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In 2020, Moravian University’s Institutional Strategy and Positioning Study revealed that prospective students and families were increasingly focused on outcomes and return on investment.
“In our effort to understand how higher education needed to evolve to meet the changing expectations of students and families, we found that they wanted confidence that a Moravian education would translate into meaningful careers and long-term success,” says Kristin Eicholtz, Moravian’s Dean for the Laurie Riley '82 Center for Career Success.
To meet these expectations, Moravian developed the Elevate Experience (Elevate).
“This initiative emerged as a bold, research-informed response to the study’s insights,” Eicholtz explains.
“Elevate’s design aligns Moravian’s academic strengths with clear, tangible career and life outcomes, integrating leadership and teamwork development, experiential learning, global perspectives, and career preparation across the undergraduate experience.”
A Shared Effort
From the start, Elevate was built as a shared effort. Eicholtz says that cabinet members engaged key stakeholders across the Moravian community—including students, alumni, faculty, staff, regional employers, and the Board of Trustees—not just to review research but to actively shape the vision and design of the experience.
“Framing these conversations around data, outcomes, and lived experience helped build trust and alignment, ensuring that Elevate reflected both Moravian’s values and the real needs of the communities we serve,” she says.
In this campus-wide effort, faculty, staff, students, alumni, and employer partners worked together to connect academics, career preparation, and real-world experience.
The administration supported this work with long-term investments, including:
- Expanding career support;
- Funding global experiences;
- Developing new academic programs;
- Building a skills-based badging system; and
- Establishing a career promise that guarantees post-graduation outcomes.
“Today, the ongoing launch and growth of Elevate is stewarded by these same partners, with teams across academic and co-curricular areas continuing to refine and evolve the program,” Eicholtz notes.
For prospective students and families, Moravian integrates Elevate messaging into recruitment materials, campus visits, admissions communications, and digital campaigns, highlighting the tangible career and experiential outcomes students can achieve.
“For employers and community partners, we leverage targeted outreach, events, and partnership opportunities to showcase how Elevate equips students with career-ready skills, leadership experience, and global perspectives,” Eicholtz says.
“We also use storytelling, sharing student success stories and testimonials, to illustrate the impact of the experience. Across all audiences, the emphasis is on Elevate as a differentiator: a program that blends academic rigor, experiential learning, and career preparation into a cohesive undergraduate experience.”
A Fully Integrated Experience
Elevate’s success is rooted in its intentional design as a fully integrated undergraduate experience, rather than as a standalone career experience.
Key elements of the program include:
- Early and sustained engagement beginning in the summer before a student’s first year;
- Alignment with the NACE Career Readiness Competencies; and
- The seamless integration of academic learning, experiential opportunities, global travel, leadership development, and career development.
Students are supported through a structured pathway that includes cohort-based advising; required career touchpoints; experiential learning; and career readiness digital badging, ensuring career readiness is built progressively rather than reactively.
“This clarity of structure and regular communication on progress reduces ambiguity for students and reinforces consistent expectations across the undergraduate experience,” Eicholtz says.
“Equally important is Elevate’s scalability and adaptability. Our Career Readiness Digital Badging Program powered by Suitable allows students to engage at varying depths while providing the institution with real-time engagement data.”
She points out that students can earn digital badging points for most co-curricular experiences, ranging from joining a campus organization to completing 140+ hours of internship experience for academic credit.
Partnerships with faculty, alumni, and employers extend learning beyond the classroom and ensure relevance to workforce needs.
“Together,” Eicholtz adds, “these elements create a sustainable ecosystem where career readiness is embedded into the culture of the institution and reinforced through multiple, aligned touchpoints rather than isolated interventions.”
A Team Effort
Elevate’s Career Success Teams are organized using a cohort-based advising model that assigns students to career professionals based on class year: the first- and second-year cohort and the third- and fourth-year cohort.
“This structure ensures that students receive timely, relevant support that is developmentally aligned with their academic and career journey,” Eicholtz says.
Each team is composed of three professional staff members who deliver one-to-one coaching, classroom presentations, workshops, and experiential programming. Career Success Teams’ responsibilities include:
- Advising;
- Employer and alumni engagement;
- Digital badging oversight; and
- Academic integration through programs such as University Foundations first-year course.
A Competency-Based Foundation
The NACE Career Readiness Competencies serve as the foundational framework for Elevate.
“This ensures that skill development is intentional, measurable, and aligned with national standards,” Eicholtz explains.
These competencies are operationalized through the Career Readiness Digital Badging Program, where students complete structured experiences tied directly to communication, teamwork, technology leadership, professionalism, critical thinking, equity and inclusion, and career and self-development.
“Through their participation in the Career Readiness Digital Badging Program, students are able to meaningfully reflect and connect their undergraduate involvement and personal experiences with the professional skills they are developing in the process,” Eicholtz notes.
She says the Career Readiness Digital Badging Program’s primary benefits are twofold. For students, the program provides an informal co-curricular transcript of their engagement outside of the classroom. Meanwhile, for staff, it provides both qualitative and quantitative data that can be used to understand knowledge gaps and student need, while guiding advising and program design.
“Community partnerships amplify this work by providing authentic contexts for skill application,” Eicholtz adds, saying that employer-specific experience sets, internships for credit, externships, and service-based learning opportunities allow students to practice competencies in real-world settings.
“In addition, alumni engagement further reinforces relevance and access, creating a networked learning environment where classroom learning, co-curricular involvement, and professional exploration intersect to strengthen student confidence and career outcomes.”
Challenges Overcome and Lessons Learned
Eicholtz says that because Elevate was designed as a transformative, university-wide initiative, one of the biggest challenges was coordinating collaboration across traditionally separate areas of the institution.
“Creating a truly integrated undergraduate experience required faculty, staff, and students to work together in new ways,” she explains.
“We addressed this challenge by building shared goals, clear communication structures, and a culture of partnership focused on student success. This approach allowed Elevate to launch not as a static program, but as a living, evolving experience—one that continues to grow through the collaboration of teams across academics, admissions, marketing, the Riley Center for Career Success, global education, and campus life.”
Elevate’s effectiveness is measured through a comprehensive mixed-methods assessment strategy that combines quantitative engagement data with qualitative student feedback. Key metrics include:
- Appointment volume;
- Suitable activity completion;
- Progress toward digital badge completion;
- Handshake engagement;
- Participation in experiential learning; and
- First-destination outcomes.
These data points are tracked longitudinally to assess early engagement, persistence, and readiness development across cohorts. The Career Launch Assessment provides baseline and annual measures of student confidence and skill growth aligned with the NACE competencies.
Qualitative insights are gathered through focus groups, end-of-semester surveys, digital badging activity reflections and portfolio submissions in Suitable, and student narratives that contextualize the data and inform continuous improvement.
“This blended approach allows the Riley Center to evaluate not only participation but impact, ensuring that Elevate is advancing meaningful skill development, career clarity, and post-graduation success rather than simply increasing activity counts,” Eicholtz says.
She says that one of the most significant lessons learned through the Elevate Experience is that sustainable, institution-wide career readiness initiatives require formal structures for shared ownership, reinforced through consistent feedback and governance.
“While early collaboration was essential to Elevate’s launch, long-term success depended on creating clear mechanisms that supported ongoing dialogue and accountability across the institution,” Eicholtz stresses.
“The establishment of both an employer advisory board and a faculty advisory board proved critical in moving the work from vision to impact. These groups created regular, bi-directional communication channels that ensured Elevate remained aligned with workforce expectations, academic priorities, and evolving student needs.
“Their feedback has directly informed program refinement, employer engagement strategies, experiential learning expansion, and faculty integration efforts, allowing Elevate to evolve responsively rather than remain static.”
The Riley Center for Career Success has realized a host of benefits—both intended and unforeseen—through Elevate. Intended benefits include increased student engagement, stronger career outcomes, and enhanced employer partnerships. Eicholtz adds that Elevate has also strengthened the visibility and impact of the Riley Center for Career Success across campus.
Meanwhile, she says that unintended benefits have included deeper cross-campus collaboration, enhanced faculty engagement in career preparation, and a culture shift where students, faculty, and staff more consistently view career readiness as integral to the undergraduate experience.
Strategies to Share
One of the most important lessons the team learned is that work like Elevate cannot live solely within one office.
“While the Riley Center for Career Success plays a coordinating role, the experience only became sustainable when career readiness was treated as shared institutional work,” Eicholtz says.
“Creating formal structures, such as faculty and employer advisory boards, helped move responsibility from individual relationships to collective ownership.”
For others looking to create a program like Elevate, she suggests:
- Using data in practical ways to guide decisions and keep conversations focused on student outcomes—Institutional research, engagement metrics, and the NACE Career Readiness Competencies helped inform how the experience was structured, where resources were invested, and how progress was assessed across student cohorts.
- Inviting partners into the work early through pilots, listening sessions, and ongoing feedback—Faculty, employers, alumni, and students were involved in shaping and refining the experience rather than reacting to a finished product, which allowed the work to grow thoughtfully over time.
- Starting earlier than feels comfortable and being clear about expectations—Engaging students before their first semester and providing visible milestones each year helps them understand how career readiness develops across their undergraduate experience.
- Investing in tools and advising structures that can grow with your student population—Digital badging and cohort-based advising allows students to engage in ways that matched their interests while giving staff timely information to guide coaching and programming decisions.
- Expect the experience to evolve—Elevate has never been treated as “finished.” Regular reflection, assessment, and partner feedback continue to shape how the experience responds to student needs and workforce change.
“It is important to emphasize that Elevate represents more than a career offering. It is a holistic undergraduate experience that intentionally connects academic learning, skill development, and real world application,” Eicholtz says.
“These practices position career services not as a support function, but as a strategic partner in shaping a cohesive and equitable undergraduate experience. The success of Elevate demonstrates that when universities align their resources, community partnerships, and institutional culture around student outcomes, the impact can be transformative for students, faculty, employers, and the broader community.”
