career competencies

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.

Best Practices - Hot Topics

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

Conference Updates - SoACE Updates

Announcing the SoACE 2018 Conference Keynote Speakers

September 28, 2018 by 0 Comments

Monday Keynote Speaker

Dr. Adam Peck has served as Assistant Vice President and Dean of Student Affairs at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas since 2008 and has been a student affairs practitioner for more than 24 years. He is the author of more than forty scholarly publications and has presented more than 100 national and international webinars. He served as editor and co-author of the book, “Engagement & Employability: Integrating Career Learning Through Cocurricular Experiences in Postsecondary Education” (NASPA Press, March 2017). He is currently editing, “Leadership Development in Student Employment, New Directions for Student Leadership” with executive editors Susan Komives and Kathy Guthrie.

Dr. Peck is actively engaged in a number of professional associations. He is a former president of the Texas Association of College and University Student Personnel Administrators, the former Texas State Director for NASPA and currently serves as Corporate Sponsorships Liaison for NASPA Region III. He serves as editor of the Research to Scholarship section of the Journal of Campus Activities Research and Scholarship. He has been named one of the “Champions of Assessment” by Campus Labs and received the “Founders Award” from NACA for contributions to the field of student activities.

Dr. Peck earned his bachelor’s degree in Theatre from Lewis University, a master’s degree in Communication Studies from Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville and a Doctor of Philosophy in Higher Education Administration from The University of Texas at Austin.

Keynote Session Title: “Bridging Leadership Development in College with Professional Development in Careers”

 

Tuesday/Wednesday Keynote Speaker

Nalayini Thambar is the Director of Careers and Employability at The University of Nottingham which has campuses in the UK, China and Malaysia.  A Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy and a qualified careers adviser, her work has involved teaching, professional practice and leadership across all areas of student employability.  Her doctoral thesis was an exploration of the professional identity of university careers advisers in a changing employability climate. Previously, Nalayini was Assistant Director at the University of Leeds Careers Centre, responsible for Business Engagement. Following significant expansion of Nottingham’s UK Careers and Employability Service in 2013, Nalayini established the delivery of expert services to students within Faculties and Schools, and the development of non-clinical placement activity across the UK campus. She is now leading work to develop the articulation of professional competencies within the curriculum across the University.  As Director of Quality for the Association of Graduate Careers Advisory Services (AGCAS), Nalayini is responsible for establishing professional standards, codes of conduct and quality assurance processes for careers and employability activity across UK higher education.

Keynote Session Title: “The Robots are Coming! Supercharging our Expertise to Futureproof our Profession.”

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Register for the conference by October 7, 2018 to get the Early Bird Rate! For more information on the 2018 Annual Conference, please visit the SoACE website.