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- Sep 25, 2018
The Fast Track to Career Services Director: An Interview with Brandon Wright
We have met many individuals in the world of University Career Services who wish to become the Director a career office someday. So has Brandon Wright. So DID Brandon Wright...and fast! Brandon received his bachelors in 2010, his masters in 2012, and has been in the career services field for 6.5 years, having two Director roles in the last 3.5 years, most recently as the new Director of the UAB Career Center at The University of Alabama at Birmingham. Brandon accelerated to D
- 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
- 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
- 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
- Jun 26, 2017
The Case for Organizational Capacity
Already Restructured, Leveraged Technology, and Developed Hybrid Staffing Models – Now What? Leading change in the past Many leaders have experience restructuring offices, leveraging technology and developing hybrid staffing models. The majority of offices extend their reach with combination of volunteers, peer advisors, student and graduate assistants, executives in residence, employers and contract staff in addition to our own full time staff. Often these efforts are more
- 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
- 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 13, 2017
New Staff in Career Services
Evaluating and honing our staff competencies is at the heart of any re-imagine effort. In Part 3, our final video on How to Re-Imagine Career Services, sponsored by PeopleGrove and Handshake, Jeremy Podany, Founder of The Collective, sat down with Christine Cruzvergara, Associate Provost and Executive Director of Career Education at Wellesley College, to unpack the role of new staff in leading massive change. The following questions highlight themes from Part 3 that you migh
- Mar 6, 2017
Ecosystem Integration in Career Services
The ability to successfully integrate into the campus ecosystem may be the single biggest game-changer for career services today. In Part 2 of How to Re-Imagine Career Services, sponsored by PeopleGrove and Handshake, Jeremy Podany, Founder of The Collective, sat down with Christine Cruzvergara, Associate Provost and Executive Director of Career Education at Wellesley College, to unpack what it's like to lead massive change. The following questions highlight themes from Part
- 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 27, 2017
Leading a Re-Imagine Effort in Career Services
The Collective is truly delighted to announce the first video in our three-part video series on How to Re-Imagine Career Services, sponsored by PeopleGrove and Handshake. Jeremy Podany, Founder of The Collective, sat down with Christine Cruzvergara, Associate Provost and Executive Director of Career Education at Wellesley College, to unpack what it's like to lead massive change. The series is broken into three important topics: Leading a Re-Imagine Effort Ecosystem Integrati
- 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 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 25, 2017
The Growth-Mindset Workplace, Part II: Embracing a 360 Mindset
We also recommend reading Part 1 of The Growth Mindset Workplace series. My freshman year in college, I was required to take an entrance exam to determine my placement in math and English courses. The results confirmed my long held belief that I was smart in English and dumb in math. How dumb, you ask? Well, let’s just say that the class they stuck me in started out with a review of fractions. Seriously, fractions. Since the 5th grade, I had struggled in my math classes—all w
- Jan 17, 2017
Check Your Bias at the Career Center Door
The career services profession currently lacks adequate training opportunities for working with diverse student populations. As a result, career services professionals may carry with them un-examined implicit biases, unknowingly doing harm to underrepresented students. Diverse career center staff often find themselves pigeonholed, assigned to liaise only with student groups whose ethnic identity they share. Too often as leaders, we unconsciously hire staff that look like us,
- Jan 12, 2017
Fighting for Your Vision & Team
I started thinking about this topic about 10 years ago when I was a newly minted associate director. I was trying to figure out our office’s role on our campus. I was trying to understand why our team was a footnote on the student experience and maybe not as relevant as we could be to the work being done in student affairs, advancement or within academics. We were going through a leadership transition of huge proportions at the institution and there was an opportunity. A wind
- Jan 6, 2017
The BIG lie about TRUST
Nobody comes to the discussion on trust empty handed. We all have strong feelings about it. We know how it feels when trust is misused, betrayed, or withheld. Our perspectives are real and have been informed by a lifetime of experiences, pain and broken relationships. Sometimes these conclusions are helpful and sometimes they hold us hostage. Over the years I’ve come to a surprising conclusion: our most popular theories about trust are often untrue and almost always unhelpful
- Jan 5, 2017
Creating a Culture of Innovation
We’ve all heard the cliché that there is no i in team. However, there are two of them in innovation, and to do our best work, we need all staff members to understand how they are an important part of the innovation process. Creating a culture of innovation is vital for those seeking to move their office forward. Unfortunately the word innovation can conjure up competing perceptions of either a useless corporate buzzword or a solo, untouchable leader. Neither of these stere
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