Blogs

Did you hear that?  

I was listening in on career centers across the country. I heard a variation on the same conversation. It went something like this: “Why aren’t our students coming to our workshops?” “Don’t students know they should be working with us?” “Why are our students waiting until their senior year to come see us?”  “They should be coming in when they are freshmen.” “Why aren’t our students doing experiential learning?” “They should know that they need an experience to get a job.”  

Oh!  Was that you saying it?  

We were, too, in the career center at Georgia State. We did all the things to get students to connected to career services. We designated individual staff members as liaisons to specific departments. We came up with clever titles for our programs. We hash-tagged with abandon. Sure, it upped engagement some. But not enough. We were simply not working at the scale and impact we expected to. The self-motivated students and the students that were required to meet with us came in. But what about the ones who really needed us? What about the ones—dare we say it?—that did not even know we existed?  The ones who truly did not know what they “should” be doing?  

Why do we blame the students for not engaging with us? We lament that they wait too late to get an internship. They don’t ask us to review their resume or do a mock interview when they go in for the job they really want. They don’t come to employer panels or network with alumni. But is it really their fault? Isn’t it really the fault of how this is all set up? 

We started thinking. What would compel students to do what they “should” do for their career readiness? Where are students? Yes, they are hanging out in the student center. But they MUST be in class. What do students want to do? Yes, they want to go where there is free food. But they MUST write their papers.  ho do students consider experts? Yes, they think their friends know a lot of stuff.  But students MUST perceive faculty as experts.  

A recent study by Strada had these illuminating findings: 51% of students rarely visited career services and 27% never did. Only 30% of students found the advice received in career services as very helpful while 49% of students found career advice received from faculty as very helpful. In every single discipline, students found career advice given by faculty as more than 20 percentage points higher than career services. We could deliberate on the reasons for these findings in a myriad different ways, and we could debate at length the quality of the advice given. But we must accept the reality of the impact faculty has.  

And then, it came to us.  Students are integrally connected to faculty through their progression to graduation and that career they dream of. Research on how to most effectively make things happen include the premise that it has to be the path of least resistance and it has to be in an environment that is easily accessible. In the case of career readiness, students are in class every day learning from faculty. There it is. We realized that, while we in career services spin our wheels, faculty, quite frankly, does not. Faculty is the key. Not just as “champions” for the career center but as the gateway to the minds, and subsequently, actions of our students.   

We in career services must be generous in acknowledging the fullness of a student’s experience and not just their touch points with us. Could we achieve that glorious pipedream that every career center has? Could we possibly get faculty to include career readiness throughout the curriculum? Yes, yes, we know that faculty does not want to teach “career.” And, yes, we definitely know that asking faculty to include anything in their syllabus that was not specifically within their discipline was absolute fantasy. 

So, what did we hit on? The truth! It came to us that everything faculty already does prepares students for career. So, if it was already happening, why do our students not know they were getting career ready? In fact, why do our students wonder aloud why they have to write a reflection paper on Beowulf? We realized that we had to help students make an overt critical connection between coursework and career readiness. Who could do that? All together now: faculty. 

All we had to do was convince faculty that they should make that connection for their students! That’s it! Easy, right? Uh, sure?  

Well, okay, we did have to think this through strategically. Over this series of blog posts, I will describe what we did at Georgia State to get career readiness into the classroom. In this first post, I will tell you how we built the structure and laid the foundation for buy in from upper administration. In subsequent posts, I will describe how we set learning objectives, how we made it “easy” for faculty, and how we are assessing the whole shebang.  And I’ll share a couple of secrets to our success.  (Yes, one has to do with money.) 

It all turned out to be a lot of thoughtful consideration and a lot of persuasive work, but it was less challenging than we thought it would be.  In fact, I was actually surprised at the positive reaction we got!  

Here’s how we started:  

We turned to our strategic plan. It states that students will achieve academic AND (emphasis mine) career success. We had done a good job with the academic part. Now, it was time to move on to the career part. We took that to higher administration and were given the go ahead to come up with a plan. 

Of course, we assembled a committee. This is higher education after all. The committee included faculty from several different disciplines; staff from academic advising, student affairs, institutional research; and students. We agreed to a couple of guiding principles: we did not want to go through the dreaded curriculum committee, we did not want to tell faculty what employers wanted them to teach, we wanted to build on what was already in place at Georgia State without requiring the addition of anything.  

We had to make a compelling case that the higher administration could support. And so, we collected data. For us, we used our career management system for our foundational data pull. We sliced and diced by college, by major, and by class standing among others. We found out that the students who are using our career center are waiting until their last semester before graduation. We found out that some “careers in. . .” courses required a resume review (that overwhelmed our peer advisors on due dates), and that was often the only interaction a student had with us. We, distressingly, found out that the percentage of students engaging with us was nowhere near where we wanted it to be. We looked to comparisons and to the research of other entities.  

Once we had the data, we had to determine what career readiness meant at Georgia State and what students needed to do to achieve it. The NACE Career Readiness Competencies were a good place to start. There was no need to reinvent the wheel on what constituted “career readiness” when NACE had already done the heavy lifting of research, analysis, and definitions. However, there were many many many discussions in our committee because many faculty wanted competencies specific to their disciplines. As you can imagine, the list got longer and longer and it became apparent that there was no way it could ever be comprehensive not to mention that no one wanted to write definitions for every single one on the list. We were finally able to settle on the NACE competencies as the university standard and provided structure for individual departments to add their own. This was a major milestone and having it in place from the get-go relieved many potential heartaches along the way.  

Takeaways:

1. Look at your strategic plan. There is certainly something there that addresses something that you can relate to career outcomes.  Use that as your first line of persuasion when talking with upper administration.  Get the go-ahead to present a plan.  That will serve you well as you progress.  You will not feel continual uneasiness that you are undertaking a potential exercise in futility. 
2. Assemble a committee that represents all constituencies of your institution. This will provide for the differing perceptions, needs, and challenges for all matters the committee takes up.  Do NOT get demoralized when you can’t come to consensus.  It’s okay.  Just make sure that each person on the committee fully understands and can explain how a decision was made.
3. Define career readiness. Determine how it will be measured.
4. Use data to tell your story. You know what the important information for your upper administration is. Go get it.   Assemble the data that helps guide your work and helps you lay the groundwork for goals and processes that will guide your work, keep you on track, and allow for compromise if not consensus.