At most colleges and universities, the biggest career development opportunity on campus isn’t hiding in the career center. It’s in the mailroom, the dining hall, the front desk of the rec center, and the work-study shift in the library archives.
More students hold a campus job than will ever walk through a career center’s door. At the University of Connecticut alone, there are more student employees than full-time staff members. And yet, on most campuses, that job is treated as exactly what it looks like on the surface: a paycheck, not a career-building experience.
Career services leaders across the country are working to change that. Not by adding new programs from scratch, but by reshaping the jobs students are already doing and working directly with supervisors to integrate more intentional career development.
Here’s what they’ve learned about turning campus employment into one of the most scalable, already-funded tools a career center has.
1. Start with the language on the job description
For Brenna Gomez, Director of Career Integration at Oregon State University, the work starts before a student is even hired—with the position description itself.
Gomez’s office has formalized a partnership with Oregon State’s university HR department to embed career development directly into student employment, with an assistant director who now reports to her with a dotted line into HR. Together, they’re helping supervisors rewrite student job postings around transferable-skill language, so the language of the job actually reflects the skills a student is building in the job itself.
“We’re helping supervisors rewrite a position description for a student role that really helps reflect this transferable skill language,” Gomez said on the Career Everywhere Podcast. “So that a student doesn’t say, ‘Oh yeah, I just answered the phone here. I don’t need to put that on my resume.’”
That reframing matters because most students don’t automatically see the connection between their campus job and their career. Without help naming the skills, a student who spent two years managing a front desk, training new hires, or troubleshooting challenging customers may walk away thinking they just “answered phones.” When in reality, they built exactly the kind of communication, ownership, and problem-solving experiences employers ask about in interviews.
Learn more about how Oregon State integrates career development into core curriculum and student employment in this episode of the Career Everywhere Podcast.
2. Invest in supervisors as much as students
Eran Peterson, Associate Director of Work+ at the University of Connecticut, has built an entire program around a simple insight: if you want to change the student work experience, you have to start with the person supervising them.
When UConn began designing their Work+ program to help transform student employment, Peterson’s team surveyed students and supervisors and found three consistent gaps:
- No consistent onboarding or training for student employees
- No clarity around what was expected of supervisors
- No shared campus-wide language for what a “good” student employment experience looked like
“Supervising student employees isn’t always recognized [by larger HR] as being a real supervisor,” Peterson said on the Career Everywhere Podcast. “And that’s something we’re trying to change, because there are actually more student employees at UConn than there are full-time staff members. It’s a really big part of our workforce.”
Work+ now runs supervisors through a “Supervisor Learning Hub” with onboarding foundations, topic-specific micro-lessons, and a learning roadmap that structures a student’s role around a beginning, midpoint check-in, and end-of-year reflection—all built around naming career competencies along the way. The program has grown from a roughly 50-supervisor, 150-student pilot to 125 supervisors and 560 students in its second year, entirely opt-in.
“The way I look at it,” Peterson said, “if supervisors determine that they’re learning and growing and can start to recognize that, I think it makes it easier for them to point to students how they might be doing it in their jobs. So it’s a win-win.”
One recruiting tactic worth stealing: UConn added a simple checkbox to its internal job-posting system asking whether a new listing is a Work+ position. Supervisors who aren’t familiar with the program see the checkbox, ask what it means, and often opt in on the spot.
Learn more about UConn’s Work+ program in this episode of the Career Everywhere Podcast.
3. Build in structure, mentorship, and reflection
At St. Lawrence University in rural upstate New York, Sarah Coburn, Senior Associate Director for Experiential Learning and Employer Engagement, took a different approach: turning existing campus jobs into a structured, multi-semester internship program called OCIP (On-Campus Internship Program).
Departments that want to participate have to agree to a few non-negotiables:
- A dedicated supervisor and mentor
- A thoughtfully written position description
- Co-developed learning goals between the student and supervisor
- Built-in time for reflection and feedback throughout the semester
Professional development is layered on top through St. Lawrence’s Center for Career Excellence, with programming that evolves each semester a student stays in the program—from Excel training and NACE competency sessions in earlier semesters to mock interviews and networking workshops later on.
“If they’re intentional about it and they really follow through and impress their supervisor, they’re building their network, they’re gaining skills, and then we teach them how to translate that for their resume and how to talk about it,” Coburn said on the Career Everywhere Podcast.
Since launching in Fall 2023, OCIP has grown to 30+ roles across nine departments and around 80 students. Coburn is candid that the model took real trial and error to build—and that when she went looking for other schools doing something similar, she found almost nothing to model it on.
“It sounds like it might be a more intensive, bigger investment than it is,” she said. “But it’s pretty minimal for the impact it has for our students.”
Learn more about St. Lawrence’s on-campus internship program in this episode of the Career Everywhere Podcast.
4. Treat campus jobs as a low-stakes career exploration lab
Beyond skill-building, campus jobs can serve a quieter but equally valuable purpose: giving students a safe place to test out a career path before committing to it.
Steve Russell, Chief Partnership Officer and Executive Director of the Kuhlin Hub for Career Design and Connections at Bowling Green State University, points to student jobs as an underused version of exploratory experience.
“If I’m a biology student and I think I want to work in a lab one day, I can work in a lab on campus,” Russell said. “And if I do that and I immediately come back and say, ‘Oh my gosh, I never want to do that ever again,’ that’s okay. You may have learned that you might still want to be a biologist, but you might want to be in the field. And that’s a really meaningful thing to have accomplished while you were making a couple extra bucks for the weekend, too, or supporting yourself through college.”
Russell’s point is a useful reframe for career centers that tend to treat “exploration” as something that only happens through career assessments or advising appointments. Students are already exploring, every time they clock in. The role of career services is to help them (and their supervisors) recognize that and define it.
“Those on-campus roles are something that I think a lot of career centers don’t always consider,” he said. “They’re not always under the same roof as career services or in our purview, but that’s a really valuable partnership.”
Learn more about BGSU’s life design approach to career services and the college experience in this episode of the Career Everywhere Podcast. Hear from BGSU President Rodney Rogers about his top-down prioritization of career readiness across campus in this episode.
5. Consider owning the infrastructure, not just the philosophy
At Wesleyan University, Sharon Belden Castonguay took a very structurally ambitious approach. Her career center directly administers campus employment for the roughly two-thirds of Wesleyan students who work on campus at some point—including, but not limited to, students on federal work-study.
That arrangement came about somewhat by necessity. Because financial aid (which oversees federal work-study funding) sits within the same office as career services at Wesleyan, campus employment landed under Castonguay’s team’s purview. But she’s found real strategic upside in owning that infrastructure rather than treating it as someone else’s system that career services occasionally partners with.
“It’s resulted in both myself and some of the folks in my office who work on the campus employment side getting to join some of [the financial aid office’s] working groups,” Castonguay said—a seat at the table that’s also deepened Wesleyan career services’ relationship with the admissions office, since financial aid, admissions, and campus employment are so closely intertwined.
Her advice for career leaders eyeing a similar move: look for the workflows in your institution that are already adjacent to career services—financial aid, HR, student employment systems—and ask whether your office is positioned to run point on them, rather than advocate from the sidelines.
Learn more about how career services can partner closely with other departments on campus, including admissions, academic affairs, and advancement in this episode of the Career Everywhere Podcast.
The takeaway: campus jobs are a perfect place to embed career development at scale
None of the leaders in this article built their student employment strategy by asking for a huge new budget line. They built it by looking harder at something that already existed on their campus—a paycheck, a job posting, a supervisor relationship—and asking how to make it do more.
That’s a meaningful lesson for career centers facing the resourcing and staffing pressures so many are navigating right now. Not every scalable idea requires new funding or new headcount. Sometimes it requires a rewritten job description, a short supervisor training, or a five-minute reflection conversation built into a shift that was already happening anyway.
If Career Everywhere means anything, it’s this: for a huge share of students, “everywhere” already includes the job they clock into a few times a week. The opportunity is to help them (and their supervisors) see it that way too and give them the resources they need to translate their skills and experience into meaningful career development milestones.
