Fletcher Technical Community College and Clovis Community College serve different student populations, operate on different timelines, and came to uConnect at very different moments. What they share is a small career services team, expected to do more with less, and the need to serve all of their students in a unique and personalized way. Their partnership stories, one spanning five years and one just getting started, show how a uConnect Virtual Career Center (VCC) delivers value at every stage of the journey.
The Challenge: Big Mission, Small Teams
Community college career services offices are asked to do more with less. At Fletcher Technical Community College in Schriever, Louisiana, career services had no centralized resource hub where students could access information and resources at their fingertips anytime, anywhere, especially since over half of their student population was still virtual from the pandemic. This was not only for Career Services, but for many other areas of the college as well. Students could basically only access support during office hours, at a campus that serves a largely rural population with real transportation barriers.
At Clovis Community College in Fresno, California, three career services staff members were responsible for serving more than 14,000 students — a ratio that makes meaningful one-on-one support nearly impossible at scale. When an unexpected staffing absence happened in 2025, that team of three was often reduced to one, and the question became urgent: how do you ensure students can still access the support they need when staff simply are not available?
Both institutions recognized the same fundamental challenge: career services should not be dependent on a staff member being available in a specific room at a specific time. Students needed access to resources, job opportunities, and career guidance 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The team also needed a way to scale their reach without adding headcount they did not have.
“Before we had uConnect, student support was limited to basically office hours. With over half of our student population being virtual, we needed a resource and support hub for students to access anytime, anywhere. Our uConnect platform centralized all of it.”
— Janel Ricca, Director of Job Placement, Fletcher Technical Community College
The Solution: A Virtual Career Center Built for Community Colleges’ Strategic Priorities
Both Fletcher and Clovis implemented uConnect’s Virtual Career Center — an all-in-one career resource platform that consolidates every career tool, resource, and opportunity an institution offers into a single destination. Rather than leaving students to navigate a dozen disconnected systems, logins, and websites, the Virtual Career Center brings everything together in one branded, searchable hub that can be independent or live on the institution’s own website and is accessible to every student, at any time, from any device.
For institutions with small staffs and limited budgets, the platform is designed to function as additional capacity: automating personalized email outreach, organizing content, and keeping students engaged between appointments without requiring daily maintenance from an already-stretched team.
Fletcher: Five Years of Deepening Integration
When Fletcher signed with uConnect in August 2021, the goal was straightforward: give students a centralized place to explore career resources. What followed was five years of steady, compounding growth.
Fletcher’s platform, branded as CareerWaves, has grown from a basic career hub into a deeply woven institutional resource. Today it includes:
- Curation Kits — pre-built collections of career content including articles, videos, podcasts, jobs, internships, and experiential learning opportunities, all vetted and continuously updated by uConnect’s content team. Rather than spending hours sourcing resources for specific student populations, career staff simply activate a kit and a steady stream of relevant, curated content is automatically delivered to the platform. Fletcher has added several kits since 2024, expanding the personalized support available to the students who need it most.
- Integration with the TRIO program that weaves career resources directly into Fletcher’s federal grant programming.
- Career video content, Forage virtual work experiences, and Labor Market Insights, giving students on-demand access to real employer videos, job simulations, and local salary data.
- A housing insecurity resource page that, when renamed to reflect student language, saw unexpectedly strong engagement — proof that curated, identity-specific content gets found and used when it’s easy to find.
The platform has grown alongside the institution, not just as a tool, but as infrastructure.
Clovis: A Clean Launch Built for Scale
Clovis Community College signed with uConnect in May 2025 and launched their Virtual Career Center in September 2025, replacing their previous career services page entirely rather than running parallel systems.
From launch, Clovis activated all 10 Curation Kits — uConnect’s pre-built content collections designed to support students with specific identities, backgrounds, and interests. Each kit delivers a continuous stream of vetted articles, videos, jobs, internships, and events tailored to that population, so students see resources that reflect who they are and what they need without requiring staff to source or maintain that content manually. Clovis enabled kits covering Black/African American, International, LGBTQ+, Women, Veterans, First-Generation, Neurodiverse, and Students with Disabilities — explicitly aligned to the college’s equity goals and the underserved student populations they prioritize.
Automated monthly emails replaced manual outreach. Handshake job, internship, and event feeds were integrated directly into the platform, with location filtering set to a 50-mile radius around Fresno to ensure local relevance. The team’s goal was a platform that would work even when the team could not.
That goal was tested sooner than anyone expected.
“Our students were still able to access our services and resources even when they could not see us in person. We have been so grateful for the VCC being able to fill in the gap for us during this challenging time.”
— Dianna Whaley, MA, Career Counselor and Coordinator, Clovis Community College
The Results
Fletcher: Engagement That Speaks for Itself
Five years in, the numbers tell a story of sustained and accelerating impact.
96% year-over-year growth in users and sessions
63% year-over-year growth in page views
Jan–Sep 2025 platform usage through September already exceeded all of 2024
11.4% of platform traffic driven by automated emails
Top engagement areas include career exploration, job search, healthcare resources, and the faculty and staff community — evidence that the platform is reaching not just students but the institutional partners who shape student success.
Clovis: Time-to-Value in the First Year
Clovis’s story is still early but the signals from the first year are clear.
All 10 Curation Kits activated at launch, covering every major student identity group
14,000 students served by a career services team that was often reduced to 1 staff member
When Dianna Whaley’s team was operating at minimal capacity due to staffing outages in 2025, Clovis’ Virtual Career Center kept running. Students could access resources, explore job opportunities, and engage with career content without needing a staff member available to help them. The platform functioned as the additional team member Clovis did not have the budget to hire.
Clovis is looking ahead to making the platform even more robust in the coming year, building on a strong foundation to deepen student engagement and expand the resources available through the platform.
What These Two Partnership Stories Share
Fletcher and Clovis are different institutions at different stages of their journey. But the through-line is the same.
Both are community colleges serving underserved student populations who need more support than a small staff can deliver in person. Both recognized that career services could not be limited to office hours and face-to-face appointments — students needed something available to them at 1 a.m., from home, from wherever they are.
uConnect’s Virtual Career Center platform did not replace their teams. It extended them by giving students 24/7 access to resources, giving staff time back from manual tasks, and giving institutional leadership a platform to demonstrate career services’ value with real engagement data.
Want to learn more?
Career-Ready from Day One explores why scalable career engagement infrastructure is mission-critical for community colleges and what the data shows about institutions that get it right. Read it here.
Ready to scale your career services and make your resources available to all students 24/7? Fill out the form below to get started.
