career everywhere

Joe Testani, Deputy to the President and former Associate Vice Provost for Career Education Initiatives at the University of Rochester, talks in this episode about how career services (and higher ed in general) can better partner with education technology vendors.

Before taking on his new high-level role as Deputy to the President in 2022, Joe worked in career services for over 20 years and implemented dozens of EdTech tools at the University of Rochester, Virginia Commonwealth University, University of Richmond, Yale, and more. He’s also served as an advisor for several EdTech companies.

In this episode, Joe discusses the current gap between the industries of higher ed and EdTech and how both sides can bridge the gap. He also shares his process for researching and evaluating a new EdTech vendor and what he looks for in terms of mission, product viability, customer service and support, etc.

Joe offers his best advice for getting buy-in to make a new technology purchase and working a recurring line item for technology into a career center’s annual operating budget. He then also digs into his most successful strategies for implementing EdTech and getting the most out of each tool.

Resources from the episode:

• Joe’s LinkedIn profile
• University of Rochester’s virtual career center (powered by uConnect)

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Christian Garcia, Associate Dean and Executive Director of the Toppel Career Center at the University of Miami, talks in this episode about his team’s motto: “Career services is everybody’s business."

He also shares three specific ways his team is implementing this motto across campus:

1. Faculty toolkit and webpage. The team created a PDF toolkit for faculty members to help them understand what the Toppel Career Center does, what resources they offer and where to find them, etc. The toolkit lives on Toppel’s Faculty and Staff Engagement Hub webpage and includes:

• An overview of the career center
• What career readiness means (along with definitions of the NACE competencies)
• A list of ways faculty can partner with the career center to support students’ career development
• An email template faculty can use to communicate with students about Toppel’s resources
• A list of ideas for incorporating career readiness into syllabi, including syllabus statement templates, example assignments and activities, and example resources. 

2. Live job and internship RSS feeds on academic webpages. Christian and his team partnered with deans, faculty, staff, and other academic leaders on campus to integrate live job and internship RSS feeds from Handshake onto each academic department’s page. The feeds include only jobs relevant to each particular academic area. You can see examples on the College of Engineering’s page here and the College of Arts and Sciences' page here. 

3. Toppel Awards. This annual awards program recognizes students, student organizations, faculty, staff, alumni, recruiters, and employers who exemplify a commitment to career education and guidance. Christian says the number of nominations has grown every year. Over time, it’s become a great way to recognize partners, and it keeps Christian and his team up-to-date on what career readiness initiatives are going on across campus.

Resources from the episode:

• Christian’s LinkedIn profile
• Christian’s Twitter profile
• Faculty toolkit PDF
• Live job and internship RSS feed for the College of Engineering
• Live job and internship RSS feed for the College of Arts and Sciences
• Toppel Awards homepage
• Toppel Faculty and Staff Engagement Hub webpage
• Toppel’s virtual career center (powered by uConnect)
• Career Everywhere job board (on uConnect’s website)

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Mark Peltz, the Daniel and Patricia Jipp Finkelman Dean of the Center for Careers, Life, and Service at Grinnell College, talks about how to improve equity and access to career services. 

In this episode, Mark walks through several specific strategies he and his team have implemented and how they used those strategies to achieve a 98% engagement rate for Grinnell’s Class of 2022.

The strategies include:

1. Proactive early outreach. Each incoming Grinnell student is assigned a career coach. During the summer, all coaches reach out to their students to introduce themselves. At new student orientation, the students meet with their career coaches in small groups to learn more about the career center, what kind of resources are offered, why they should use the career center, etc. Coaches then “assign” students the task of coming into the career center for a 1:1 appointment at least once during the fall semester. 
2. Need-based grants. Largely funded by donors, the Grinnell career center created a series of need-based grants to help students buy professional attire for job interviews, pay for medical school interview travel costs, attend relevant conferences, and more. “Your socioeconomic background shouldn't have an overly consequential influence on ultimately what you do with the rest of your life,” Mark says.
3. Service leadership work-study program. Mark describes this as a professional development program rooted in volunteering. Volunteering, working with local nonprofits, and getting involved in the community outside of Grinnell College are all important professional and personal development opportunities, but many students can’t afford to volunteer. This program, funded largely by donations (along with some federal work-study funds), pays students an hourly wage for their volunteer work.
4. Investing in a uConnect virtual career center platform. Knowing he wanted to make Grinnell’s career resources available to all students 24/7, Mark and his team purchased uConnect’s virtual career center platform. Grinnell’s new virtual career center also includes identity communities with curated content and resources created specifically for those student populations. Now, all Grinnell students can equally access career resources anywhere, anytime. 

In this episode, Mark also shares how his team tracks student engagement data, and how they use that data to measure success and adjust programming and outreach to make sure they’re reaching all students. 

Resources from the episode:

• Grinnell College’s virtual career center (powered by uConnect)
• uConnect’s new Identity Kits product page
• Mark’s LinkedIn page
• Mark’s email: peltzm@grinnell.edu 

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In an effort to engage more students with career services (and earlier in their college careers), the University of Oregon Lundquist College of Business career center partners with faculty to add career-related assignments to three core business classes. 

The assignments, all asynchronous and requiring no live class time, are sprinkled throughout: 

1. BA 101: Introduction to Business (a freshmen-level class)
2. BA 240: Spreadsheet Analysis and Visualization (a sophomore-level class)
3. Marketing 311: Marketing Management (an upper-division class)

That way, by the time business students reach their senior year, they’ve already been exposed to career multiple times. And because the assignments are part of their grade in three required classes, every student gets the opportunity to learn more about the career center and what resources are available.

“It's a way for us to signal as a college that we feel this is so essential to your education that we are embedding it into these core classes and assigning points to it. We're using the incentive that we have trained them to cue into, which is points in a class,” says Jessica Best, Director of Career Strategy for Mohr Career Services. “We can ensure everybody at least has equal access to it and then they can make the choice whether they want to engage or not.”

Best says about 90% of students engage with the career assignments, and her team frequently surveys the students to get their feedback on the program and track their progress.

In this episode, Best and her colleague Gene Rhee, Director of Mohr Career Services, share what the assignments look like, how (and why) they built the program, how they got buy-in from faculty and senior leadership, how they handle grading, and more.

Resources from the episode:

• Gene’s LinkedIn profile
• Jessica’s LinkedIn profile
• Mohr Career Services virtual career center
• Jessica’s email: bestje@uoregon.edu 
• Gene’s email: generhee@uoregon.edu 

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Laura Kestner-Ricketts, Executive Director of Career and Professional Development at Augustana College, shares how she introduces faculty to career resources in a super scalable, efficient way.

In this episode, Laura offers a step-by-step overview of a new 45-minute program she launched at Augustana that trains faculty on how to navigate the career center website and use all of the resources. 

After only six months of running this program, Laura says it’s a hit with faculty (and students, as it can easily be adapted for them) due to its interactive, engaging format. Listen to the episode for more details, but here’s a general outline of the program:

1. Laura introduces faculty to the website and briefly highlights each heading and drop-down menu.
2. Then she shows them how to access each of the website’s six signature resources, including identity/affinity communities, labor market insights, Candid Career videos, mentors, and more. 
3. Next, Laura breaks attendees into groups of six.
4. Each member of the group has four minutes to research one of the six signature resources. They’re encouraged to take notes.
5. Next, Laura invites attendees to get into groups with people who researched the same signature resource. 
6. They have four minutes to share what they learned, hear what others have learned, and solidify their knowledge of that resource. 
7. Attendees then get back into their original groups.
8. Each person has two minutes to share what they learned about their resource:
   1. Who could benefit from using it
   2. What the resource is and what it can do
   3. When it might be helpful to suggest or share with a student (advising, in class, individually, group, etc.)
   4. Where to access it
   5. How to navigate it
   6. Why someone might find it helpful
9. After 12 minutes (two minutes for each person), Laura brings everyone together to debrief. 

Resources from the episode:

• Augustana’s career center website (powered by uConnect)
• Outline for the faculty presentations
• Laura’s LinkedIn page
• Laura’s email: laurakestnerricketts@augustana.edu 

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Sharon Belden Castonguay, the Executive Director of the Gordon Career Center at Wesleyan University, discusses Career Everywhere in a liberal arts environment—particularly as it relates to career services working with admissions, academic affairs, and advancement.

Sharon shares how Career Everywhere can be implemented in a liberal arts institution like Wesleyan. She also digs into specific ways career services can partner with each of what she calls the “three As” (admissions, academic affairs, and advancement) to embed career throughout the entire student journey.

“On a liberal arts campus, Career Everywhere means that the community is helping students make sense of what they're learning inside the classroom, outside the classroom, within their major, and outside their major,” Belden Castonguay says.

“It’s helping them connect the dots so students leave with a coherent narrative about why they chose the course of study they did, why they chose to do all of the other things they did… the Korean dance class, the medieval poetry class, why they played intramural lacrosse, why they were involved in activism, why they were volunteering in their community. We’re thinking about putting all of that together in a way that is meaningful to them.”

Resources from the episode:

• Sharon’s LinkedIn page
• Sharon’s TEDx talk (The Psychology of Career Decisions)
• Sharon’s Coursera course (Career Decisions: From Insight to Impact)
• Wesleyan’s career center website (powered by uConnect)

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With institutions across the country facing funding cuts, many career services leaders are reinforcing their budgets by getting corporate sponsors for their career centers. And employer partners, eager to connect with the next generation of talent, are stepping up.

For example, Spelman College’s career center has been sponsored by Carrier, Salesforce, Wells Fargo (and others); University of Washington’s has been sponsored by Alaska Airlines, AT&T, Starbucks (and others); and Langston University’s has been sponsored by Dell, Boeing, Hormel Foods, and more.

While corporate sponsorship programs are not necessarily new to many career centers—with employers traditionally sponsoring events like career fairs, info sessions, and interview rooms—the continued emphasis on digital engagement means many of those traditional programs are losing their shine. The time is ripe for career services teams to launch corporate sponsorship programs for their virtual career centers.

In this episode, you'll learn how Leonelle Thompson, former Director of Career and Professional Development at Langston University, and Harold Bell, Director of the Office of Career Planning and Development at Spelman College, created robust corporate sponsorship programs for their virtual career centers.

They share tactical advice and guidance on:

• How to get started
• What types of sponsorship opportunities to offer
• How to grow your program once it’s up and running
• And more

Resources from the episode:

• Spelman College’s virtual career center
  • Sponsors page
• Langston University’s virtual career center
  • Sponsors page
• Leonelle’s LinkedIn page
• Harold’s LinkedIn page
• Digital corporate sponsorship playbook (includes sponsorship package examples)

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Joe Catrino, the Executive Director of Career and Life Design at Trinity College, talks about how career services and higher education can innovate and prepare students for the future of work.

Much of Joe’s philosophy is inspired by the concepts of life design and design thinking and how they can be applied within career services. He even wrote a chapter on “Design Thinking and the New Career Center” in the 2022 textbook Mapping the Future of Undergraduate Career Education.

In this episode, Joe shares what the future of work means for higher education, how career services can embed life design into career coaching, what it will take to make sure today’s students are ready for tomorrow’s workforce, and more.

“Jobs that our students are going to have, they don't even exist yet. So how do you prepare students for that? How do you prepare for this future of work, this disruption? Well, you focus on skills,” Joe says.

Resources from the episode:

• Mapping the Future of Undergraduate Career Education textbook (Joe wrote chapter 8: “Design Thinking and the New Career Center”)
• Designing Your Life book by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans
• Long Life Learning book by Michelle Weise
• Robot-Ready report by Emsi (now Lightcast) and Strada Education Network
• Joe’s LinkedIn page

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Megan Baeza and Maribea Merritt, the two-person career services team at the University of Texas Permian Basin, are responsible for serving more than 5,000 students. So they’ve learned a thing or two about how to make a big impact with a small team.

In this episode, Megan, the Director of Internships and Employer Relations, and Maribea, the Director of Career Education, share six specific strategies they use to make the most of their limited staff and resources, including:

1. Teamwork: Sharing tasks, communicating, dividing and conquering, jumping in to help with duties outside of their job description, and more.
2. Tools and technology: Making career resources available 24/7 via tools like uConnect, offering online appointment scheduling, using tools like Mentimeter in classroom presentations, etc.
3. Consistent student outreach: Sharing jobs via Handshake, sending automated newsletters to students (curated with content personalized to their interests and identities), and more. 
4. Community partnerships: Partnering with student clubs, employers, alumni, and faculty; starting a Career Champion program; and more. 
5. Time management: Being purposeful about blocking calendars and saving time for paperwork, event/presentation prep, travel, and collaborating with each other and partners. 
6. Classroom presentations: Finding larger audiences to make a big impact (like UTPB’s freshmen seminar class), creating interactive presentations, and more. 

Resources from the episode:

• UTPB career center website
• Career Champions program page

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Toni Rhorer, Executive Director of the Career Management Center for the Rady School of Management at UC San Diego, talks about how career services can partner with admissions in a graduate business school environment.

Toni has worked and led in career services for over 15 years, with the majority of those being in graduate business schools at Duke, Arizona State, and now UC San Diego. She’s spent years building partnerships between career services and admissions teams and conducting research on what employers are looking for and what competencies will make graduate business students most successful in the workforce.

In this episode, Toni shares why it’s so important for career services and admissions to work together, how she’s embedded her team in the admissions process, and what interview questions she asks potential students.

Resources from the episode:

• The Rady School of Management’s virtual career center
• Toni’s LinkedIn profile 

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Amid a national decrease in higher education enrollment, Illinois Institute of Technology drove their highest enrollment in about 40 years in Fall 2022 by centering their recruitment strategy around career readiness.

Thy Nguyen, Associate Vice Provost for Student Engagement and Career Services at Illinois Tech, and his team partnered with colleagues in enrollment management to build a virtual career center full of resources both teams use to recruit, enroll, and retain students—and set them up for success after graduation.

Why? Because today’s learners (and their parents) care deeply about the return on investment in higher education. Rather than operate in siloes, Illinois Tech’s career services and enrollment teams combined resources to tell a compelling story about the ROI of a degree from their institution. 

In this episode, Thy shares:

• How IIT recognized the need/opportunity to make career resources the lynchpin of their recruitment efforts
• An overview of the partnership between career services and other teams across campus (and early results)
• Specific strategies and tactics used by enrollment teams to promote career resources
• How creating a campus culture of career readiness has impacted retention efforts in addition to new student enrollment
• How IIT uses outcomes data as a key selling point in recruitment marketing

Resources from the episode:

• Thy’s LinkedIn page
• Elevate portal
• Elevate portal career outcomes page

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Junior Delgado, Director of the Career Center at Westfield State University in Massachusetts, shares his best tips and tricks for how to build allies across campus through genuine interactions. 

Junior shares how he’s built so many partnerships in his 22+ years at Westfield, how he leverages them in his work as a career services leader, and why it’s so important to approach these relationships with authenticity.

Resources from the episode:

• Junior’s LinkedIn page
• Junior’s email: jdelgado@westfield.ma.edu 

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Nancy Bilmes, Director of the Center for Career Development at the University of Connecticut, shares how she built UConn’s Career Champion program and trained 500+ faculty, staff, alumni, and employers to have better career conversations with students. 

Nancy shares:

• How (and why) her team started the program three years ago
• How they recruit Champions (particularly faculty)
• What the training process looks like (including the resources)
• How they measure success
• And more!

Resources from the episode

• Career Champions resources page on UConn’s career center website

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Josh Domitrovich, Executive Director of the Center for Career and Professional Development at PennWest, talks about two Career Everywhere initiatives he recently launched:

1. A Career Champion program for faculty and staff
2. A five-week Professional Advantage Academy for students that simulates the job application process

Josh is in the unique position of leading career services for a brand-new institution. PennWest was established in July 2022 as a result of the merger of California University of Pennsylvania, Clarion University of Pennsylvania, and Edinboro University of Pennsylvania.

He shares actionable advice, best practices, and detailed breakdowns of how he built the Career Champion program and Professional Advantage Academy—and how he got buy-in from top to bottom. 

Resources from the episode:

• PennWest's virtual career center
• Josh's email: jdomitrovich@pennwest.edu 
• Josh's LinkedIn

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Daniel Pascoe Aguilar, the Founding Director of the Center for Social Justice and Chief Diversity Officer at Excelsior University, shares how he’s using identity and allyship communities to develop the next generation of diverse leaders.

A longtime leader in career services and higher ed, Daniel discusses the critical importance of developing the next generation of diverse leaders, improving access, and building a village around underrepresented students on and off campus.

Daniel shares how his team built the communities, how he got buy-in from senior leadership, and why improving access to higher education is everyone’s responsibility.

Resources from the episode:

• Excelsior University’s identity and allyship communities

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For too long, career services has been an afterthought. Now it's time for career services to be in the driver's seat, leading institutional strategy around career readiness. That's why we're launching the Career Everywhere podcast! Join us every other Tuesday for in-depth interviews with today’s most innovative career leaders about how they’re building a campus culture of career readiness… or what we call Career Everywhere.