Start of Something New: Fresh Takes & New Ideas on Student Engagement

Location: Austin / Boston

Engaging Through Social Media
by: Emma Andruczyk

Social media has quickly become a mainstream way to communicate, and professionals working with college students are not immune to this phenomenon. How are career practitioners able to get the most out of their social media use in a meaningful way? Kettunen, Sampson, & Vuorinen (2015) present 4 ways to think about how career practitioners use social media in practice, including:
-Category one focuses on the information delivery (ex. resume writing techniques on department websites)
-Category two emphasizes connecting with the desired audience through content/marketing (ex. Facebook and Twitter)
-Category three is an educational and instructional focus (ex. boards on Pinterest)
-Category four is where practitioners co-career by sharing their expertise and engaging with clients in a virtual conversational setting (ex. message boards, or reddit) Often times, practitioners approach social media from the first two categories (Makela & Kettunen, in preparation). For those hoping to use social media in new ways to further enhance their competency, they must cultivate their “awareness of the varying models of career interventions with online technologies” (Kettunen, Sampson, & Vuorinen, 2015) and find innovative ways to develop the other categories. During this presentation we will discuss our experiences, and motivations for deepening our digital competencies focusing on social media. We will describe an “Ask Me Anything” event that our department held in the social media platform reddit, and why we chose this platform to co-career. Through this presentation, participants will be challenged to consider and investigate new ways to engage students in online environments.

Enhancing Career Readiness through Experiential Learning
by: Arlinda Pringle & Shawn Turner-Pewitt

More than ever, it is imperative that students work to develop a career plan before graduation. Career readiness encompasses much planning, action and execution, in addition to possessing various competencies that employers are seeking. From oral communication to professionalism to leadership, building the necessary competencies in the students that we work with is of the utmost importance in order for them to thrive professionally. As career professionals, we constantly emphasize the importance of these competencies. However, experience can be the best teacher! In this flash talk, we will discuss the role of experiential learning and how it could be used to both build necessary competencies and enhance career readiness in students.

We are the Champions: Successes in Career Development

Location: Columbus

Do you aspire to re-energize your career fair? Discover an easy and cost-effective way to empower students, re-energize your career fair, and get students hired! At the University of Michigan School of Information, the Career Development Team conducted a cost/benefit analysis to look closely at our career fair outcomes. What we found was not surprising: students hate the long lines, don’t know how to “pitch” to employers, and employers participate primarily for branding. Our data showed that less than 10% of students received jobs or internships as a result of the fair. These results triggered the idea to try something new to re-energize the format and allow students ways to stand out from the long lines to showcase their uniqueness and passion to employers. This is when the idea for Elevate Your Passion EYP program started. EYP is made up of a select group of students who apply and receive training to present a TED talk style presentation to employers. The goal is to provide students with greater visibility to articulate their passion to employers through a pitch & storytelling event as a launch to our career fair. Since the launch of EYP, evaluations and outcomes reported have improved significantly; 60% of students are reporting jobs and internship outcomes as a result of participating in EYP.  "I learned to articulate my story through Elevate Your Passion, and it helped propel me through applications, cover letters, interviews, all the way to a full-time internship at Facebook this summer." "After I gave my presentation, a recruiter came up to me and said 'you have to come be a part of our organization'. And that's exactly what I did." What we hope to accomplish through this session is to provide a framework to launch a similar approach to re-energizing your next career fair.

Budgets are tight, staff stretched thin, and more students are walking through our doors. Is it possible to provide the “Wow Factor” and create popular, impactful site visits that benefit candidate and employer audiences? Learn how a Midwestern graduate program started small and dreamed big – moving from local visits to nationwide activities, using alumni and advancement partnerships to ensure success. Becoming a savvy interview candidate is enhanced if you’ve visited employers and seen the workplace in action. Many students only know what they’ve heard from peers and alumni, or seen on social media. Traveling on-site is instructive, eye-catching, memorable, and impactful for both candidates and employers. But is it too expensive? Where do you find the time The School of Labor and Employment Relations (LER) on campus at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has moved from visits across town to visits across the country – starting years ago with the question of “how do I afford a bus” to today’s question of “how do we pare down the list of students asking to join so we can fit at the facility?” Different trips of different scopes will be possible for different career centers, depending on size, location, and student audience. This talk will illuminate creative ways to push the envelope on what’s possible, and become “the talk of the town” with students. LER’s new TraveLER series has allowed students to visit companies like Tesla, Facebook, Boeing and Amazon. How is that possible? Who helps to make this happen? Who benefits the most? And how can we make this a cycle, with future students paying it forward as alumni? This presentation will cover the evolution of LER site visits, partnerships, budgeting, alumni involvement, social media coverage, and student feedback. Hear about this, and about our desired next steps.

It's My Life: Advocating for Diverse Populations: Advocating for Diverse & Underrepresented Populations

Location: Marriott 4

Join us for discussion on the top habits that hold women back from being seen or considered for more senior and leadership roles per the new book How Women Rise by Sally Helgesen & Marshall Goldsmith. The book presents the 12 habits that hold women back and this quick session will present that for thought and action planning whether it is reading the book, speaking to a mentor or just some critical reflection.

The session starts with a personal story of a lost boy who fled Iran and how meeting a stranger changed his life for the better. Amir will discuss his journey from the days of oppression in Iran to fleeing the country. His lucky encounter with a stranger when he was a 17-year-boy, how the kind stranger helped mentor Amir and his role as the lead for the Diversity and Inclusion office of a Fortune 500. He will discuss how this "lucky encounter" evolved into a much greater phenomenon: The opportunity gap that exists amongst our youth. This will be followed by a discussion around what grit is and why it is so important for us to pay attention to metrics such as grit so that life-changing events discussed above are not left to luck. The presenter will display several student profiles that appear to be average in today’s recruitment world and showcase how our current hiring processes are limited and blinding us. The last portion of the presentation will focus on avenues and potential solutions to help level the playing field for so many young people. Session format "A Lucky Encounter", Amir’s personal story Where we are today? What is grit and why should we care? How can we do better? Discussion plus Q&A

Stop. Collaborate and Listen.

Location: Marriott 1

Alumni often have missed the whole internet job search skill set and for the first time need to quickly learn how to be pro-active and/or confidential in their searches. Reasons are plenty: Career advancement, a shift in passion, better benefits, burnout, or career transition are some of the triggers that might possibly motivate you to rewrite your resume and launch a job search. Clearly, this is a very sensitive aspect of your career and should be approached with caution and solid information on achieving success. Learn what to do and what not to do when conducting a confidential job search.Handouts will be provided so you can easily share this valuable information.

Student Employment Integration: A Strategy to Streamline Student Interactions and Energize Career Services
by: Jason Eckert

Click here for the PPT presentation

• Unique Campus Recruiting Events
• Engaging Students with Accepted Offers Before They Start
• Engaging Students Who Decline Your Offer
• Professional Development Workshops/Topics for Interns
• Managing Rescinded Offers
• Ghosting in the Recruiting/Hiring/First Day of Work

External Facing First Destination Outcomes Dashboards
by: Jamie Cavey Lang, recipient of the John D. Shingleton Award for Innovation

We have created a dashboard that is accessible by the public and is reflective of our first destination survey and the outcomes. (Website: https://careers.uiowa.edu/post-graduation-data) Why did we make these?: Over the past several years, we have been benchmarking to ensure that our students are obtaining successful jobs/experiences post-graduation in comparison with peer institutions. Through this benchmarking, we realized that there was a lack of transparency at many schools and we thought we would try to start a new trend. Additional reasons for dashboards: (a) company HR professionals to see salary trends by major/job title/etc. (b) prospective students to see what types of jobs/graduate schools students are graduating with/attending (c) more efficient than completing a request for every individual that calls our office (d) increased data transparency in line with the University of Iowa’s goals (e) allow students to see grade point ranges for students that are continuing education in specific fields and the list goes on.What are they?: Two external dashboards are currently available - one focused on employment and the other on continuing education. We have included the most recent 3 years of data in aggregate form for each major/program from the University of Iowa. There are mechanisms and algorithms in place to make sure that sensitive information (i.e. salary) will not be shown if there are too few responses. The dashboards are interactive and allow for people to search by state, job title, college, and many other ways.How did we do this?: These dashboards were created through a partnership on campus with our Business Intelligence Shared Services Center (BISSC) Team using Microsoft Power BI. We worked with campus partners – admissions, college personnel, academic advisors, etc. – to determine what to include and what would be the most useful.Do we have more dashboards?: Currently, we have several internal dashboards that University of Iowa personnel can request access to that go a bit more in depth and touch on other features in our career center. Looking forward we would like to create an external dashboard for experiential education experiences and what alumni are doing 5 years post-grad.

First Destination Survey Non-Completers: Understanding the Effectiveness of Survey and Communications Tools
by: Stephen Roach, recipient of the John Steele Grant