Podcast: Careers embedded in higher education

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A student in business attire smiles while shaking a woman's hand.

Embedding career development and professional skills into curriculum can boost students’ career preparation and help them see the return on investment in their education.

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Recent public polls have found American’s confidence in higher education is waning, but current college students say they still see the value of the investment they’re making in their future.

April 2024 data from Inside Higher Ed’s Student Voice survey found a majority of students say their college education is highly (39 percent) or somewhat valuable (45 percent). Translating their education into careers is one area students still need help with, with one-third of students never engaging with their career center.

Colleges, universities and national groups are looking to help students make the most of their degrees through professional skill development and embedding careers into curriculum.

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Inside Higher Ed: What does that look like at the practical level, trying to bridge that skills gap?

VanDerziel: What it means for us is really thinking about the competencies that are being developed by students, with students, both in the classroom and outside the classroom, throughout their experience.

So we have a competency model that we have developed; there are eight competencies that are widely being adopted right now across campuses. And the importance of it is that if these become campuswide, students will be able to identify what they’re actually learning.

Examples I would give you would be, many classes, students have to do project work, they have to do analytical work, they have to present their findings, they have to work in a group and therefore there are a lot of competencies that are being learned.

So they’re learning critical thinking, they are learning teamwork, they are learning written and verbal communication skills. However, we need to be really direct with students about those experiences, that they’re not just completing a research project or a research project with a group of people. But how that translates to the world of work, so that once they go and do that interview, or they are completing their résumé, that they’re able to articulate all of those experiences and to articulate it in a way that an employer will understand and that they’ll value.

Inside Higher Ed: It’s almost like creating a shared language model, it seems, where everybody’s using consistent phrasing and identifying all these things that students, like you mentioned, are already doing, but just putting a name and making it more visible to the students that that’s happening. Would you say that that’s the case?

VanDerziel: That’s exactly right. We just need to make it much more practical for students and not assume that they understand that “Hey, you did classroom presentations … you’ve really been honing your verbal communication skills or presentation skills.”

They might not be seeing that as being quite as relevant for an employer, as it was just in the academic environment, but it absolutely translates. So let’s help them to understand how that translates to the workplace.

Inside Higher Ed: Something else I’m seeing is experiential learning being introduced to first-year and earlier college students. Where are you seeing that pop up? And what is the value of experiential learning as part of that career development journey?

VanDerziel: Internships and experiential learning are critical to a student’s experience and their outcomes success.

So we know that students with internships—particularly paid internships—will have more job offers upon graduation. We know that a paid intern will get, like, 1.6 job offers, versus a student who didn’t have an internship, 0.7 job offers. So it’s a pretty dramatic difference—it’s over double.

We also know that students who have those experiences will also be paid more in their first year salary out of college, so it makes a huge difference. Employers tell us, in all of our surveying, that internship experiences are the No. 1 thing they’re looking for.

We hear a lot about employers who are saying, “We are doing a skills-based hiring model. We’re no longer that interested in just screening candidates or early career candidates by GPA,” as an example.

We know that only about 44 percent of employers are screening by GPA these days. So that means, what are the rest of those employers doing? Well, they’re saying they’re doing skills-based hiring. What they’re actually doing with skills-based hiring is saying, “What experiences can I see on a résumé that a student may have that can demonstrate certain kinds of skills and competencies that will relate to my workplace?” That gets substituted with internship and experiential education experiences. So it’s so important, because if there are two equally qualified candidates, the internship experience is going to win every single time.

Inside Higher Ed: Skills-based hiring is something that’s come up a little bit as, again, as we’re talking about the value of higher education and what a college career can do. It’s coming up to say, “Oh, employers value skills-based hiring.” Would you say that that is instead of the college degree or in combination with the college degree?

VanDerziel: It’s absolutely in combination with the college degree. Our surveying has shown that there are conversations that have been had with employers around the value of higher education, the value of the degree, but by and large, those professional-level, entry-level jobs; they’re not dropping the college degree requirement. Where they’re dropping the college degree requirement are on jobs that didn’t need the degree to begin with.

There has been a long history of degree inflation with jobs. And what employers are really doing is evaluating that, the degree inflation. But what they’re also saying is that a very effective way for students to learn skills, to build skills and competencies, is through a degree program and through higher education.

However, there is, again, this language barrier that happens, this communication barrier, and a practicality that sometimes is missing. And that’s what we really have to bridge with and for those employers. But no, they’re not giving up on the college degree. Our research has clearly shown that.

Inside Higher Ed: We mentioned equity earlier as part of NACE’s core mission. And one of the benefits of embedding career development in the curriculum is that there is an equity lens to it; all students are getting this experience throughout their career. I wonder if you can talk about that element as well and why it’s important for all students to receive this kind of career development.

VanDerziel: If we just talk about first-generation students, as an example, they just don’t have the same social capital, they don’t have the same history of higher education, they might not know the steps that need to be taken.

And so it’s particularly important for us to think about career preparation from the very beginning of a student’s time on the campus, because we need them to understand things like the importance of internships, the importance of building a repertoire of skills and being able to communicate about those. But gaining experiences where they can show what they’ve demonstrated, so that inventory is so very important for those students. And they’re not going to take that inventory, because they don’t know how important it is, unless we’re very direct about it.

So all of those experiences that they’re having, whether it be in the classroom or out again—and when I say out, I mean, student activities, leadership experiences that they’ve had, work-study, that they’re doing part- time jobs that they have. Those all add up to critical elements that an employer will eventually look at.

We need to help them to understand how important that is. And then we also need to help them to understand that there are people there to help them with their career journey, right? So let’s think about career exploration generally … Students don’t exactly know what they’re going to do with their degree, whereas they’re going through the program, and some wait way too long to consider it.

They’re in their senior year and they go home every summer, and parents and others are saying, “What are you going to do? What are you gonna do?” “Well, I don’t know, we’ll see, we’ll see.” That’s often the answer, or the answer may be a particular kind of job, a very specific kind of job, because it’s the only thing that they’ve known.

So it’s incumbent upon us to help students to think really broadly about how they can use their education to their advantage, to find their passion, to find the right place for them, that there are many different kinds of industries out there, that there are many different kinds of jobs where their degree can be applied.

Not all students are going to naturally do that on their own. And so it’s really helpful when we integrate career into all elements of campus life.

We also did a study with breakthrough tech for on women in STEM. And one of the things that we found was that women who use career services who are in STEM majors actually have more job offers than men if they use the career center. So from a data standpoint, they exceeded their male counterparts. But those that didn’t use it did much worse than their male counterparts.

Inside Higher Ed: That’s interesting—what’s the hypothesis as to why?

VanDerziel: There are probably many reasons for it; a lot of it probably has to do with a social capital. So having the information that they need to make the right decisions about their careers, and also the building of competencies around the job search and confidence in the job search, that someone or something intervened, that made a difference in that job search process.

So that could be anything from help on a résumé that made it better advice on negotiating. It could be a variety of things. But we know that those outcomes were much better in those cases.

Inside Higher Ed: So, “use your career center” is the bottom line?

VanDerziel: Yes, use your career center. That’s right.

Inside Higher Ed: We often see the career center as the hub of this work on campuses. But where would you say are the spokes? Who are those other departments or stakeholders who should be involved in this?

VanDerziel: So we just released a faculty survey on the integration of career into the classroom. And we found that 92 percent of faculty say that students in their disciplinary area have asked them career advice in the past year alone.

Faculty are key stakeholders in the career journey, so the integration of what’s happening in a career center and their expertise is so important to translate to those faculty members, as they are guiding students in their journey as well.

But we also know all of the other areas are just as important anywhere where student is building skill, building social capital. [It] is really important for career to be integrated. As we talked about earlier, whether it’s student activities and student recreation, there’s teamwork being held, there are leadership experiences that are being gained. And so it’s really important that we bring everyone along on the journey together to do that.

All of higher education is under scrutiny for its career development. But those most called into question are often liberal arts colleges that focus on interdisciplinary learning and the development of the whole student rather than a targeted career pipeline. At Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, campus leaders developed a brand-new strategic plan, the Gettysburg Approach, to emphasize not only the value of a liberal arts degree but also the ways it can equip students for the workplace. Here’s Jim Duffy, associate dean of co-curricular education at Gettysburg.

Inside Higher Ed: Can you sort of give us the 30,000-foot overview? What is this new initiative at Gettysburg and what does that look like on campus practically?

Duffy: It all begins with the Gettysburg Approach. The Gettysburg Approach is the way we deliver our undergraduate holistic experience. It’s broken up into four anchors.

The first anchor is knowledge—so breadth and depth of knowledge both in and out of the classroom. The second anchor is enduring skills. Some folks refer to these as durable skills or soft skills, but these are skills that we’ve surveyed employers about and they’ve told us, “These are the ones that we’re looking for in graduates.” And those seven skills are creativity, adaptability, intercultural fluency, problem solving, teamwork, leadership and communication.

Communication has risen to the top; I don’t think that’ll surprise anyone. We recently had some conversations with employers who said it increasingly rises to the top. We cover that both in and out of the classroom. In the classroom, we have—through our curriculum—communication conventions, both in the general ed curriculum and in our major curriculum. And then when you look to the co-curricular side, we recently had our leadership showcase where we had three panels of students who were able to use their oral communication to reflect on what they had done over the year.

The third anchor is the personal advising team. And this is really important, because this is where the student gets that network of support they need to succeed. Our personal advising team is made up of a faculty adviser, a co-curricular adviser, a career adviser, and then, at the conclusion of the sophomore year, the student has an option to have an alumni mentor.

And then the last piece of the Gettysburg Approach is the guided pathways, and this is how we deliver those high-impact experiences. They’re broken down into introductory exploratory and consequential experiences.

So what this approach does is it provides students with opportunities to engage both in and out of the classroom and to make intentional connections through conversations with their advisers so they can articulate the value of their Gettysburg College degree when it comes time to go to grad school or to take that next career step.

Inside Higher Ed: That’s something that we’re hearing a lot from employers, that students may have these skills, or they may have gotten this depth of knowledge, in their college career, but they don’t know how to talk about them or articulate them. There’s a gap there, if you will. How does the Gettysburg Approach seek to get in front of that gap and prepare students to talk about these experiences?

Duffy: We actually surveyed alumni about this before we launched the Gettysburg Approach. And this was the one of the top things that alumni talked about, “I did all these things in college, I can make some connections, but I can’t make them at a deeper level.”

And so in order to do that, the personal advising teams are really core to that. Because the pathways, if you think about the pathways that we have—which are experiences that we offer outside of the classroom—what we’re really trying to do is make intentional connections to what they’re doing inside of the classroom.

For instance, a first-year student who’s searching for a major is very curious and they want to try out a bunch of different things. On the co-curricular side, they’re going through introductory experiences. These are short experiences that students can engage in to get a better sense of what we have to offer. As an institution, we’re offering over 128 clubs and organizations. And in addition to that, we have a leadership center, a Center for Public Service and Eisenhower Institute, we have all these options. And it can be very overwhelming for first-year students if they just look at it on paper.

But when we take an intentional approach to advising them, we can show them all of the opportunities that are available to them and what they may want to check out or look into. Then, as you migrate through the pathways, our exploratory experiences are the next step.

So now that I’ve gone through an introductory experience in leadership, for example, I may say, “Oh, I want to pursue that.” And I may want to do our leadership certificate, or I may want to enroll in Gettysburg College’s leadership certificate program. It’s a little bit of a higher level of engagement. And, again, intentional connection. That may be coupled with an interest in majoring in public policy, for example.

And then our last category of the pathways is consequential experiences, which is akin to the capstone experiences that students go through on the academic side. Those consequential experiences have impact on community. Using that same thread, a student may elect to be a leadership mentor—that’s a student on campus who delivers leadership guidance, programming and experiences to other students.

What’s at the core of this is making connections, but making them at an intentional level so that students not only understand them while they’re here, but that they can articulate and share those examples with grad schools, employers and the like.

Inside Higher Ed: Something else that I really liked about the Gettysburg approach is that it’s all students—this isn’t an opt-in program or something that students have to seek out on their own. It’s something that’s promised to them. What are the challenges, the resources that you have to invest in to get the whole campus behind an initiative like this, to sort of get everybody geared up for this?

Duffy: I think one of the good things about the way we rolled this out was that we’re kind of doubling down on what we really do well, right? So we know we offer a rigorous classroom and academic experience; we know that we offered a significant number of co-curricular experiences that students can engage in and that variety speaks to what our students want, because students can create their own clubs and organizations.

So the foundation for it was there. I think the personal advising team pulls it together, and calling out those enduring skills that are based on what employers tell us pulls it together. But as far as resources, I think the big thing was, we’ve added a few advisers in our co-curricular adviser [team], we’re about to hire a third co-curricular adviser here shortly. And so those are the folks that really get to sit down and talk to the students and explore their interests.

Inside Higher Ed: Something else that we’re seeing among the general public is this doubt on the return on investment in higher education. A lot of small liberal arts colleges are turning towards careers, really emphasizing some of these outcomes that students are learning to point to, [that] no college is still worth it and that it’s still important. How’s Gettysburg getting in front of those conversations with its students and its parents to talk about that this is still a valuable experience?

Duffy: We talk about it a lot with our outcomes.

We can display that with what our students are doing once they complete the degree here. But from a practical sense, while they’re on campus, we’re committed to getting students into the Center for Career Engagement early and often. And so that has led students to do more through our Center for Career Engagement.

I think some students in their first or second year may think, “Wow, why do I need to go there?” but really, the Center for Career Engagement is providing a number of services—major exploration all the way to general interests.

The other thing that I think is important on this return-on-investment question—I talked about this quite a bit—is, for students it’s just as important to know what you don’t want to do as it is to know what you do want to do. And the only way you can figure that out is by taking advantage of the experiences that we have to offer.

We have a significant alumni base, over 30,000 alumni, plus parents and friends of the college, who offer career experiences to our students. That’s in addition to the traditional internships and externships that we make available to students. So it’s really an intentional effort to get students into career early.

Career is also the one required pathway—there’s five pathways, and in order to complete the pathways, you have to complete the career pathway and one of the other four. We’re really making a concerted effort to ensure that students get the experiences that they need to do what it is that they want to do.

We have a robust research program that our faculty offer over the summer. So for the students who are really focusing on grad school, it’s a great opportunity for them to stay on campus over the summer and explore those options. Likewise, for those who are more on the career-oriented side, we have plenty of internship and externship opportunities available as well.

Inside Higher Ed: That’s something we talked about a little bit earlier, that every student is going to go through this process, even if they don’t know it. And we know based on NACE research that students who engage with their career center are more likely to get jobs, are more likely to have paid internship experiences and things like that. What has been the value of just having this proactive approach to engaging with students on these different topics?

Duffy: I think this is a good time to talk about our guaranteed career-ready experiences.

We tell students that when you come here, there are career-ready experiences that you can engage in and that are available to you. And some of the examples of those are off-campus and on-campus internships, working on a long-term Center for Public Service project, global study and travel through the Center for Global Education, campus leadership roles—we have a significant number of those—and the faculty-mentored research that I mentioned earlier.

Those are just a few examples. What we want students to know as they arrive at Gettysburg is that this is all possible; “I’m likely going to be here for four years, and these are the things that I can accomplish during those four years in addition to majoring and minoring [in] specific subjects.”

So really, what we want to do is we want to provide students with what I refer to as structured flexibility, right? Here are all the things that are available to you, here they are in an organized way, but it’s up to you, and through your faculty and co-curricular adviser, how you’re going to navigate your way through these experiences and how they’re best going to suit what it is that you want to do at the conclusion of your time here.

Inside Higher Ed: There almost seems to be an equity piece in that right there. You don’t tell students that they can’t do it. It’s instead like this menu of what you want to do and what you can do.

Duffy: I appreciate you saying that, because with the pathways we even have, we’ve told students, “If there’s an experience that you don’t see on the pathways that you’re either doing or that you want to do, tell us. We’ll work with you to figure out where that should fall in the pathways and how we can best support you through that experience.”

Much like on the academic side, we have an individualized major program. So something similar to that.

Inside Higher Ed: Faculty have such a critical role in developing students for whatever their next step might be after graduation. How are faculty incorporated into the Gettysburg Approach?

Duffy: They’re incorporated in a variety of ways. I mean, obviously, through knowledge, they’re at the core of that, the breadth and depth of knowledge is predominantly achieved through the classroom.

Then those connections are made on the co-curricular side, out of the classroom. I think one new initiative that I can talk to you about is our faculty liaison program through our Center for Career Engagement. It allows us to work closely with a few faculty members and train them so that they can work with their departments and their areas to better inform students about career opportunities that are available.

What we do here at Gettysburg is we create this ecosystem for students where they can get support anywhere, anytime. And faculty are a big part of that, because [students] see faculty on a daily basis.

We talked earlier about that personal advising team, and that’s great to have that personal advising team. But we know students are going to have other adult mentors as well. That may be coaches, faculty members, other staff members. So it’s really an all-campus approach to supporting our students.

Inside Higher Ed: If there’s a lesson learned here, or something that you would want to share with a peer institution who is looking to gain some knowledge from you, what would you share has worked really well or something that you’d want other schools to consider?

Duffy: Well, one thing I would share is patience. Like any other pilot program, it’s constantly changing, which is good, because we’re taking feedback from students, from faculty, from staff, and we’re trying to make it better. You have to be really flexible about that.

I think if there’s one piece of advice I would give, it’s to engage the entire campus community. We did a really good job of that when we, last year, before rolling out the pathways, I met with 10 seniors and mapped their experience to the pathways to get a better sense for what it would look like. We did open sessions for staff, we had our vice president for college life went around all the academic departments to engage them and get feedback, and then went back again to make sure we had the right feedback from them. In order for it to work, it’s got to be a campuswide effort.

And I think the other thing I would say is, you have to be willing to hear the feedback and to act on that feedback. So even after taking all those initial steps, shortly after the program started, we got some feedback. Again, that was a little bit different than what we had heard before. And now, you know, we’ve started to act on that as well. Then going into going into the upcoming year, we’ll make some additional changes to fine-tune some things. It’s one of these projects that’s ever evolving.

Listen to previous episodes of Voices of Student Success here.