Mapping the Future of Undergraduate Career Education

Equitable Career Learning, Development, and Preparation in the New World of Work

Melanie V. Buford, Michael J. Sharp, Michael J. Stebleton, Melanie V. Buford, Michael J. Sharp, Michael J. Stebleton

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000602579
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Bildung
• Categoría: Hochschulausbildung

This timely book explores current trends and future possibilities for undergraduate career education, the nature of the changing workplace, and its impact on students in colleges and universities.

Built on decades of experience in career development and professional learning, the editors raise and investigate multiple critical issues facing career educators in higher education today: preparing students for the future of work; exploring the increasing centrality of experiential learning in career education; examining innovative paradigm shifts in career education; and developing strategies for equity-focused and inclusive programming for all students.

Reckoning with the effects of Covid-19 on the world of career development, this book draws on contributions from leading scholars, entrepreneurs, and practitioners from across the fields of education, business, STEM, and the humanities to offer an inclusive and innovation-focused approach to supporting scholars, practitioners, and students involved with career education, development, and counseling for a new generation – and a new world of work.

Part IThe Landscape of Undergraduate Career Education and the World of Work

1Present and Future Innovation in Career Education

Melanie V. Buford

DOI: 10.4324/9781003213000-3

The Seeds of Innovation

The world of work continues to change, ushering in a reshaping of both the structure and nature of career (Abe, 2021; Avis, 2020; Hall & Associates, 1996; McKinsey & Company, 2020; Schwab, 2016). Along with these changes, the workforce continues to evolve and diversify (AAUW, 2020; Ciocirlan & Pettersson, 2012; Olinger, 2011; US Census, 2017), reflecting our changing world. People of different gender, racial, cultural, and generational identities, with a range of abilities and goals, infuse new priorities into both higher education and the marketplace, expanding the international conversation on the nature of meaningful work and recontextualizing our pressing social, technical, and political challenges. Generation Z, born between 1995 and 2010 (Seemiller & Grace, 2019), is only the most recent voice in this conversation. As a result of many of these developments, undergraduate career education has already begun a process of rebirth, to better reflect a new age of connection, information, technology, and diversity (Contomanolis et al., 2015; Dey & Cruzvergara, 2014).

For our purposes, I will briefly highlight four powerful innovations in the field of undergraduate career education: technology and scalability; curricular integration of career content; emphasis on experiential learning; and the implementation of design-thinking principles. These concepts will be expanded upon in later chapters, but for now, I will provide a conceptual overview of these phenomena, each of which has gained momentum over the last ten years. Though it will not appear on this list of structural innovations, equity and inclusion has received more and more focus in higher education – and in career education – over the last few decades (Alon & Tienda, 2007; Bikos et al., 2013; Brint, 2009; Burke et al., 2016; Pasque et al., 2016). In career education, both practitioners and scholars have turned their attention to equity and addressing the needs of underserved students. Part II of this book will discuss those efforts in more detail.

Technology and Scalability

According to a National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) report (2009), more than half of college career centers faced a decrease in their operating budgets in the 2009–2010 school year, many of which have never fully recovered in the intervening decade (NACE, 2020). This was consistent with impacts to higher education in general, following the 2008 recession. At the same time, new technologies offered new opportunities to provide services at scale. Career centers – forced to think more strategically about vision, reach, and brand – adopted software solutions to support recruiting, connecting with employers, and marketing and service delivery to students (New, 2016). They also needed to support their funding requests and corporate partnership proposals with data about student needs. Here, technology provided assistance. A growing emphasis on the collection of data on attendance, postgraduate employment, satisfaction, and learning outcomes drove partnerships with new software vendors. GradLeaders is one such vendor. According to the career-center-facing page of their website, they offer “all the tools you need to better prepare your students for the workforce and prove the value of services and education you provide” (GradLeaders, 2021). Social media emerged as another strategy to connect with students and market services, with the added benefit of facilitating employer connections and networking. In general, offices turned their attention to strategic planning, improving efficiency, reducing redundancies, and occasionally merging to centralize efforts (Dey & Cruzvergara, 2014).

Though the adoption of new technologies has often generated a certain amount of fear in higher education (Stoller, 2015), a number of platforms have emerged and have been integrated into the delivery of career services. Christine Cruzvergara is the Chief Education Strategy Officer at Handshake – a leading student employment connection application that now serves more than 7 million students and 1,100 college and university partners (Handshake, 2021). According to Cruzvergara, career management technology-based platforms such as Handshake, VMock, Riipen, and Quinccia are growing in usage in career services offices. They have increased the efficacy and reach of career centers, often addressing five main areas of need: supporting resume writing and interview preparation, connecting students with employment opportunities, facilitating experiential learning, supporting mentorship initiatives, and providing information about working and living abroad (C. Cruzvergara, personal communication, February 10, 2021).

In many cases, these new software solutions were adopted in order to address the decline in fiscal investment in career services. They have additional benefits, including expanding access to career services, so that students can utilize programs from a distance, at any time of day or night, in different languages, and at their own pace. This has appealed to those members of Generation Z who value accessibility and connectivity (Prensky, 2001; Seemiller & Grace, 2019). These solutions also offer possibilities for tracking and content delivery at scale, which promises to expand career education efforts, at worst, and evolve them, at best. Yet technology presents limitations, such as the need for hardware and internet access and a certain baseline technical sophistication to fully benefit from the programs available. Income, cultural barriers, access to technology, and age might all play a role in whether or not students can access these types of programs.

Elevation of Career Services Leadership. In recent years, many college and university career centers have received more resources, recognition, and elevation (Chan, 2013; Dey & Cruzvergara, 2014; Lederman, 2021). This support has only bolstered those innovative scaling efforts born in leaner times. The 2019–2020 NACE Career Services Benchmarks Survey Report for Colleges and Universities (NACE, 2020) – which collected data just before the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic – provided a snapshot of the structure of contemporary college and university career centers. It highlighted a few key trajectories. Indeed, there has been a pronounced elevation in titles of career center leadership. The percentage of career services leaders being granted elevated titles has gone from 12% in the 2017–2018 survey, to 25.3% in 2019–2020. Most offices surveyed maintained a centralized structure (68.4%), although many of them explored hybrid structures. Elevation and centralization often come with wider responsibility, necessitating varied services that can reach a large percentage of the student body. Centers today provide a range of offerings, including career fairs, experiential learning support, assessment, on-campus interviews, both virtual and in-person coaching appointments for individuals and groups, advising, and support for specific student populations. Staffing has gradually increased over the last several years, as the importance of return on investment for higher education looms large. Of course, Covid-19 impacted this trajectory, bringing new financial uncertainty and stress to career center leadership and staff (Handshake, 2020).

Role of Peer Coaching. One innovative effort aimed at addressing the scalability problem is the development of peer coaching programs. As the workplace changes, employees are called upon to learn a range of skills, develop self-direction and confidence, navigate issues of identity and culture, and manage transitions and uncertainty. Mentoring has been found to support the development of these types of skills in career (Crisp et al., 2017). This is especially true for students with marginalized identities (Crisp et al., 2017; Museus & Neville, 2012; Parker, 2008; Tovar, 2014). Peer career coaching presents a number of benefits at the college level:

Career learning as a relational activity includes the ability to self-reflect and expand self-awareness, personally assess what is known and what needs to be known, and to adapt to the situation by altering behavior and attitudes…Support and challenge from a trusted peer, through the peer-coaching process, can provide a powerful form of this accelerated career learning.

(Parker, 2008, p. 491)

A number of centers have recognized the inherent potential in peer coaching, not just for engaging students in the career development process, but for addressing staffing shortages and budget cuts. Mary T. Calhoon, Assistant Dean of Students at University of Nevada, Reno, shared her experience of scaling career services by adopting a peer coaching model. In 2013, Calhoon was hired to redesign career services after recession-driven cutbacks resulted in the closure of her university’s central career center. She and one other staff member were charged with delivering career services to approximately 20,000 students. Embracing the concept of student empowerment, they hired a team of “career mentors” drawn from the student population itself to address individual questions. They verified their success using two metrics: self-reported increases in student confidence and clarity after peer coaching and an increase in career center touchpoints with students as a result of greater staff engagement in workshops and in classrooms. Meeting the need for one-to-one appointments through peer coaching allowed their professional coaching to increase student reach by creating more large-scale programming (Calhoon, 2018).

Peer coaching, technology, and other scalability solutions have allowed centers to widen their impact on students across campus and at distance. This, combined with the elevation of structural prominence for a number of centers and directors, has increased the visibility of career services in higher education. A 2020 Forbes opinion piece went so far as to suggest that career services may yet save higher education, counteracting declining enrollment across the industry. According to Busteed (2020):

Career services may be the most important yet underappreciated function in higher education…it will become one of the most important drivers of enrollment growth as students and parents seek career outcomes as their top reason for attending.

(Busteed, para. 1)

Busteed (2020) specifically cited the rise in demand for career services at colleges and universities, underscoring the need to offer career support more widely. This effort to equitably reach more students is consistent with Dey and Cruzvergara’s championing of the rising prominence of career services and their emphasis on outcomes, statistics, enrollment, and recruitment (Lede...