by By Lynn Chisholm, MS, CPM, Director, USF Office of Internships and Career Readiness
As usual, I’m thinking about career readiness. The importance of career readiness has taken on increasing value on our USF campuses (Tampa, St. Pete, and Sarasota/Manatee), and from conversations I’m having with colleagues around the Tampa Bay community, the state, and country, we are not alone. We, like nearly all campuses now, track our grads as they enter the job market, and just like worried parents watching their own children cross the stage toward the “real world” door, we hold our breath until we see that they “made it!” All the while wrestling with the questions “are they ready?”, “will they continue to be successful beyond the first job?” and “what else should we be doing before they leave us?”
This time my thinking was stimulated by Troy Markowitz’s (VP – Academic Partnerships at Portfolium) Forbes article of August 8, 2018, The Barriers To Success And Upward Mobility For First Generation Students And How To Fix The Problem. Markowitz observes that we’re entering a new version of what student success means, and he cites the evolving mission statements of campuses around the country as evidence. Student Success 3.0, he observes, represents an important paradigm shift:
Three components comprise the third iteration of Student Success: 1) Curricular and Co-Curricular Learning, 2) Assessment, and 3) Career Readiness. …let’s agree that successful outcomes should include strengthening higher education’s value for students and positioning graduates for a lifetime of opportunities.
What jumped out to me was the shift towards experiential learning and linking it with career readiness as the bookends to Student Success 3.0 (that’s us folks!) and the crucial role that “assessment” plays in driving the decisions any campus makes in support of “a lifetime” of career success.
On our campus, we have felt this shift. We’ve been morphing out of a traditional service delivery model (if you build it, they will come) and into Career Advocacy for this very reason. We’re connecting with students both before and after their years on our campuses in order to extend the runway and groom their path for success. And equipping them for success not just in that first post-grad opportunity, but well beyond that as we enable them to manage their career progress without us.
Those may not seem like revolutionary ideas, but how we are doing it represents a significant change in service delivery through closer alignment of what we do, when we do it, and who we’re offering it to. And with this iGeneration we’re also thinking through the “why” and providing them with just-in-time services through a blend of high-tech and high-touch that speaks their language and meets them where they are. Our Career Readiness Badging Program is one example of this, it is offered on all three of our campuses, to Alumni, and to our FUSE transfer students, and helps students prepare for skill transfer post-USF as well as develop practices in support of on-going professional development.
As I finish these musings, we – SoACE Experiential EeducKG members – are on the front lines of the Student Success 3.0 shift, and I look forward to the variety of ways that our members translate that for our students. Student Success 3.0, becomes that process of equipping our students with the keys (experiential learning) to drive their life-long career success (career readiness), using a longer runway and strategic nudges (applying assessment data) and will require collaboration in new and innovative ways as we respond to the continually changing needs of our students. A new definition of success for a new generation of students.
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Lynn Chisholm is the Director of the Office of Internships and Career Readiness within the Community Engagement and Career Readiness division of Student Affairs and Student Success, at the University of South Florida. Lynn’s office is responsible for developing and managing student career-focused experiential learning opportunities and programming to promote student success. Her team oversees the Engaged Student Employment program and On-Campus Internship Program, Co-op, and internships both domestic and global. Her team administers the Career Readiness Badging Program and supervises our crew of Career Readiness Peer Leaders who provide the student interface for the program.
Lynn has been in higher education for 15 years, having been faculty at FSU and UGA and staff at Polk State, and has worked in HR in workforce and organization development for 12 years.
Lynn earned a Certified Public Manager Masters Certificate through FSU, her Master’s degree at Boston University, and her Bachelor’s degree at UCF.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lynnchisholm
Twitter: @LynnChisholm3
