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Best Practices

Establishing Effective Partnerships between Employer Partners and Career Centers Webinar Recap

July 19, 2019 by 0 Comments

by Alison Hogue, University of South Carolina, Darla Moore School of Business

I have had the pleasure of working in career services at the University of South Carolina for nearly eight years.  During that time, I have been an experiential education coordinator for liberal arts majors, a career coach for arts & sciences majors, an employer relationship manager in the fields of engineering and computing, and a senior manager in employer relations for the Darla Moore School of Business.  Each one of these roles has offered unique challenges and opportunities to find new and innovative ways to prepare and connect students to the world of work both during their matriculation and post-graduation.

One of the things that struck me when I started in this field was that my assumptions about the role of career services professionals when I was a student were wrong – our office was designed to act as a resource and a conduit for students and employers to connect, and it was not intended to serve as a placement office.  Unfortunately, there is no magic formula for getting students to utilize these resources.  I have attended numerous events centered on internships and co-ops, career development, HR and recruiting, and university and employer relations.  Each one has provided new insights on emerging trends, programming ideas, or suggestions for improving assessments and interpreting data, but there was a common underlying question that seemed to plague both schools and employers –  what does an effective partnership between an employer and a university look like, and how do you build one?

In the May 16th SoACE webinar entitled Establishing Effective Partnerships between Employer Partners and Career Centers, GM Financial Talent Acquisition Managers, Roderick Hooker and Lori Bambauer, explored this topic in greater detail along with Alicia Smyth, Executive Director of Career Services at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, who shared her insights from a university perspective.

GM Financial’s University Relations team was established in 2015 with an eye toward internship recruiting and building a talent pipeline.  The program later expanded to include recruiting for full-time positions and strengthening involvement in the community.  Roderick provided the example of a successful partnership that he formed with the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA), which was close in proximity to one of their Texas locations.  The end goal in this case was to build the sort of relationship where students were actively seeking out and excited about opportunities at GM Financial.  Roderick offered several tips for establishing a new relationship:

  • Sit down with the career services office and map out a strategy.  In this case, UTA suggested that GM Financial would need to attend several events per semester in order to build brand awareness.  Setting this type of meeting early in the year or during the summertime will provide the maximum number of opportunities for employers to engage with students.
  • Start small and build out. In addition to career fairs, Roderick and his team volunteered for existing events where employer assistance was needed.  This included career events such as resume reviews and mock interviews, as well as classroom presentations and student organization engagement.
  • Understand all of the opportunities on campus.  If you are going to a school where career services are decentralized, it helps to understand the relationships that already exist between departments on campus.  In this case, general GM Financial internships were available to many majors, but Roderick also had a particular interest in business students and began attending events for both career services and the business school.
  • Differentiate yourself.  Laurie added that it’s vital for the organization to speak to students about culture and community and purpose.  Why is your organization different and amazing compared to others that recruit on campus?
  • Be patient!  GM Financial’s partnership with UTA was nearly two years in the making.  This is an important point to make when setting expectations – return on investment is not automatic, and it takes time and active involvement in order to build brand recognition on campus.

Alicia Smyth echoed Roderick’s advice in her discussion of a successful partnership she established with Boeing, the #1 private employer for Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.  In Alicia’s example, her office already had an existing relationship to Boeing, but it had a lot of room to grow.  Her goal was to get Embry-Riddle included in the top tier of target schools as a part of Boeing’s Engineering Accelerated Hiring Initiative (EAHI) – something which she and others worked closely with Boeing to ultimately accomplish.  Here are some of her tips for strengthening an existing relationship:

  • Get school administration on board with your plans. Help them understand how the employer has contributed the success of students and graduates.
  • Tap into existing alumni at that company you are targeting. In this case, a Boeing Bridge Mentoring Program was instituted in 2015 as a way for Embry-Riddle graduates working at Boeing to mentor students who had an interest in working for the company. This program, now known as the Boeing Co-Pilot Program, is still going strong.
  • Utilize existing interns.  Boeing interns return to campus and serve as brand ambassadors to heighten awareness of opportunities among their peers.
  • Include alumni on industry advisory boards throughout the university.  Involvement in areas outside of career services is key in moving the relationship forward.
  • Host a dedicated day for your employer to connect with students.  In Embry-Riddle’s case, Boeing held a summit in Seattle once per year to include highly engaged Embry-Riddle alumni who work at Boeing, Career Services, Philanthropy, select faculty, and University Administration for many years. This was recently increased to twice per year. Boeing comes to campus to attend the Career Expo in the fall and holds an information session in the spring. This is in addition to scholars and incoming intern luncheons that they host for students, and their involvement with student organizations. They conduct these activities on both the Daytona Beach, FL and Prescott, AZ campuses.

Whether you are starting a new relationship or building on an existing one, it’s important to note that one size does not fit all.  Communication and feedback are key when it comes to creating successful partnerships between universities and employers.  Strategies should be reviewed yearly to refine plans and modify or eliminate the engagements that are not working.

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Alison Hogue serves as the senior manager of employer relations at the University of South Carolina’s Darla Moore School of Business. She earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in Theatre, her Master of Arts degree in Teaching and is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in Higher Education Administration — all from UofSC.

In her spare time, Hogue has held leadership positions for the Provost’s Advisory Committee for Women’s Issues, the Southeastern Cooperative Education Conference, and the South Carolina Association of Colleges and Employers. She is a certified Global Career Development Facilitator and has taught career readiness courses and public speaking classes for both UofSC and Limestone College.

Award Recipients - Best Practices

Lynn Chisholm and Peter Thorsett, 2018 Innovative Spirit Award Recipients

July 12, 2019 by 0 Comments
Peter Thorsett
Lynn Chisholm

The SoACE Imaginative Spirit Award is presented to either an individual, team, or office in recognition of their contributions toward the implementation of a unique and creative approach relevant to student/alumni programming, advising, employer/university relations, recruiting and/or training.  This award upholds the high standards of excellence in support of student/alumni/employer/university engagement and serves to encourage creativity in our profession.

At the 2018 Annual Conference in Atlanta, the SoACE Innovative Spirit Award was presented to Lynn Chisholm and Peter Thorsett from the University of South Florida. Lynn and Peter were recognized for innovation and creativity in developing the USF Career Readiness Badging Program. This program has provided a creative and scalable “career readiness” solution for the more than 50,000 University of South Florida students across all three campuses.  Utilizing the university’s on-line learning platform, a framework was built using the NACE Career Readiness Competencies, organized by Learn It, Do It, and Show It components.

Utilization of this badging program has helped students build stronger resumes, become fully connected with job search tools, and iteratively practice and receive feedback on their performance in behavioral interviews.  Furthermore, the badges they earn are made fully visible to employers and portable for students through the utilization of verifiable credentials based on the Open Badges standard through Badgr.

In support of student success beyond the University of South Florida, this team has been asked to share their program with higher education institutions across the country, as well as with high schools and communities, and have given many presentations and webinars, including at the SoACE Annual Conference.

As Director of Internships and Career Readiness, Lynn Chisholm is responsible for the overall administration and supervision of the Office of Internships and Career Readiness to develop, support, and manage student career-relevant experiential learning opportunities and programming. This office collaborates with Employer Relations and the Office of Professional and Career Development to offer internship opportunities for both on-campus and off-campus experiential learning including co-op, as part of a student’s progress toward graduation and obtaining full-time professional employment. Previously, Lynn was the Internship and Prior Learning Assessment Coordinator at Polk State College, Human Resources Specialist with the City of Lakeland in workforce and organization development, Clinic Director at the University of Georgia Speech and Hearing Clinic, and Speech and Language Clinic Coordinator at Florida State University in the Communication Sciences and Disorders Department. Lynn earned a Certified Public Manager Master’s Certificate through Florida State University, a master’s degree at Boston University, and a bachelor’s degree at the University of Central Florida.

Peter Thorsett works within the Community Engagement and Career Readiness (CECR) unit at the University of South Florida. In his role, Peter directly supports the efforts of the Associate Vice President in strategic planning, evaluation and assessment, and programmatic integration across the unit’s individual teams to ensure that student career outcomes are linked to student and career success. Peter is also responsible for managing the team that provides marketing, outreach, and operations support to all of the teams in CECR. Peter has more than 20 years of experience in a variety of strategy, marketing, and technology related roles in both higher education and private industry, including work for Turner Broadcasting, Johnson Controls, Miami University (Ohio), UNC Charlotte, and Georgia State University. Peter holds an MBA from Georgia State University and a BSBA from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

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Career Readiness and Student Success 3.0

February 19, 2019 by 0 Comments

By Lynn Chisholm, MS, CPM, Director, USF Office of Internships and Career Readiness

Student Success 3.0 takes collaboration and planning!

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