Some colleges have put career development front and center. Students start working with career counselors before they even take their first class. Career planning and experiential learning are woven into their academic studies. A team of engaged advisers strive to help them discover how to make a living doing something they love.
By the time they graduate, these students will have created portfolios documenting their skills for employers. And should they face professional challenges after graduation, their alma mater will be ready to help then, too.
Such innovation gets a lot of attention, but many colleges lag far behind. For them, preparing students for the work force falls to a small staff with meager resources working in a silo. It may amount to little more than résumé-writing workshops and lists of alumni.
That won’t cut it anymore. As employers, parents, and lawmakers expect colleges to do more to ensure that degrees lead to jobs, such colleges—especially those that focus on the liberal arts—will have to catch up.
Doing so comes down to leadership, says Andy Chan, vice president for personal and career development at Wake Forest University. “The way change has to happen,” says Mr. Chan, whose work redefining career education at Wake Forest has become a touchstone in the field, “is that the presidents have to support, and endorse, and communicate that this is important.”
TAKEAWAY
Key Ideas From Revamped Careers Offices
- Making career development an institutional priority requires buy-in from the president.
- For small colleges, getting corporate recruiters’ attention can be tricky. Banding together can help.
- For large colleges, reaching every student is a challenge. New technologies might make it easier.
Even then, challenges remain. For small colleges, capturing the attention of corporate recruiters isn’t easy, Mr. Chan says. For larger ones, like his own, the trick is reaching every student.
Big companies deal in volume, and often use a “key schools” recruiting model, focusing their efforts on a small number of large institutions, says Robert Bartlett, who has worked in corporate relations at two universities and wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on the topic. Now president of the Michigan Colleges Alliance, which represents 15 private colleges in the state, Mr. Bartlett saw a way to give small colleges more career clout. Corporate recruiters aren’t likely to put in the time or the money to visit the alliance’s member colleges individually. But taken together, “we represent the third largest university in Michigan,” he points out.
In this time of constrained resources, there’s a lot of talk about how colleges might save money and have more of an impact by working together. The alliance has put this approach into action.
Several years back, “we basically flipped the key schools on its head,” Mr. Bartlett says, “and created a key-company system.”
Member colleges identify students who might fit the bill for participating companies’ internships or job openings. Companies decide which students they want to meet. Then, reversing the traditional college job fair, the colleges bring all of those students to the employer. The alliance calls the program “Concierge Career Connection,” and now organizes student visits for 10 or 12 companies each year.
On average, the member colleges have fewer than four career-office staff members each, according to the alliance. Working together gives them an outsize reach.
One advantage these visits have over a job fair is the employer gets the candidates all to itself, says Roger Jansen, chief strategy officer and chief human resources officer at Spectrum Health, a company with hospitals, medical groups, and an insurance plan that’s based in western Michigan.
Last year the alliance sent résumés from about a hundred of its students to Stryker, a medical-device company based in Kalamazoo, says Jeff Batuhan, the company’s senior director of global talent acquisition. The company ultimately hired five. That might not sound like a lot, Mr. Batuhan says, but it represents a strong conversion rate: In traditional recruiting, “sometimes we meet hundreds of students on campus at a single university and may just hire one.”
For all the attention Wake Forest has devoted to career development, it still doesn’t reach every student. Mr. Chan estimates that some 75 percent of students take advantage of its programs.
Certain types of students are more likely to go unreached, including first-generation and minority students, athletes, and art majors, he says. Mr. Chan thinks technology can help, and he serves as an adviser to the chief executive of Handshake, a product meant to do just that.
Handshake replaces traditional career-development software with a platform designed to improve the way employers and students connect on campus. When a college uses Handshake, each student gets a profile, explains Garrett Lord, chief executive and co-founder, who got the idea as a student at Michigan Tech. Colleges can give employers access to those profiles, and track what happens to their students.
Handshake uses algorithms to connect students to information that their experience suggests would interest them, and even sends notifications though its own mobile app and others students already use. The idea is to meet students where they are. Most use Handshake on their phones.
The platform is meant to go viral on a campus. Perhaps only a small minority of students will ever be active posters, but most will at least monitor what their friends are up to, Mr. Lord says. “I’d love to connect with 90 percent of students on every campus Handshake is deployed at,” he says.
That, he admits, is an ambitious goal. But success doesn’t depend on getting students to visit a physical office on campus, just to build one more app into their day. So maybe it could work. Handshake is live at about a dozen colleges now, Mr. Lord says, and the company plans to add 65 more in the fall.
Mr. Chan, for one, is impressed with what Handshake can do. It provides the same services as existing career-office products, he says, in a more student-friendly way. If it works as well as he hopes, reaching every student might really be possible—even for colleges where career development has not yet been given pride of place.
