individuals who can accomplish more than the average person. This definition of grit is individua
- Jan 18, 2017
Shifting from a Scarcity Mindset to an Opportunity Mindset
Many institutions have responded unproductively to economic scarcity in recent years—often by freezing in place. Institutions have reduced spending, streamlined inefficient practices and shelved futuristic plans, in effect trying to do the same work with fewer people and fewer dollars. I don’t mean to sugar coat or deny problems. The lack of investment capital or any number of other critical resources presents real and difficult challenges, leaving institutions with hard choi