Has Your Institution Defined Career Learning?

In this podcast, Jeremy, Monique, and Nick discuss why and how colleges must define career learning outcomes to create systemic change in career preparation. Without definition, campuses may experience fragmentation, confusion, and uneven student experiences. And now more than ever, both parents and students expect clarity on what career preparation they're receiving.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Welcome to the Career Ecosystem Era and Higher Education podcast, where we explore the systemic changes colleges and universities are making to ensure every student receives the career learning they need to succeed. My name is Jeremy Padani. I'm the CEO and founder of the Career Leadership Collective, a consulting company dedicated to helping higher education transform their career ecosystems. Today I'm here with my amazing colleagues, Monique and Nick.

SPEAKER_00 0:25

Hi, everybody, I'm Monique. I'm a consultant with the Career Leadership Collective.

SPEAKER_01 0:30

Hi everyone, this is Nat Cadden. I'm the Senior Manager of Consulting Training and Executive Search.

SPEAKER_02 0:38

So let's ask a question today, together. What has your campus defined when it comes to the most important aspects of career or career learning, career success? What have they defined? And today we're going to operate under the premise that if you want systemic change to occur in a manner where you can elevate career learning on campus, you have to define it. You have to script the path for success. So ready? On the count of three, everybody name the path to success. This is easy, right? One, two, three, go. You can do that on campus. I mean, think about this. If you put your students, faculty, employers, alumni, cabinet members, career center staff in a room and said, all right, everybody go. Yell out the definition of, you know, how we define career learning on this campus, you get a lot of different results here. Um, but but it begs the question then that we have to figure out a way to define this well. So the key question for today is what aspects of career learning has your campus defined? And notice I'm not talking about what goals has your career center defined. Those are good. We love career centers, but we're we're talking about big beliefs that a campus has about what they believe about the career side of learning. So, Monique and Nick, let's uh look at some examples in our culture where career, where career, where clear definitions about what needs to be done have actually shaped change.

SPEAKER_01 2:17

Yeah, um, Jeremy, one that comes to mind for me is in the medical field. Uh, there was, if we think back to how doctors practiced medicine uh a hundred years ago, 200 years ago, we have learned a lot since then. And even in the past 50 years, there's this idea of evidence-based medicine, medicine that is informed by research and best practices, and we're all agreeing on what actually gets us to the patient outcomes that we need. I mean, we we for the most part, we don't use leeches for bloodletting anymore, right? Um how have we moved from guessing what works to establishing and measuring what is effective and then building best practices around that? So the evidence-based medicine uses those insights and really creates a framework in which doctors could transform medicine and we have better health outcomes to prove for all that.

SPEAKER_00 3:19

Yeah, and when I think about our culture and you know what needs or what needed to be done, and some might argue still needs to be done to continue just to shape change. I think about one of my top leaders that I absolutely love kind of pointing back to, um, which is Dr. Martin Luther King. Not only was he a great orator, I think a great visionary and so forth, but I think just his understanding of the importance of activating an entire country to bring about equal rights through the civil rights movement is just one of the most um palpable examples that I think about in our history. I mean, it brought about the end of segregation, um, it allowed populations to vote that weren't even given that right. And then most of all, it really set the tone for building out equality um under the law.

SPEAKER_02 4:15

Yeah, that's right. And all of those were scripted. They scripted out a very clear agenda and segregation, insure voting rights, achieved legal equality, under the law. I mean, and and in the medicine-based examples as well, Nick. Fantastic. And I I think of the uh one of my favorite books on change, I'd say it's a top five book for me, is the book Switch by Chip and Dan Heath. And they share an incredible example in there about the oil change industry and how people used to just get their oil changed or change their own oil. But when the oil change industry said do this every three months or every 3,000 miles because it's good for your car, it's the best thing for it. All of a sudden there was clarity and cars stopped breaking as much. It also increased business. Uh Uncle Ed's and Grease Monkey and Jiffy Lube, they all popped up where you used to just do it, you know, at the shop. But they clarified, they scripted the path. So let's bring this back to career services today. The career ecosystem era in higher education is a it's a move toward a system whereby every student understands and experiences career learning in the context of their overall college experience. A system where it's no longer optional but embedded into the experience. We're seeing this pop up all over the place. However, we've learned in our consulting practice that it is an absolutely critical first step, just like some of the examples we just talked about with civil rights and medicine and oil changes, that it is a critical first step to define career learning. So, what does it look like when an institution tries to create a career ecosystem without first defining career learning?

SPEAKER_00 6:12

You know, Jeremy, when I think about that, I well, two thoughts come to mind. I'll share the first. I'm currently in the process of building a home and we get to see each layer be done. And they started the builders with the foundation, because without the foundation, the other layers cannot stand. And so um, I think just as I'm a visual learner, that first came to mind. But I mean, honestly, I think when you're in an institution or an environment where you um sort of put the cart before the horse, you you feel like are we dealing with the chicken or the egg? And you really don't know where to go and what to follow. And sadly, I think that lack of clarity can really create confusion, frustration, and ultimately has the potential to lead to a bad and or even worse, a toxic environment.

SPEAKER_01 7:05

Yeah, for sure. Yeah, and building on that without that defined career learning outcome, um, it results in a lot of fragmentation of career preparation for students. So it's experienced very unevenly. If you are in that right major or if you have that right professor, you might have those needs met, but otherwise, you don't know where the gaps are or if we're doing it effectively. And it reminds me of when I go to the grocery store without a plan for the week. I can go to Costco and fill my car with hundreds of dollars of groceries. And then you get home and you're like, why don't I have anything to eat? Right? Or you have lots of stuff to eat, but nothing makes a cohesive dish or a cohesive meal. So it's like, well, guess tonight I'm having scrambled eggs with seaweed powder, right? What other other things they were hawking that day at Costco? And so you get this disconnected dish, and it's not very appealing to not only students, uh, but as well as faculty, uh, other staff across campus, the career center, and you end up with overworked and over-asked campus constituents. So this is a lot of time without that clarity, you see uh career teams who feel burned up. Faculty who say, Don't ask me to do something else, right? But when we create institutional clarity through career learning outcomes, we begin to understand what our recipe of success is, and we can start to build that cohesive dish, that cohesive ecosystem so that all students realize that future career success.

SPEAKER_02 8:50

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SPEAKER_00 9:50

That's super tough because I literally said to myself, I'm going to Costco today and I have no reason to go, but I just like doing it. That's right. I feel like Nick, you're reading my Let's get those samples.

SPEAKER_02 10:01

I live a mile and a half from Costco and it's really dangerous. You mean you can't leave there and only spend$25.

SPEAKER_00 10:08

I need to make sure I go with the list. Okay. You know, so I'm so glad that we're having this conversation because I think one of the biggest things and most important things to do is to explain why career learning, right? So that we have a good understanding of its importance. And so, Jeremy, I'm just wondering if you could elaborate a little bit further on Nick's mentioning of career learning outcomes. So tell us a little bit more about what they are and why do career learning outcomes matter so much, particularly right now.

SPEAKER_02 10:41

Yeah. And, you know, we have these on the academic side of the house, not career learning outcomes, but academic learning outcomes. And they're critical to define what type of knowledge we want students to gain. And they've been there for quite some time and in academia. However, they've not been there from a career learning perspective as a bridge to really illuminate those academic learning outcomes. And so a career learning outcome it describes what the institution or an academic college believes that every student should be able to know related to their career development prior to graduation. Often a set of five to seven clear career learning outcomes built off of high impact practices. And we'll get into that a little bit more later. And the thing I also love about this, we've written about this quite a bit. In fact, I'll put into the the blog feed after this a note from our recent blog post that I wrote on the pressing need for colleges to define career learning outcomes. And it's it's chapter three in the book. I mean, we're we're spending a lot of time and and energy on this because it's so important, and it the lights turn on when everybody understands the clarity here. Um I'll also say about this that we can promise what we're going to teach, but we can't promise jobs. We can try to promise jobs, and sometimes institutions are dancing around that, and I think it gets a little dangerous. It's a bit like promising the stock market is going to work for you. Um but we can promise learning. We've been doing it for years. We can promise what we're going to teach and and develop. And I think learning is the true mission of higher education. So when we we get into actually scripting career learning, we're in a good spot. And and furthermore, parents and students are simply expecting clarity on this today. Um the the the first destination job outcome is just the legs of the table. But the beautiful buffet on top, it's it's uh we want to know what we're paying for, and that that that that buffet that magnetizes us to come there, and that's wow, what are we walking every student through? How are they designing their future? What are you actually doing with them in the preparation realm? So yeah, I think I think that uh you're you're spot on here, um, Monique and Nick, about uh defining career learning outcomes being of the utmost importance.

SPEAKER_00 13:12

Absolutely. And I love a lot of things you said in that designing your future, that's absolutely important. And families and students deserve to know what they're getting into when it comes to career development. Um, one of the things that I think it's always important to highlight is what career learning and career learning outcomes are. But just as much as we're defining what they are, I think it's important to also define what career learning outcomes are not. And so I think it's really important to uh clarify for people to not confuse career learning outcomes with tactics or career office goals, but more so to clarify the difference between the two. So I'm wondering, can you give us some examples of what that is and clarify what career learning outcomes are not for us?

SPEAKER_01 14:02

Yeah, and that's a great point, Monique. I think for um, you know, for uh many of our career offices across the nation, learning outcomes, unless they have a big hand in um first year curriculum, career courses, it's a little bit different of a way of thinking, um, but it's a different way for the campus to think about how they approach um careers. So uh a career learning outcome is not something that students do, but it's something that they learn. All right. So oftentimes when I'm on a campus and we're we're leading design sessions, let's create our career learning outcomes. Someone will say, oh, having a student having a resume, that should be a learning outcome. Uh, but the reality is not every student needs to have a resume. What about a music performance major or an architecture student? So if we think about I need to have a performance or I need to have a portfolio, really it's zooming out and saying, how do I learn, how do I learn how to showcase my skills and experiences? So really, when you zoom out, that's a learning outcome about storytelling about my experience at my institution and what I've gained. So it in that example, a resume is just an artifact of something that I may do that demonstrates my learning, right? So we want to step back and say, what is that learning that we're trying to get at? And that's what we try to measure, right? And similarly, someone may say, attend a workshop at the career center. But but again, that's a tactic. So why is a tactic not a learning outcome? It's because tactics don't actually tell us what is being learned. That is, what are our guiding principles? What do we hope the students learn, not just do, that sets them up for life? Those tactics can help us measure our work, but we don't actually measure what students have learned or gained, right? So it's that idea of a career learning outcome is centered on student learning and not centered on the work that individual staff or faculty may be doing. Uh so uh the way I like to kind of zoom out and think about that is it's a difference between giving a student a fish and saying, check, they ate today versus teaching students how to fish. And that's a skill then that they carry forward for their lifetime, right? So that's the difference between saying, here's a tactic, giving them a fish versus educating them on how to fish. And really, that's that transformative mindset that helps students not just in the present or for their first job, but for their lifetime. And I just think about we we worked with a very high-profile STEM school where they said all of our students have great first jobs, but they're not accelerating in leadership positions five years out like our peer competitors. And they realized it was largely because they were focused on the tactics of giving students fish and not equipping them for that future career success and empowering them with those skills.

SPEAKER_02 17:06

Yeah, so good. And, you know, it's really growing in popularity to lean into learning. And it's not that the tactics go away, they might be part of the learning, but the this this popularity that's behind this, um, let's let's define it a little bit here. So we recently surveyed about 130 institutions about their career readiness strategic plans. And one of the questions we asked was Does your institution have a codified list of career learning outcomes? We wanted to get a kind of a point-in-time guess on our understanding of what is actually happening with developing career learning outcomes. And we found that this topic was one it was that's both a growth area because it needs to be done more, but it's also trending. And here's what I mean by that, because only 18% said yes, we currently have a codified list. 54% said no, but 29% said that it's in process. So we're nearing about we're nearing that 50% mark in the field where I would say by early next year we're gonna see 50% of institutions who have now created a codified list of institution or college-wide career learning outcomes. And I think this is a huge step in the right direction. So let's talk about some institutional examples who we've helped do this and we're who we're seeing do this well. Uh Nick, I think you have a couple of examples uh from our consulting practice.

SPEAKER_01 18:44

Yeah, that's right. We just uh wrapped up uh almost a year-long engagement. Um, that was a phase two from a previous consulting work with uh Auburn University. And through that work, they have a somewhat decentralized career environment. Some colleges have a career office, others don't. Um, and they realized to uh if they're gonna, they're going to lean into supporting the institutional strategic plan and even their accreditation, they needed to think differently about career success on campus. And so we came in and were able to help them actually identify five career learning outcomes that were flexible, that individual colleges could realize them, but there was a level of specificity that they could measure institutionally. How is this occurring for our students? Where are the gaps across the four-year student cycle? Where do colleges need additional support? So we went through, we had a committee. It wasn't just career folks, there were career folks, but there were faculty representation, there was uh associate deans from colleges to come up with these career learning outcomes that have that flexibility and adaptability. And after creating those, they went and uh surveyed uh the deans, got their reactions in the creation of them. Um, and then they were able to create a rubric to ask individual colleges how do you feel these are being realized in your individual colleges and where do you want support? So it actually allowed career staff to better allocate their time and resources as well, once they created them, and it started to centralize and get those guiding principles on the horizon to have everybody going in that same direction. And so there's a lot of energy on their campus, and now it's directing the overall efforts and generating that buy-in with deans, associate deans, the provost office, as well as faculty. And we've seen this on uh smaller scales. We just are finished up a project with uh UMass Dartmouth, um, where we worked uh very much with faculty gen ed committee representation, faculty senate representation, first year seminar to think about how do we think about career learning outcomes institutionally and how do we start to align our work of which career the career office can be an activator of that. And they actually got additional uh grant funding to support using career learning outcomes to integrate into their curriculum and co-curriculum.

SPEAKER_02 21:23

Yeah, I love the two distinct college or campus examples there. And it is it is pretty important to consider institutional context. And I think of our work at UT Austin and how that's a very large federated environment with 19 academic colleges, 19 career offices. And you can't just say, well, let's tomorrow centralize a vision for um for all of our career learning outcomes. However, they can work together and create certain uh institution wide values and bigger buckets. And then like you said, happened at Albernick, the the uh the colleges can then do the work to really create their own language and own meaning behind that. So uh I love that the learning outcomes themselves and the process can be flexible to meet whatever campus environment presents itself.

SPEAKER_00 22:21

Yeah, that's a great all those are some really great insights around career learning outcomes. And I think when we consider how many different campuses and institutions that we've worked with, we could honestly say we've seen them create various different um versions of career learning outcomes, which is great because no two campuses are alike. And so I'm just wondering, um, Jeremy, if you can give some examples of what you would label as powerful career learning outcomes for campuses to consider.

SPEAKER_02 22:57

Yeah, that's great. And I think the good news is here, you you don't have to reinvent the wheel, but you do have to make the wheel your own wheel. So this is this is not a curriculum overhaul. It's not developing a trade school mentality. And when done well, defining career learning illuminates academic learning in a way that matters to students and parents and leads students into practical applications of their career pursuits. So I I recommend and we recommend often basing your career learning outcomes on national best practices that have already been identified as effective. They're practical, they're high impact. Um, and there are a few different sources that you can look at to walk through this. We a few of my favorites are the high impact career practices from Lightcast, uh National Alumni Career Mobility Survey, the NACE career readiness competencies, and the Gallup Purdue Index Report. From those findings, there's some clear starting points with developing career learning outcomes. And I'll list six of them that I think are needed in the mix at some point. Um, and I'll frame this as we believe statements, because that's in essence what you're creating. And then you can put learning and rubrics and all the exemplary things behind them. Uh the first is career design, and something about believing every student will be able to explore their career options and design a plan for their future. The second is experiential learning, that every student will engage in hands-on activities such as internships or research that complements their desired career path. Uh there's a bucket that needs to be related to skills and competencies, uh, that every student can gain certain skills. And I think that's that's one bucket. I don't think you need to have nine buckets related to that. Um, that they can fall under one big bucket of skills and competencies. Um there's a bucket related to connections that students can build relationships with employers and alumni, and there's a way to teach about that, or community members in their field, in the career fields that they want to explore. Uh there's there's one that, and this one comes up on every single uh project that we do is articulation. That we we we need to lead students into the ability to articulate their value and their skills to employers, to graduate schools. Um and then the final that we see often that I would recommend get into the mix at some point is the ability to launch a job or internship search campaign that every student would know how to effectively do that. So these are these are important variables to have. And like I said, we didn't just make these up for this podcast. These have come out of some research that's been ongoing and looked at for multiple years with employers, alumni, um, folks that are um succeeding in their career fields. And so uh take take these aspects and don't feel like you have to start from scratch.

SPEAKER_00 26:04

Yeah, that's great, Jeremy. And and Nick, how would you um describe this when how would you describe the shift of the student experience when particularly some of those career learning outcomes that Jeremy just mentioned are institutionalized?

SPEAKER_01 26:22

Yeah, and and I love that all the examples he shared do not require a student going to a particular office, right? So students could realize all of those uh career learning outcomes without having to go meet with an individual outside of their curricular context. So the shift really becomes student-centric, right? And that's super important, particularly if we think about first gen students, those working part-time, those who are taking care of parents, of kids, multiple responsibilities, but everybody benefits, right? Um, when we can have that career success embedded and activated and cultivated by the career office. Um, it really uh helps students when they're institutionalized. Again, things are not fragmented and disconnected. So we don't have students falling through the cracks. And it occurs when uh students need it. So a lot of times people say, oh, we do a lot of that in the senior seminar. Well, that's too late. So, how do we think about this earlier on? An example, we worked with uh University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley, UTRGV to not only develop their career learning outcomes, but realign their freshman seminar classes to support and serve as the foundation of their career journey in their curriculum. And now they're doing that work in their second year of courses as well. So it really started to reorient things in ways that can positively impact retention, persistence, let alone graduation and outcomes. Um, and again, that how does that shift that student experience? I just think of a personal example. I was a business major and I was a religious studies minor. I was one of the few. That's not a common pairing. Uh, and I use that example when we're talking with faculty campuses about shifting to career learning outcomes because it can help students see value in what they're learning. So I say if you have teach a religious studies class at the end, you can ask all your students, regardless of major, uh, how might what you learn in this class help you with your future career goals? And that gets at articulation, right? That Jeremy talked about. What are the skills that I've developed? If you think about that, I if I'm a finance student with a religious studies minor, I could understand how different faiths or religions may not agree with all investments. Or as a doctor, a medical professional, how does it impact how I'm going to serve a constituent who have different beliefs about different medical practices? So ultimately, that shows by doing this well, when we institutionalize it, students actually increase learning within the classroom when it's tied to their future career goals. And then they see an increased value of the class and their institution overall. And so when they leave, they're going to say, not only was my degree worth it, but I am an advocate for higher education because it gave me the skills to be successful because career success was institutionalized.

SPEAKER_00 29:30

Yeah, that's fantastic, Nick. And I think this is really great because in many ways we are sharing career learning outcomes in a way that displays how they can be activated and implemented. And so I'm going to take us back a little bit to ideation, if we can go there for those wondering where do I start? And so, Jeremy, I'm just wondering if you can share what are some of the best ways to go about developing career learning outcomes as a campus.

SPEAKER_02 30:00

Yeah, read page 97 and call me tomorrow. So, no, you know, I you'd think I'd have the whole book memorized, but that's the only page I actually know because this question gets asked a lot. And uh that page 97 in the Career Ecosystem Area in Higher Education is about the task force that defines your career learning outcomes. And I think, you know, in higher ed, when we have a really well-done strategic task force that can come around this, uh, we can create those college-wide or institution-wide career learning outcomes. And it's not a Herculean task, it's not something that's going to take a year. Uh, it really is uh a handful of means, you know, we've done this in one retreat before. We we it does take a little bit of time to then, like Nick gave the example of workshop with these with the deans, workshop these with key stakeholders afterwards. So there is a drafting process and a little bit of buy-in, but this can be done looking at national research well, it just but it does take that task force. So I think it's from a development standpoint, that's one of the best starting spots. Um and while the task force is crucial, I I think some of those listening today might want to help their institution even a step further back and buy into defining career success for all students. So Monique and Nick, for you both, what are what are some realistic first steps?

SPEAKER_00 31:33

Yeah, I think back to my days of working at various institutions and then also thinking about what it was that I wanted to just grasp that students could understand. And not just students, but faculty, staff, prospective families that really would bear fruit once students were graduates and once they were alumni of the institutions. And I think what resonated most with me then, and what still resonates most with me now, is um the National Alumni Career Mobility Survey that was um created by the collective and is now Pumber by Lightness. I think the six high impact career practices, if you have no idea where to start building your career learning outcomes, I think those six are such a helpful. I talked about the fact the home building and the foundation. I think if you have those six high impact career learning practices as your foundation, I think that is a beautiful place to start to be able to then build those different layers for the architect of a great um design for career learning outcomes.

SPEAKER_01 32:48

Yeah, and I'd say too, just thinking about you have to get the conversation started. So, what's going to get the conversation started in the first place on your campus is kind of like the idea, as you talked about Jeremy with the oil change. It's 3,000 miles or three months. Getting that in people's minds that starts the conversation, starts the action. And I really think the best place to do that is helping your campus understand the career ecosystem era. So again, that shift from the career counselor era to the career center era to the career ecosystem era and showcasing other institutions that are doing it. Um, but keeping in mind we don't want to just replicate, but our ecosystem is different, right? Even in the same community, in the same conference, right? We're our unique ecosystem, but we can still start to uh talk and use that language so that we can begin a conversation uh with each other about this new uh era that we're moving into. Uh, and then we can start talking about those career learning outcomes.

SPEAKER_02 33:55

Fantastic. And well, we covered a lot of ground today, you all, from shopping at Costco to getting our oil changed to uh making sure we have a foundation and blueprint for the house we build and um and not using leeches to let blood out of our system. So if you got nothing else, you know, you get all these practical life hacks from the career leadership collective. No, but in all sincerity, uh let's bring it back to the the initial premise that defining career learning is is really essential if you want to orient the campus around success in this area. Otherwise, it does it sits in that space of fragmented, left-to-chance, optional. And in this day and age today, with what parents and and students are expecting at all institutional types. It is it is an absolute necessity. And so we hope that you are on this journey to define career learning, define career success for your student body, and that this is uh helpful to your cause today. Um, and we invite you to catch all the episodes of the Career Leadership or the Career Ecosystem Era in Higher Education podcast, and subscribe to the podcast and to our newsletter. You can do so at career leadership collective.com slash podcast. Of course, if you haven't read the book, The Career Ecosystem Era in Higher Education, we encourage you to do so. And send us your questions, your thoughts on what's working as you build out your career ecosystem and the challenges you'd like for us to address on the podcast. You can send us those to podcast at Career Leadership Collective.com. It is a joy that we are building a new era together. So bye for now.