New on the Job: Q&A With Rob Liddell, AVP for Career Services at Florida State

Rob Liddell is a Florida State alumnus who found his dream job at his alma mater. And as assistant vice president for career services, Liddell’s dream job is helping students find and land their dream jobs. Returning to Tallahassee has come with bumps—Liddell currently lives in student housing with resident advisers who weren’t alive when he graduated in 1999—but the role was “irresistible,” he says.

FSU

“We have an obligation. We have a commitment. We have an opportunity to impact the lives of a lot of people, and we want to do a great job with that,” Liddell explains.

Liddell began the inaugural role in August, leading the university’s career development efforts across campus. Inside Higher Ed spoke with Liddell about his work, his goals for the office and the metrics of student success in career services.

The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Q: What led you to a career in higher education?

A: I went off to Auburn University, and I went to a lot of sporting events, and I went to several social gatherings and I went to an occasional class. I didn’t do very well. I did not thrive in that community.

But I had a graduate assistant who was my English composition [instructor], and she said, as an assignment, “OK, let’s talk for a little bit about content, and let’s all of us go to Rob Liddell’s dorm room and just call on him and invite him back into the class.” I missed several [classes] in a row, and that was such a kind confrontation that I recognized the power of calling people up to their potential.

I dug myself a deep enough hole where it was hard for me to get back into the good graces of that institution. So I came back to Tampa, Fla., where I was I spent most of my formative years, and I found myself a little bit. That led to an associate’s degree, which then facilitated a transfer to Florida State as a junior. I found a bright line, but there’s always been this idea about working with students, about helping them process some of their stuff.

My parents were divorced when I was 10, so I had people in my life that would show up and offer some coaching, or some encouragement or some instruction, and I didn’t value it as much then as I do now, but if I felt equipped to get through all of my stuff, and I can be that type of a person for others, then I think that would be a quite a high calling.

I started working at the University of South Florida in Tampa, had an HR role, an administrative role, but oftentimes I was drawn to supporting colleges and really appreciating how faculty and student affairs practitioners serve students and again, invited their story and extended it and called them up to their potential. And from there, I really set my set my sights on working in higher ed as long as possible and [being] as impactful as possible.

Q: What’s included in your purview?

A: It starts with engaging students to some degree with on the foundational aspects about some systemic and structural programs that invite them to consider some of these, what we term “career-readiness competencies,” that are evergreen across all disciplines … items like communication and collaboration and leadership and inviting and appreciating diverse experience, all these types of things employers consistently ask for them and expect them to be developed at some point from their job candidates.

Our Build Your Foundation module has a lot of that baked into it, and students default into it. Effectively, upon enrollment at FSU, students are kind of dropped into this. It’s an invitation to deeply consider and then come back to regularly: What’s the intent, what’s the long-reaching plan for your future and for your career, and then what are some of the resources that will help you accelerate that and make it as smooth a transition as possible?

So we start with the foundation, but then all along, we have some very thoughtful programs that are built to gain experience. We’ve got four that I’ll mention—and hopefully I’ve got all four things memorized.

We have an employer-in-residence program where we have industry professionals to come in. We create a venue through which they can engage students, either on campus or virtually, with surfacing job information, insights, trends, that type of thing.

We have another program called our Experience Recognition Program … Our ERP program effectively wants to offer students either a certificate or a transcript notation for recognized experience. Some of that experience could be an internship, it could be creative engagement, could be research, it could be what we termed to be significant community service—whatever the aspect might be, we want them to go after it. We want it to hopefully be aligned with some of their career aspirations, and to really specifically develop these curated experiences. But then we want them to reflect on it, and then come back to that reflection, and maybe 30 days later, maybe two months later, and just think about the learning and the growth that’s occurred. I think that’s a really important program.

We also have two other programs that I’d like to share. One is our FSU shadow program, so we partner with folks on campus, but more specifically in the community, to try to create a one-day exposure program where students can go in and interact with folks and get a really good sense about what a workplace dynamic might feel like, or what a working professional, what their activities are, what their temperaments might be. All that’s kind of fit to personality and capacity, but we’ve really found a really strong response to that initiative.

The fourth program I’ll mention is InternFSU. This program is administered through the Career Center, but it’s in partnership with a lot of great campus stakeholders. We’ll actually fund a paid on-campus internship program for students who are currently enrolled [in] either the fall or the spring semester. We’ll have two or three [students] here, five or six there, and we kind of have a network of students that are developing these really important insights into what it looks like to work. Sometimes these are folks that are … maybe the lower SES [socioeconomic standing], or those that are demonstrating some financial need. These are application-based processes that we want then to go through the full process of identifying and curating documents, interviewing and being selected for a role.

These types of experiences are really, really foundational to our approach to experiential learning, and so we’ll move from gaining experience to, then, how do we advise students and how do we partner with them?

These [career center] liaisons are kind of like a Swiss Army knife, where they look like one thing, but they do a lot of different things.”

One of the distinctive aspects of the approach here at FSU is we have embedded liaisons, and so we’ll actually have Career Center staff that serve half the week in their designated academic unit. The dean or their designee will set aside an office and provide a lot of encouragement and basically as much integration as possible into the life of the college.

These liaisons are kind of like a Swiss Army knife, where they look like one thing, but they do a lot of different things. Some of our liaisons will have more of a career advising focus; they might be engaging and offering advice on developing professional documents or timelines for seeking internships or writing graduate school application essays and going through those processes. Then other liaisons might have a little bit stronger hand in programming, and so they might have a broader mix of workshops that will be integrated and, again, specific to the industry or specific to the aim and purpose of the college. Then others will actually have a more external face, so they might have some more specific employer engagement.

These types of efforts have been really, again, amplified and augmented by the specific kind of role-based functional Swiss Army knives, but again, their membership in both the Career Center and in their designated academic unit makes that sing.

But then we also want to go a little bit further and provide excellent service to graduate students, and so we have the dedicated team of folks that are really trying to not only train career practitioners through our doctoral program, through some master’s residency programs, but we’re also interested in supporting doc [level] students, specifically [if] they’re seeking careers in academia, but then also careers in industry.

We have a suite of tools and resources, workshops, programs that are targeted towards our doctoral students, specifically because that is one of our institutional foci. You know, we really want to ensure that if they’re pursuing a career in academia, we want to make sure that they’re really, really competent teachers. But then also, we also want to ensure that their job-search skills are really robust in the event that they’d like to pivot into industry.

Q: What are your short- and long-term goals in this role?

A: Short term is meeting everybody. I’ve been asked a few times about, “What does it look like to go from a student population of about 11 [thousand] to 12,000, to 45,000?” There’s just so many people, and I think that it’s being intentional.

I’ve got a listening tour that I hope never to stop. Not only am I meeting with everyone from the student ambassadors—a sophomore from Fort Lauderdale that really is interested in serving on campus—to senior directors that have, frankly, outshone me, and accomplishments that have really advanced in their own progression. So really trying to invite a lot of input there.

But then there’s the listening tour with our key partners, our academic deans and folks that are dispersed broadly throughout all of our colleges. Then I find myself placed within the Division of Student Affairs, which is, to some people, it might not be as obvious, but to me, it makes a lot of sense, because, again, we’re here for students. I think that there is another full complement of great professionals that I have a chance to learn from and to hopefully educate and inspire a bit.

To an extent, there is some effort to be made to really demonstrate value and walk back and revisit some partnerships to ensure that we are not only meeting expectations and meeting needs, but we’re also trying to communicate where we can see further growth. I think a short-term goal would be that, but we’re also looking towards, how can we support our students that are desirous of a study abroad experience about completing an internship internationally? What does it look like to have really curated experiences for a lot of different affinity groups?

So this is an interesting nugget to me, that we had a lot of students that were from Miami, that didn’t live on campus. That didn’t make sense to me, because, again, there’s a good distance between Miami and Tallahassee. So what we’ve tried to do is, we’ve recently hosted an event with alumni and with some employers, but a lot of students, to really kind of describe the FSU experience and just provide some networking.

We see that as really credible community building, because it’s hard to fully commit oneself to development, to the learning, that really requires some focused effort if you don’t feel like you belong, if you don’t feel like you’ve got a web of support around you. We really want to speak into those aspects.

Longer range, we’re looking towards continuing to modernize our career effort. We have a bias towards data, and so we want to make sure that we have fluency. That is a commitment that I’m making to my team, is that we’re going to ensure that all of our career people have some level of proficiency with understanding data and articulating the value of being a data-informed practitioner. I think that’s incredibly important.

But more than that, we want to make sure that some of the trend lines and the insights that we can share, as far as student outcomes and trajectories, etc., that our students have access to that as well. Because, again, I would be rather egotistical and rather misinformed if I thought that everyone came to us to ask the questions—we want to empower them with the tools necessary so they can chart their own course.

Q: How do you define student success?

A: Student success is one of those terms that is really, really broad, and it can look like first-year retention, it could look like four-year graduation, six-year graduation rates. I think that those are conventional, but they’re really hard to point at directly where my unit or my effort contributes specifically to these things.

I would say that student success would be a recognition that there’s a culture of expectancy that students are going to engage early. They’re going to expose themselves to helpful information. They’re going to formulate at least tentative plans, a tentative goal: “I’m going to major in this with the idea that I might work in that.” That is a measure of student success that I think we can uniquely contribute to.

But then beyond that, I’m interested in seeing students complete internships. I’m interested in students joining faculty-led research. I’m interested in students serving in our community, and how they define community’s up to them, it’s not just in Tallahassee. It could be if they’re from Orlando or from Argentina, or from wherever, that they’re serving deeply in their community. I think that’s another measure of student success. But I think increasingly, in this moment … the first-destination data is really important. Citing our graduating senior survey, which is administered every spring, the FSU Career Center has been the No. 1 reason or way in which students find employment. To me, that’s a measure of success.

I also want to facilitate broad institutional goals. FSU has stated that they are committed to becoming the very best public research university with students graduating with little to no debt. And currently, FSU is just about half of the national average debt, which we’re incredibly proud of, because again, we think this is a matter of accessibility. Not only should you have access to a great education, but you should also not be burdened by undue debt.

I think a lot of that comes in through intrusive advising about industry-specific career liaisons. It talks about leveraging data and insights from research about life span and career development.

[Student success] is a very personal matter. So it’s, “Yes, I finished with a degree, and I’ve got a job, but it doesn’t give me joy” [is not enough].

We’re also interested in tracking those long-lead-time metrics about not lifetime earnings, even though that’s an important criteria, but again, fulfillment with affinity beyond, etc.

Q: You’re in a unique position, as a career service professional who recently returned to his alma mater to advance his career. What insight has that experience given you?

A: I know what this feels like. I know about the nerves, about going through the interview process, about acquiring a ton of information and trying to give back who you are authentically, and so to have to be selected by someone who wants you as much as you want them, that’s a great gift to anybody. This experience really invites that out to really help students tap into some of the same feeling. It’ll be personal to them, but again, the same notion of, “I worked hard to get here, and now that I’m here, I want to do a great job with it, because there’s a stewardship that I really want to offer others.”

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