Career Everywhere

Dr. Ellen Awad , Associate Dean for Student Life at Hope College, talks about how to help students connect their co-curricular experiences to career.  In the episode, Ellen shares: The importance of connecting co-curricular activities to career development How to help students articulate the skills and competencies they learn in these activities The need for students to reflect on their co-curricu...

Amanda Morgan , Associate Director of Career Services for the Academic Success and Career Center at Washington State University, shares how WSU blends academic advising and career coaching. In the episode, Amanda talks about: Why (and how) WSU’s Academic Success and Career Center office is set up to blend academic advising and career coaching How they’ve created an optional University 100 course f...

Kelli Smith and Lexie Avery , both of Binghamton University, share how their team has successfully engaged more first- and second-year students with career services. In this episode, Kelli and Lexie talk about their four-phase strategy, why it’s so important to engage students early and often, and how they’ve increased first-year engagement from 28% to 71%. The four-phase engagement strategy inclu...

Manny Contomanolis , Director of the Mignone Center for Career Success at Harvard University, shares how career services professionals can become thought leaders on campus. Manny discusses why thought leadership is so important and provides strategies for becoming a thought leader, such as asking hard questions, leveraging external trends, and being a good storyteller. He encourages career leaders...

Kerry Spitze and Steve Russell , both of Bowling Green State University, share how their career services team and the entire campus (from the top down) are implementing life design and design thinking. Life design, like Career Everywhere , is all about helping students think about their careers and life after college as early and purposefully as possible. To implement life design campus-wide, Bowl...

Jackie Warner , the Assistant Director of the Center for Career Success at Thomas Jefferson University, shares how career services professionals can support neurodivergent students. In this episode, Jackie talks about: What neurodiversity is What unique challenges neurodivergent students face when it comes to career development What accommodations career services teams can make for neurodivergent...

Julia Vollrath , the Associate Director for Campus Initiatives at the University of Florida, shares how her team is using data to track and improve student engagement. In this episode, Julia talks about: What specific data points her team is measuring (and how they measure them) The most interesting things they’ve discovered in their data How they’re using the results to adapt their career service...

Mike Summers , Associate Vice President of the Gateway Career Center at Lafayette College, shares why he thinks career must be everywhere. “Talent is evenly distributed, but opportunity is not. So we have to increase the social capital and access to all students,” Mike said. In this episode, Mike talks about: How he and his team have implemented the Career Everywhere approach to career services Wh...

Beverly Johnson , Associate Director of Career Readiness at Arizona State University, shares how her team is engaging Indigenous students with career services. Beverly talks about: The programming and initiatives her team has implemented to reach more Indigenous students What important cultural considerations to keep in mind How career services professionals can be good allies And more   Having wo...

Dr. Carissa Liverpool , Assistant Athletic Director of Student-Athlete Development for the Scarlet Knights For Life Program at Rutgers University, shares how her team is engaging student-athletes with career services. Carissa talks about: The unique challenges student-athletes face in terms of career development and how to address them How her team uses technology to engage student-athletes, emplo...

Emily McCarthy , Senior Director of Career Development at the University of Arizona, shares how her team partners with the alumni office to support recent grads in their career development. Emily talks about the services they offer recent grads (and why), what the partnership with the alumni office looks like, and how both teams partner to cost-share the uConnect platform to scale their support fo...

Monica Clem , Vice President of the National Career Center for Teach For America, talks about how the Teach For America (TFA) career center supports its 60,000+ alumni in their careers after the two-year teaching program. Monica shares how her team uses technology (like uConnect’s virtual career center ) to engage alumni, how the national and regional TFA teams work together to support alumni all...

Leonelle Thompson , Manager of Early Career at Williams and a former career services leader at Langston University and the University of Tulsa, talks about how career services teams and employers can work together to get students career ready . Having worked in both corporate recruiting and higher education career services, Leonelle discusses: What career readiness means What skills today’s studen...

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 imple...

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...

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 i...

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:  BA 101: Introduction to Business (a freshmen-leve...

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.  Af...

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 c...

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 Washin...

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 Cen...

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 strategi...

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...

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 car...

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 wi...