Building a Student Success and Career Readiness Team: Recruiting Players from Across the Institution and Alumni

In a traditional higher education approach, students who enroll in online programs develop content knowledge and skills in a field, graduate, and seek a new job or advancement in a current work setting.  Near the end of a program, they may attend job fairs to get an early start on the job search, but this exercise may reveal new information and opportunities that could affect career choices and readiness.   What if we include a focus on career opportunities and preparation in addition to knowledge and skill development throughout their programs?  We could expect increased student satisfaction, improved retention, and an enhancement to the institution’s reputation to attract new students.  This session describes how one UMUC graduate program is building this approach.

Recognizing the Need

Awareness of the need for a student career success approach emerged as capstone course students and alumni expressed frustration about the challenges of finding a job.  Challenges included: 1) lack of awareness of the variety of career opportunities; 2) lack of knowledge regarding how to locate pertinent job postings; 3) lack of experience required for jobs of interest; and 4) lack of skills needed for the job application process (e.g., résumé preparation, interview skills).  As part of these challenges, students and alumni also may lack strategic planning skills for career preparation and professional development.  Adding career planning exercises to the capstone course was the first step in addressing student career readiness needs that extend beyond program learning objectives.  These exercises included visits to specific areas of the university’s Career Services website and its resources.   Students reported that they found the exercises helpful and wished they had been introduced to the planning exercises and the Career Services website from the beginning of the program.  Although the university’s mission statement includes a focus on career-relevant education, education and the availability of university services were not meeting student needs.  We needed to integrate planning for career success and the support from university resources throughout the program.

Developing the Approach 

Student feedback and comments in conversations with alumni served as the basis for developing a program-wide strategy for improving student career success.  The approach includes partnering with the institution’s innovative Career Services department, sister programs, faculty, and alumni to help students begin preparing for their careers starting with their first course.  The following list highlights features of the career success approach.

• A Career Corner module in online classrooms.  This module includes examples of jobs, guidelines for planning a career in the field, a link to the Career Services Website, suggestions for building a professional digital presence, links to professional organizations and conferences, and recommendations for developing a professional resource library.
• Guests in the online classroom.  To extend the support to students, three kinds of guests are included in the online classroom.  Alumni mentors are available to interact throughout the term to share experiences, provide recommendations, and answer questions.  Adjunct faculty with specialized expertise join the classroom for specific time periods to answer questions about course concepts related to their work in the field.  A representative from Career Services also joins the classroom for a specified period to answer questions about career planning and the Career Services department.
• Opportunities to develop practical experience for a résumé.  The program has a list of projects and opportunities that can be initiated to help students apply their knowledge and skills in real life situations.  In partnership with sister programs, a virtual conference (with mentoring by faculty) provides students the opportunity to engage in professional activities by presenting and gaining knowledge from related fields.
• Partnering with additional university departments.  Staff in the advising department support students throughout the university and tend to have limited understanding of the career opportunities in each field.  The next partnership initiative involves working with this department to provide detailed advising materials that will enable staff to respond to common questions they encounter from students.   

The Career Services Partnership

Due to limited staffing, the partnership with Career Services is unique in the university.  The guest visits within the program classrooms are an experiment to see how much this extra support can contribute.  However, integration of information about Career Services and a link to the department website has already proved to be beneficial.  In order to support 90,000 students and 215,000 alumni, Career Services has built a model that uses technology and customized tools and resources to meet the extremely diverse needs of its clients.  Career tools such as resume builders, résumé critique tools, and mock interview tools use artificial intelligence to give specific, point by point feedback to students for specific ways to improve their application materials. The résumé critique tool not only looks for formatting issues but also identifies the need for action verbs, quantification of experience, and identification of soft skills. The mock interview tool customizes interview questions to a specific résumé, then analyzes facial expressions, body language, tone of voice, and content analysis of the answers to give specific feedback on improving the interview performance. These tools enable career advising specialists, mentors, and employers to target those areas of the person's career journey which cannot be addressed with resume critiques or interview preparation.

This model has made it possible for the department to devote its staff resources to the most critical needs of its clients, which occur when they are actively seeking a job.  Students and alumni who are ready to seek employment can participate in the recruiting events hosted by Career Services. The Career Services department has also been creative in finding ways to identify potential employers for graduates from smaller programs by looking for specialized job opportunities within larger organizations whose emphasis may be in a different field. 

Session Objectives

This session presents an approach for improving student readiness for career success.  Attendees will be encouraged to interact with the presenters throughout the session to ask questions, share their experiences, and offer additional ideas for improving student career success.  The goal is a collaboration in which everyone will have new ideas to incorporate at their own institutions.  The presentation materials and slides will be posted on the conference web site.