Spotlight for Career Services Professionals, January 18, 2012
Engagement and assessment: These two areas present key challenges for most career services offices. Although Le Moyne College is not immune to these challenges, it has been trying to meet them head-on.
Mark Schappert, Le Moyne’s associate director of career services, says the foundation of the first challenge—to engage, teach, and advise students who could benefit from the office’s career development resources and programming—is based more on the percentage of students the career services office reaches.
“If we don’t just count numbers of appointments or workshop attendees, but looked at percentage of the target population we engage, we are far from our goal of advancing the career development of most of our students,” Schappert explains.
He notes that the second challenge relates to knowing what students learn from career services and providing some evidence of that learning.
“Our traditional approaches to career development alone—individual appointments and group workshops—lack structure and are piecemeal,” he says. “They are largely reactive, weak in incentives, and lack student accountability, unlike graded academics. These approaches are still largely event or activity focused rather than outcomes focused.”
Le Moyne’s career services office took two major steps to address these challenges. First, it began partnering with others—department heads, faculty, deans, and program directors—who see the value of career readiness programs and who can encourage or require students to become engaged with career services. For example, the division of management and its dean are working with career services to launch a new career development program for all undergraduate business-related majors. The program will lay out a required four-year sequence of online and workshop learning.
Despite challenges, including a realignment in reporting lines, Schappert notes that the benefits of the outreach are worth the extra effort.
“Partnering with others has been very helpful,” he says. “I think it’s very hard for career services to get the results we want by ourselves.”
Technological integration has also been a boon to career readiness preparedness and assessment efforts.
“It occurred to me that e-learning and learning portfolios were great newer tools that could potentially strengthen our overall approach to student career development,” Schappert says.
In 2009, he helped create a comprehensive online student career development system to address major areas associated with career development, such as self-assessment, career exploration, job-search skill development, graduate school applications, and more.
“We use our online career development system to record what transpired and what students got out of it,” Schappert explains. “It’s also like a toolbox. It holds all kinds of career development instruments, resources, information, and guidance, and puts them in one place.”
The system is designed to be used by students throughout their undergraduate college careers, ideally beginning in their first year. Career services staff can access student accounts to review student input, assess progress, and provide feedback.
Early results have been positive: In the first pilot, which used first-year students, documented learning outcomes in the four identified areas—such as “Students will be able to identify and briefly describe their top three Holland types and code”—ranged from 73 percent to 78 percent. In the second pilot, completed in 2010-11, students were required to complete specific modules, and more than 90 percent used the system to do so and demonstrated attainment of at least three basic resume guidelines.
Since the pilots, other academic departments have approached career services about partnering.
“We’re called career services, but ‘services’ doesn’t have anything to do with outcomes; it has to do with output,” Schappert says. “We’re trying to advance the idea of not just focusing on what we put out, but on the impact we have on our students.”