Ep. 100: How Career Readiness Became a Core Pillar in PennWest’s New Strategic Plan

Josh Domitrovich:

Our average annual persistence rate for students who engage with us is about 88%, which is 7% higher than the average PennWest rate. And if you dig a little bit deeper into that though, and you look at students who engage versus don’t engage, which is where we really try to present it, that number expands to 10%. And this year was the very first year, this past year, so academic year ’24-’25. It was the very first year our persistence rate eclipsed 90%.

And that what I just shared with you, and I’ve shared this with the team, it has warded off budget cuts. It has warded off staff reductions. Just to be able to share the impact that we make, 10 percentage points is significant. And this is not chunk change engagement. We engage 33% of the population every year. We’re very strong and that engagement has never went down as enrollments went down, which means we’re engaging more students theoretically.

So our engagement rate is about 33 to 35%. But enrollment, as I’ve shared, has declined 15% over the last few years. So we’re doing a heck of a job engaging students and seeing that engagement has also evolved to students aren’t engaging just once, they’re engaging in multiple engagement types and times. So the work is speaking for itself, but most offices can speak on the latter, not the former. We know the students that are engaging with us, but have you connected it to how it’s ultimately making a difference with retention and/or persistence, whatever that looks like?

Meredith Metsker:

Hey everyone. Welcome back to the Career Everywhere Podcast. I’m your host, Meredith Metsker, and today marks a very exciting milestone for the podcast. It’s our 100th episode. So to help us celebrate the occasion, I have invited a very special guest to join me today. He’s one of our biggest Career Everywhere champions, a longtime friend of the podcast, and he was also my very first guest on the show back when we launched in January 2023. So please join me in welcoming Dr. Josh Domitrovich of Pennsylvania Western University. Josh, thank you so much for being here.

Josh Domitrovich:

I am honored and I sincerely appreciate you having me back. And I think this is super special, and major kudos and flowers to you. It’s amazing that this is the 100th episode. And to think of all the people that you’ve interviewed, all the great knowledge that has been shared, what a testament to you, Meredith, and the uConnect team. So please, everybody else give her a round of applause because I think it’s amazing for you to continue to develop and evolve this podcast and share such meaningful content that has helped me and thousands of other people. So kudos to you.

Meredith Metsker:

Well, thank you for that. As we were just talking about right before we hit record, this is one of my favorite parts of my job. I am a journalist by trade. It’s what I started my career in. So getting to interview interesting people who do meaningful work, I mean, it’s hard to think of a better way to spend time. So I appreciate you saying that.

Josh Domitrovich:

Always.

Meredith Metsker:

So yeah, like I was saying, you were my guest for episode one. You have believed in the show and you generously shared your time and expertise before it was even a thing, before we even officially launched. And you’ve also presented at the Career Everywhere Conference a couple times in the Career Everywhere community multiple times. You’ve been on this podcast at least three times, maybe more. And it has just been so much fun following your work at PennWest as the inaugural executive director of the career center. And you have accomplished a lot in the almost four years since I first interviewed you.

Josh Domitrovich:

Yeah, a little sobering that you say all that. Definitely come a long way. Very humbling, lots of challenges as many of us have faced in higher ed. We’ve had our fair share, which we’ll share a little bit about today, how we navigated that. But it’s crazy to think it’s been four years, and it feels like it’s been 20. PennWest years we say are like dog years. Every year feels like it’s forever because of so much change. And little surprise is we just heard that our president’s leaving for another institution. So he’s-

Meredith Metsker:

What?

Josh Domitrovich:

… on the out. Yeah. So this will be our-

Meredith Metsker:

Breaking news. All right.

Josh Domitrovich:

Yeah. So this is we’ll be going on our fourth president in four years. So they just named the interim, which is positive because it was my former boss, the provost. So we made a lot of ground under him, but very sad to see Dr. Anderson go, but it made a lot of sense for him because he’s going back home. So we wish him well. But yeah, change is constant here. So lots happened. We’ll definitely dig into it.

Meredith Metsker:

Yes. The constant changes will definitely be a recurring theme. For those listening who maybe don’t know, PennWest is a relatively new institution that was created from the consolidation of three standalone universities in Western Pennsylvania. So Josh has had the unique challenge of merging multiple preexisting career centers, and then building a new career services function from the ground up all while navigating budget cuts, restructures, new presidents. And I think you said eight different bosses. Is that correct?

Josh Domitrovich:

That is correct. Eight different bosses.

Meredith Metsker:

That’s a lot of bosses in four years.

Josh Domitrovich:

That’s a lot.

Meredith Metsker:

Despite all of those challenges, you have made career services an indispensable part of PennWest’s institutional strategy. And in fact, career is now one of the core pillars of PennWest’s new strategic plan, which I know we’ll talk about. So I know accomplishing this has been quite the journey. And when I first interviewed you back in, I think it was late 2022, you were just getting started with a lot of this work. So it seemed only appropriate to have you back for the 100th episode to celebrate that work and hear what has changed and how you made it all happen.

Josh Domitrovich:

Can’t wait.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. All right. So before I get into my questions, Josh, is there anything else you would like to add about yourself, your background, or your role there at PennWest?

Josh Domitrovich:

Yeah, maybe talk a little bit about my background. I think it’s always interesting whenever you have these guests and to hear the different walks of life people came from. And I think some of that context is lost when you just hear, well, he’s just the executive director of the career center. But I think my journey, like many others, has helped shape the approaches that I take, the person that I’ve become. So I think a little of that context could be helpful for the listeners.

So for those that don’t know me, I’m a first generation student, kind of born and raised within the state system of Pennsylvania is what we like to say. So I attended former Clarion University for my undergrad and grad. I have an HR degree, bachelor’s degree, and then an MBA. And then I, in late 2022, graduated from IUP with a doctorate degree in higher education administration and leadership. So all PASSHE schools, bleed PASSHE, if you will.

And also while I was going through school, I served six years in the military. So I was a cop, believe it or not, in the Air Force National Guard out of Pittsburgh. And I think it’s all those, the combination of what the military taught you in discipline and strategy, going through business courses, and then the culminating piece of that being focusing on higher ed administration and leadership. It’s just been such a cool journey to learn different tactics from different industries and disciplines, and then bring them all together to try to figure out how do you use those strategically to help make decisions at your institution and then take care of your people.

And I think that’s the human resource element in me. I spend a lot of time and attention on the team and trying to prove to them that I care for them, that I want to take care of them. I want to get to know them as people, not just the professional person, but as the person behind the role and the person outside of work. Because whether we like it or not, it all comes to work. And if they’re not okay there, then they’re not going to be okay in the office.

And it means a lot to me to prove that, especially as a father of two young kids. That’s my number one role, being a dad, then a husband. And then I just also happen to work here and love what I do. But that’s the order. And I want the team to know that is the priority for me, and I hope that’s the priority for them. And if it’s not, that’s okay. I just need them to know that that’s the case. And I think all those experiences helped me get here and showed me that if this first generation kid can do it, so can others.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, I love that. Thanks for sharing your story. And I am glad you mentioned the fatherhood angle too, because I was thinking that one of the things that has changed in the last four years is we’ve both grown our families.

Josh Domitrovich:

That’s right.

Meredith Metsker:

I think you had just had your daughter pretty recently when we first talked. And now you have your son and I’ve had a son and I’ve got a little girl in the way and things are crazy. But fulfilling and a lot of fun.

Josh Domitrovich:

It sure is.

Meredith Metsker:

And also you were mentioning your work in the Air Force. Maybe we’ve talked about this before. So you said you were a cop. So is that Security Forces?

Josh Domitrovich:

It is Security Forces. That’s right.

Meredith Metsker:

My cousin served in Security Forces for the Air Force for a while.

Josh Domitrovich:

Oh, very cool. Yeah, it was such a cool process. I mean, it was a means to an end. The goal was go help get school paid for, and it accomplished that goal. But you learned so much through that. Got to see and do a lot of cool things. But just really the lessons that it instilled in you. That is something that I live with every single day. It’s helped me as a person and a professional, as a father. It’s been countless times I can use and really lean back on those skills.

And I definitely think it’s helped me, we’ll talk about today, I think one of the major lessons I’ve learned through this process is perseverance. And the challenges never go away. If anything, it feels like there’s just more of them. But there is an opportunity in every challenge. You just have to look at it that way and find it.

And I think that is the secret sauce, or that is the thing that I’ve probably learned and grown the most with over these last four years, especially at PennWest. Things weren’t hard before PennWest. I think the nature of higher education has become very challenging over the last four years. We just haven’t integrated at the same time. And that just compounds the challenges. People leaving. I’ve had 12 different in total bosses between presidents and VPs and AVPs.

Nobody should have been able to accomplish what we’ve accomplished in that environment of turmoil. But it goes to the root of what Career Everywhere means, and what our team does and how that mission is so consistent and so strong throughout the turmoil because it’s true. It is integrity. It is the piece of what every college experience should be for the student. That’s why I think we’ve been able to stand through the test of time and that change.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. Well said. And on the note of Career Everywhere, I’ll ask you the question that I ask all of our guests here on the podcast. And that’s what does Career Everywhere mean to you?

Josh Domitrovich:

I think having listened to a lot of the podcasts, probably almost all of them, these definitions that come through, and hearing what it means to people, I mean, for me, it comes straight down to this is why we are here. What it means to me is it has become, in the beginning of integration, this mantra, this statement became who we were. It was our guiding star.

And we were so thankful that you all, in our opinion, kind of coined it and used it and leveraged it to teach people that, no matter where the student is in the journey or wherever we may be positioned inside higher education within the divisional structures of our college, career’s there. And we can impact any student, any division at any time because career is the reason the student is here. And that mantra hasn’t changed for us. It’s become our guiding star.

It was the first internal kind of summary of what our mission is and how I pitched it to all eight bosses that I’ve had. It’s the simple term that I want them to walk away with and is the sticker on my laptop wherever I go that our job is to put career services on the map because career is everywhere. That’s your sticker, by the way, I got from the conference. Thanks, Ash.

So I mean, that is so much of what it means to me, it means to us, it’s our guiding star. It is the work that we do. It is the reason that we fight the good fight is what our team talks about. This is a valiant effort. It’s worth it. And trying to spread that knowledge that career does impact all the work that we do. Faculty, staff, students, it means something. And it’s something definitely worth fighting for, as I mentioned.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. And you all at PennWest are one of the best examples of Career Everywhere that I can think of, just in terms of how you have evangelized it across campus, and then just the results that you have seen, which we’ll talk about today. I mean, you’re in the strategic plan. You were directly involved in drafting that strategic plan, as were some of your colleagues. So yeah, if anyone has proved that Career Everywhere can work and is effective, it’s you all.

Josh Domitrovich:

Appreciate that. It means a lot. And yes, I mean, I think the ultimate, which we’ll talk about, it feels like when we first spoke back in 2022, it was the beginning of the race. And I feel like the strategic plan was one of the significant goals that we wanted to try to get to. And it worked. We got there and, the dean says, it’s written in blood. They can’t go back now. And I’m excited to share the lessons we learned through the process, what’s actually written in it and how, as you had mentioned, that career is one of the five values of the strategic plan. We’re there. Career ready is a value of PennWest, but it was a lot of work to get there. It was a lot of strategy to get there.

Meredith Metsker:

Yep. We’ll definitely dig into that, all the behind the scenes work, the networking, the saying yes strategically. We’ll dig into all of that. Before I get into some of that, I do want to get some more context on PennWest. I know I kind of gave the Cliff Notes version at the top of the podcast and we’ve hinted at some of the challenges you all have faced. But could you just share more about PennWest, your career center, your team, and some of the challenges and changes you all have faced in the last few years?

Josh Domitrovich:

Yeah, absolutely. I think you did an excellent job of giving the broad overview summary. Three standalone institutions prior to 2022 integrated really because of financial challenges across the state system. Over the course of those years, when we first integrated, we had about 12,500 students, now we’re down to about 10,500 or so. So like many, have faced enrollment decline, we had about a 15% enrollment decline over the last four years.

We have the unique challenge, or opportunity, if you want to look at it that way, to serve three physical campuses. And then we call our fourth campus online because a large portion of our student body are online students. Yes, we are Western PA. We kind of work the whole entire corridor of Western PA based off of our locations.

The other thing I’d mention, we are aligned within academic affairs and I direct report to the provost. That hasn’t always been that way. So one of the challenges that we’ve faced is, at the beginning of integration, we were in enrollment management. A year later, we moved to student affairs. A year later, we moved to academic affairs, and then we’ve resided there over the last two years. So that has been interesting. We’ll talk about that a little bit.

Meredith Metsker:

That’s a lot of restructuring.

Josh Domitrovich:

Yeah. And how I got to eight different bosses, many of which aren’t here anymore. So that piece of I’ve had a supervisor that was very open, thankfully, knew absolutely nothing about what we did. And I’ve had a supervisor in our most recent, who is now our interim president in Jim, he was the epitome of a champion. He knew enough. He took time to learn. He was our advocate when we weren’t at the table. And he was a significant reason when he was provost, how we were able to navigate turmoil and he be able to believe in the work that we do to build us up and spread us across so many divisions to be able to help infiltrate, if you will, other areas of work to lift them up. And we’ll talk a little bit about that.

But some other things that might be worthy, we have, it’s 11 and a half staff is what we have. One to two, sometimes three GAs, about 20 undergrad student workers, just for some perspective. Our budget has been cut since the beginning of integration. So we were about 75,000 bucks or so at the beginning of integration. That went, at its lowest point, the whole way down to about 41,000, so almost a 50% cut. However, we’ve climbed back up. We’re back up to about 60,000 now.

And what was really sobering this past year was, through the enrollment decline and some of the work that we have to do with the state system to balance our budget, it was a zero-sum game this year. We had to make some cuts. And we were one of the only offices within academic affairs that got a bump. So much of that was what Jim was believing in us and us to be able to prove the work that we do. And that is hard because that increase came from somebody else within our division because it wasn’t new money. It was shuffling money.

But I think it goes to show, even in this constrained environment, there are opportunities, you need to be careful with, but there are opportunities for that improvement. And for us to be able to go from 75 down to 41, up to 60, yeah, it’s been a whirlwind, but it just goes to show you it is possible in such a turbulent environment. And in that turbulence, we’ve had 14 staff. We were down to eight. Now we’re back up to 11 and a half because of advocacy. We had already mentioned now we’ll be on our fourth president. I’ve had five different VPs, three different AVPs through the process. We’re a unionized environment. We have to navigate three different unions. So it’s a whole thing.

We’re different. We recognize we’re different. We know it is way more challenging in our environment. And that’s not to say others aren’t challenged by any means. We all are. But unless you live through it, man, is it hard. But it’s rewarding to be an inaugural executive director of something so different, like an integrated institution, and have had the pleasure of merging three career centers into one to be able to serve such a cool population of students in a really hard time, but do it really well is a testament to the team and it’s a testament to the work that we do. So that’s probably what I’d say. Those are the other kind of coloring within the lines, if you will, of more of PennWest.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, that’s really helpful context. Thank you for sharing. And I think it’s truly also a testament to your leadership and your storytelling abilities too, that you have been able to claw back your budget, claw back more staffing despite all of these challenges, despite the constant changes at the top in your leadership. So I know we’re going to dig into that, but that was one major reason I wanted to have you back on the show, and especially for the 100th episode, because you prove that, even in the face of just constant change, like you said, it is possible to elevate career services, to get a seat at the table, even if you have to drag that seat yourself.

Josh Domitrovich:

That’s right.

Meredith Metsker:

And kick open the door. You have done that. So I am excited to dig into all of that with you today. So I think a good place to start too is talking about this new strategic plan that you all just launched. So as we’ve talked about, career readiness is now one of the core pillars of the plan. And I believe it’s also woven into the other pillars and was even added to the new mission and vision statement, right?

Josh Domitrovich:

Yeah. So yeah, the whole process. There was a rewriting of, revisiting was the initial statement, the institution’s going to revisit the mission, vision, values while the president chartered this idea of how do we impact the student experience. So the way that he structured the strategic plan was through four pillars. And those pillars, pillar one focused on recruitment and retention. Pillar two focused on the in-class student experience. Pillar three was the out-of-class student experience. And then the fourth pillar was the post-graduation purpose is what he called.

So how do we create an environment at PennWest that is constantly supporting the overall student experience to help them become better for the life after college and the communities that they’re going to serve? So the way this kind of all came to be, what’s good to know is that this timeline was four months. The initial call-out to the content writers came at the end of January of 2026. And by the time they got everybody together, people agreed to it, it really didn’t start till February, and the deadline was May. Because-

Meredith Metsker:

Wow. That seems pretty fast for higher ed.

Josh Domitrovich:

That’s what we said too. The president said he needed it to be done because, our prior strategic plan, which he was not a part of because he wasn’t here yet, that plan expired in July 2026, and he wanted his new plan to start July 2026 for the next three years. So it made sense, but it was, holy heck, this is going to be some work over the course of three, four months to try to get this lifted.

And the way the structure was built in terms of people involved, there were only 12. Now, there were 12, what they called content writers. So for each pillar, the four pillars, there were three people in each of those pillars. Now, each of those pillars, aside of that, one VP was assigned as what they called a cabinet contact. So for example, the in-class experience, the provost was the contact there. It made sense. Our VP of student affairs outside the classroom. Enrollment management was enrollment retention. And then one of our advancement VPs, he was our contact for post-graduation.

So it made sense the way they did that. They didn’t have a significant role. It was more of like if we ran into an issue, they were who we were supposed to contact to try to get cabinet feedback, and then they would bring it back down to us, if that makes sense. So really it was three of us in each of those pillars. And in our pillar, we had one alumni rep, and then the other pillars had student reps. So it was nice. So it was really only two professionals, some faculty, some staff.

But we had the pleasure of getting, I kid you not, I think it was 75 pages of various documents that they all wanted us to decipher and use through our research and then in our writing because so much work was done. Certain studies were done. We had a new marketing campaign that rolled out, and there was a lot of market research that was done and a lot of student community stakeholder feedback. And they wanted that to help inform us because, in four months, there was no way we were going to be able to get the true stakeholder feedback if you were really thinking about it that way. So in addition to attempting to hold open forums and gather feedback, they wanted us to leverage those pieces.

So it was a monster of a task, but it was such a fun process because being asked to serve as a content lead showed me that the work that we put in prior to this had paid off. I don’t know why necessarily I was ultimately selected. The provost tells me he was a big champion of it. But I like to believe, us being in enrollment management, student affairs, academic affairs, we were able to show the important work that we do within the career center.

And we positively impacted every division that we were in when we were physically on the organizational chart. But what was neat was that impact never went away when we left that division. So we were able to prove ourselves to a bunch of people throughout the journey. And I think it was a kind of sum of all parts. Everything that, the work that we did led us to Josh should really be one of those individuals for us to kind of charter a path.

And for me, when we started writing it, I knew very clearly, per our conversation earlier, that career, it was in all of the pillars. So I had to think of a creative way of, okay, I’m in charge with Amanda, how do we write this pillars? But how do we infiltrate the other pillars to ensure that we are strategically embedded throughout the experience, not just this ongoing belief, well, career’s at the end, which our staff initial reactions were so we’re post-graduation. Can we change that philosophy? So that was the fun work to, how do I get career across all the pillars while also focusing on the strength of our own pillar that I’m in charge of?

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. I also love your use of the word infiltrate.

Josh Domitrovich:

It’s the military there. Sorry.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, there you go. Exactly. Okay. So to confirm, you were on the postgraduate success pillar, correct?

Josh Domitrovich:

Yes. Yep.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. So yeah, I would love to talk about, I guess your process of helping to write that strategic pillar and then hear more about how you got career woven into the other pillars, who else from your team was involved, and what that whole process looked like. So can you share a little bit more about that?

Josh Domitrovich:

Yeah, this could be a pretty lengthy answer.

Meredith Metsker:

Let’s do it. Let’s dig into it.

Josh Domitrovich:

I’ll try to break it up into parts, and then we can dig into as much depth as you would like. So the initial ask came out for me to be a part of pillar four, and I didn’t know what the other pillars were at the time. And in that pillar four, there was kind of an original idea that the president was going for. And so much of that idea kind of shape shifted over time. And we tried to help influence that we don’t want people to look at this pillar and only think of alumni. Because one of the other content leads, Amanda, was in the alumni space, our alumni relations team that she was in charge of. And there’s some of that in there. But the way we tried to flip this was thinking pillar four is the most critical pillar because it’s going to impact every other pillar.

So what we tried to do very quickly was begin drafting these ideas where I literally spent probably two full days to try to get it lifted to give it to Amanda because I wanted to have career be a prominent voice to respect the alumni. How do we gather alumni in? Not the other way around. I didn’t want alumni to lead. I wanted career to lead and show how we supported alumni. And then from there, we shared that template with the project managers behind the scene. And they actually used that template as an example to give to the other pillars.

And then you started to see some of that language surface, which was really neat because one of the first initiatives in our pillar is integrate career and workforce readiness systematically throughout the student experience. Well, that initiative is so broad by purpose because you have to do it throughout the entire student experience. So in order to accomplish pillar four initiative one, which I just read to you, I have to be a part of pillar one, pillar two, and pillar three. And then ultimately pillar four kind of works itself out because if you do all those things the right way, you naturally evolve into success metrics and outcomes.

But what was interesting was I had existing relationships, good, really strong relationships with content writers in pillar one and two. So the recruitment retention and then in-class experience. I didn’t have a super strong relationship with the out-of-class experience. So my colleague, Rhonda Gifford, who’s been on the podcast before, Rhonda actually, when they called for volunteers, Rhonda and I talked behind the scenes and said, “You’ve got to get in there and you really have to think about experiential learning.” Because for those that don’t know, Rhonda lifted what we call an experiential learning center at PennWest. So that had to be a critical piece of the out of class experience, although it does touch in-class. We really wanted to try to cement that type of thinking there. So Rhonda was our spy, if you will, to go into that pillar and really try to showcase and elevate that type of work.

So as this was all happening, every pillar was writing. And I remember asking the project manager, “Wouldn’t it make sense if we saw what each other were writing?” We’re going to get to the end of this and be like, “Wait, why are you all saying the same things,” or, “Should that really be in this pillar?” And they’re like, “The timeline’s so fast. I’m not sure we can do that.” So that was the answer I got. So that was like the no.

So the yes I turned that into was I just reached out to the content leads that I knew. So Jill was in pillar one, Lacey was in pillar two. And I said, “Let’s get together. Let’s share what we have. Let’s help one another. Here’s what I’m saying in this pillar. Can I support you in your language? And can you support me in my language, in your pillar?”

So we behind the scenes shared, behind the scenes, right, we shared and we spoke together about what we were trying to draft and the direction we were trying to achieve. And most of it was a lot of overlap to no surprise. We knew. But what was so inspiring was reading what Jill and Lacey wrote, it was like we were there. And so much of that work, when I reflected on this, came from a working group that I was selected to be a part of where Jill and Lacey were also a part of. And so much of that working group that we worked at the state system with, it was thinking about career outcomes with the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and how do we test these livable wages and what programs are better, better performing than others. And I was really able to educate them there and kind of share data and perspective.

And you could see that come back. So they became champions. They were, but they were content champions now, which was really neat. So I didn’t need to be there. And then that led to the whole mission, vision, value writing that we had talked about. We never saw that, the pillar content writers. We never saw the mission, vision, values throughout the entire process. It was the last thing that was written and it was the last bit of feedback before final approval.

But career ready landed as one of the five, which also showed when we learned who was writing it, they were also a champion of us and the work that we did. So it was, like I had mentioned earlier, it was this culmination. It was the sum of all the parts. It just goes to show that work that you do over the test of time, it was working. And it just happened to land really strong in the writing of the strategic plan. So I’ll pause there.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. No, that’s really great context. And it makes me think of the phrase that luck is where opportunity meets preparation.

Josh Domitrovich:

Bingo.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, that makes me think of this. The timing of the new strategic plan, maybe some might view that as lucky, but it was the result of all the preparation and the work that you had put in up until then, and the opportunity presented itself.

Josh Domitrovich:

Amen to that. I don’t think I ever put it so eloquently, so thank you. But it is so true. The luck was timing, but what wasn’t luck was building the champions along the way. That was the work. And it just happened to be it all kind of came together at the right time in the strategic plan. Which now the real work begins, to be honest with you.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. Now you got to execute.

Josh Domitrovich:

Exactly. Yeah.

Meredith Metsker:

And I was thinking too, that’s the strong relationships you had with all these leads of these other areas across campus, it’s kind of a silver lining to having so many reporting structures throughout your time there. I mean, yes, it is tough to have to constantly move and get to know a new department on campus, a new supervisor, but you also got to know every department on campus and every supervisor really well.

Josh Domitrovich:

I mean, that’s it. When the announcement came out about the president and then the shifting, they said, “Here we go again.” I said, “But it’s an opportunity just like before.” And I went back to, we were in enrollment management, we were in student affairs, we were in academic affairs. All those were blessings in disguise because it allowed me to share the work that the team does and tell, as you said, a really cool story. And that all helps because you build allies through that work. And what was amazing, I’m not going to call out the division, just to be respectful, but it was interesting being in a division. And when we were in the division, how responsive that division was to us. But when you left that division, how non-responsive they became to you. And it was fascinating to be there and then not be there.

But the relationships that were built when we were in it allowed us to kind of get over those hurdles because we were able to prove ourselves. So that is just the dynamic, the politicking, the power dynamics. I mean, you learn so much. I don’t wish it on anybody to be moved that many times and have that many supervisors. But at this point, keep them coming. I mean, we’re able to do it and it’s not a big deal. It’s fun to be able to tell the story because the story that we can tell is the right story. It is a meaningful story. It is the student’s story. And that’s what we’re here for. So it’s an easy sell in our opinion.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. It’s easy when you truly believe in it and when you also have the data and the stories and all of that to back it up, which I know we’ll get to in a little bit. So kind of on the note of some of the behind the scenes work, the relationship building, the saying yes strategically, thinking back on the last four years, what do you think were some of the key moments or decisions you made that led to you getting the seat at the table and being involved in the strategic plan and having career be a major pillar?

Josh Domitrovich:

If I had to summarize it, I think relationship building is such a critical skill that I don’t think I recognized how important it was. We know it is. We know networking’s important. But in this environment through that much change in turmoil, there were people that we began having conversations with, and past experiences had a sour taste in their mouth already. So it was how do you unsew that history, respecting what happened, but also sharing like we’re not them. We’re new. We’re a new evolution of the career thinking.

So I think the relationship building is such a critical piece. And by happenstance, the moving across the divisions I think was a blessing in disguise. What I also think is you had mentioned the term strategically saying yes, and it’s something that we talk about in our team all the time. We just say that’s a fancy way to say no. You’ve got to choose to strategically say yes.

Meredith Metsker:

It’s a positive spin on it.

Josh Domitrovich:

It’s a positive spin. That’s right. But that has been such a powerful belief and exercise to test because I think I try my best to really share that belief with the team. We need their bandwidth to be strong, not overused, and then have good energy to advance the work that we want. But there are times where, whether we like it or not, it has to be a yes. So in the moments where it doesn’t have to be a yes, can they say no? Is it respectful? Can they leverage certain bits of data to say that?

I think for me though, so if we bring it back to how did we get into the strategic plan and kind of build these relationships? I’m not sure I ever said no. And I say that because one of my colleagues, she brought it up to me, and she said, “You’re going to run out of gas. They’re using you.” And she was saying it nicely. There was a time where I definitely felt like I was the fixer here, not in the office, kind of the thinking of the university. That’s a good thing, but it also takes a toll on you.

But I think I don’t regret any of the things that we did because I made sure it led to something tangible to impact the team. So thinking strategically saying yes to this team that went to PASSHE, it allowed me to build relationships with the content leads in two of the other pillars that I mentioned. I don’t think I would’ve had that same relationship because we were able to talk intimately as a team of six of us about the work. You went out after and you got to know them more as a person and share. That all matters if you have the opportunity.

Being proactive in trying to run data for enrollment management, which led to the development of this exploratory studies program that I was asked to be in charge of it. That was not something I was expecting, but it allowed us to place career in a critical piece, which then evolved to us being asked to be a required assignment in first year seminar. So it was all these little things, these yeses, which also then led to the provost asking me to project manage a new grant with PASSHE that focuses on building an advising infrastructure for the state system. So they selected three out of the 10 universities across PASSHE and those three-

Meredith Metsker:

Can you quickly say what PASSHE is? Sorry.

Josh Domitrovich:

Oh yeah. So PASSHE is the Pennsylvania, so it’s our state system of higher education. So PASSHE is what we call it for short. It’s comprised of 10 universities across the state, PennWest being one of them. And there were three of us that were selected, three institutions. And over the next two years, this $750,000 grant will help us figure out how do we build an infrastructure that PASSHE can use across all 10 institutions.

But the key element of that advising is career advising. And as soon as the provost saw that, he said, “Josh, I want you to be the project manager of it.” It’s like you can’t say no to that. That is a sword you fall on because that is an end game. A huge way that we get faculty on board is advising. And a lot of the work that we have done at PennWest is trying to marinate that and allow faculty to see how important their conversations are in the career conversation and building tools for them. But now we’re going for the head of the snake. We’re going straight to an infrastructure within PASSHE that if PASSHE’s saying, “This is what we want you to do,” it’s going to be done. And to be a part of that is so cool. To see where that might evolve over the next two years is really exciting.

So I guess in short, definitely wasn’t one thing. It was all these little things that I think you learn over time, your willingness to say yes. Trying to see the entire forest through the tree that’s in front of you and how sometimes a little bit of pain is a long-term gain. Persevering, not giving up, believing in yourself, believing in the team, believing in the mission.

Then I’d say the last thing, and I’ll press pause, is data. Data is your friend, can be your friend. Data can be your friend. You can use it in a lot of different ways to try to tell a story. And I think learning what your president or your boss believes is important or understands what’s important at the institutional level, what’s important at the divisional level, and then what’s important at our office level, how top works down, but down should work up.

Because a lot of the work that we did, people weren’t aware of, but as I started connecting it to visional and institutional outcomes, it just naturally grew to the top and it becomes this natural understanding that career does have a significant impact on student persistence and retention. Now we’re a part of those conversations. We’ve pulled a table to the chair that we weren’t at. I have a Monday morning meeting with enrollment ops. Never was a part of that before. So I have all the insights of what’s enrollment looking like? What are the challenges? How are we helping in certain areas? But that was an evolution. But we’re not in enrollment management, but I’m in an enrollment management meeting with 95% of the people from enrollment management. So it’s all those little things.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. Well, the enrollment management thing, that’s how it should be. Career services should always be in that room.

Josh Domitrovich:

Agreed.

Meredith Metsker:

I remember when I worked in higher ed, I was on the university’s central marketing team, but I worked with enrollment management and wrote for all of the recruitment marketing materials, the websites, the videos, the one-pagers, whatever. And I always wanted more data. Enrollment management would just be like, “Well, we have this student story and let’s put this quote in there.” And I was like, “That’s great. But also, do we have broader data and bigger stories, more patterns that we can draw on?” And it was always so hard to get. So kudos to you for getting yourself in that room and partnering with them on that because I’m sure it makes the story a lot more compelling.

Josh Domitrovich:

It does. And it’s interesting you bring that up, Meredith, because I think, again, over this last year, it’s been very telling. Having more dynamic conversations and more frequent conversations with enrollment, we also then have that’s bled into our university communications marketing team. And now one of our staff members, Christina, who’s the director of our career engagement side, she has a regular meeting with the content writing team.

Meredith Metsker:

Amazing.

Josh Domitrovich:

And to see the amount of stories that Christina has pushed to them that they have used has been… I’m kidding you not. Every other week there’s at least a story that we had some level of engagement in. And for how many times they come to us now, and say, “Hey, do you know, we’re looking for somebody with this profile. Ask the team.” It’s amazing. So I appreciate you bringing that up because that has been a cool dynamic. It’s been a really neat change, especially as career has been a more focal point in trying to pitch that to the marketing team, and them accepting that and seeing how we grow that makes a difference.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. Sounds like a mutually beneficial thing. And I definitely wish I would’ve had that at my institution when I worked there. I’m curious, you have talked about your use of data, some of the things that you’re tracking in the past on past episodes and in the Career Everywhere community. But for those who maybe are not familiar, can you share a little bit more about some of the specific things you’re tracking, how you’re connecting it to certain KPIs?

Josh Domitrovich:

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Apologize to anybody who listens, this is where I geek out. So if I black out, this is my happy-

Meredith Metsker:

Data nerd here.

Josh Domitrovich:

This is my happy place. Look at my walls. This is my happy place. This is my happy place.

Meredith Metsker:

If you’re listening, his walls are covered in sticky notes and diagrams and all kinds of good stuff.

Josh Domitrovich:

This is the result of our strategic plan, our-

Meredith Metsker:

Love it.

Josh Domitrovich:

… internal office. Okay. So at a very basic level, I was in a meeting with a former provost, and I asked him what makes the president say yes? When we’re asking for these things, budgets are being cut, staff is being reduced. How do I stop that? How do I make an ask for more? And he said, I quote, “If it doesn’t touch enrollment retention or outcomes, don’t send it to him.” Okay, loud and clear. Heard it.

So I go back, we start to brainstorm, and we think, how do we start making connections based off our work to each of these areas? Outcomes was very easy. We already did the first destination survey. We work with a lot of academic programs to provide specifically accreditation related data sets to help them. Easy. Check. We already knew that we fulfilled that box.

Enrollment was a little bit different. We talked about it. It was me putting myself out there. It was like dating, like, hey, are you interested? Here’s what I could do. I heard about this meeting. I heard this data set in the meeting. Could I investigate it? And it led to this evolution of the exploratory studies program. And that program has allowed us to turn positive registration and retention for our exploratory students. So that’s just a little bit of a aside. But the big thing, if you can do anything, it’s connection to retention or what we call persistence at our institution. So retention and persistence are a little bit different.

Retention, if you will, is kind of year over year or semester over semester change for the student. So does little Joshy come back from fall to spring? Does he come back from spring to fall? That’s retention. We weren’t necessarily interested just in that because a lot of the work that we do, like any career service office, is we impact any student regardless of credit load, where retention tends to focus on full-time equivalent students. So those that are in the 12 to 18 credit limit. And they often look at first time students in some of their reporting. Well, we could impact a student taking one credit, 18 credits. They could be here full-time, part-time. It doesn’t matter. Our data shows we engage the spectrum of students.

So we actually devised a plan with institutional effectiveness to define what persistence meant at PennWest. And what persistence meant to capture all those students was, did the student retain? Did they come back? And/or did they successfully graduate? Because no retention metrics actually track a senior when they leave because senior’s graduating. So persistence is a more encompassing data metric that we look at to ensure that we’re capturing any student across the spectrum of engagement.

So from there, we had to think about how do we show impact related to persistence or retention? So in short, what we did was we defined engagement in our office. And what that meant for us was we have five engagement types. The first one is appointments, then it’s program/presentations. Then it’s events. The next is software. And the last is documents.

So documents specifically is we utilize Handshake. And inside of Handshake, a student could upload documents to be able to be used in their job search. If that service wasn’t provided, student couldn’t upload said document. Just like some students only ever engage with us through the software that we provide. We never see them. We never talk with them. So those five engagement types get packaged together and we call that engagement.

And what I do at the end of every year is I pull data for all five engagement types. I make a really pretty file. And then that file gets connected to the persistence rate of students at PennWest. And we’ve created our own internal dashboard at PennWest through the help of institutional effectiveness. Shout out to Serene. Serene and I have worked through two iterations of it where a simple dashboard you can pull up and it very clearly shows you students who engage with the career center versus students who did not engage with the career center, what their persistence rates were.

And what I can share with you over the course of, well, since integration. So since, well, it’d be 2022, so July 2022, our average annual persistence rate for students who engage with us is about 88%, which is 7% higher than the average PennWest rate. And if you dig a little bit deeper into that though, and you look at students who engage versus don’t engage, which is where we really try to present it, that number expands to 10%. And this year was the very first year, this past year, so academic year ’24-’25, it was the very first year our persistence rate eclipsed 90%. And that, what I just shared with you, and I’ve shared this with the team, it has warded off budget cuts, it has warded off staff reductions.

Just to be able to share the impact that we make, 10 percentage points is significant, and when you think about it. And this is not chump change engagement. We engage 33% of the population every year. We’re very strong. And that engagement has never went down as enrollments went down, which means we’re engaging more students theoretically. So our engagement rate is about 33 to 35%. But enrollment, as I’ve shared, has declined 15% over the last few years. So we’re doing a heck of a job engaging students and seeing that engagement has also evolved to students aren’t engaging just once. They’re engaging in multiple engagement types and times.

So the work is speaking for itself. But most offices can speak on the latter, not the former. We know the students that are engaging with us, but have you connected it to how it’s ultimately making a difference with retention and/or persistence, whatever that looks like? And what’s really neat is in our dashboard, you can start filtering out by certain populations of students.

So we know there are three populations of students that we have the most impact on. The first, freshmen, the second, non-traditional students, the third, minority students. Those are key populations of students. If you look at any report that institutional effectiveness runs, those are the categories people want to see the needle move positively on. Of course you do. So that freshman statistic helped, helped, voluntold me to be in charge of exploratory. It also helped move the needle when we first were told no to get into our first year course. That changed to a yes.

So it’s those little, what makes the provost say yes? What does the president want to see? Learning the why behind them or the metrics that they are trying to achieve and us connecting. Again, we know what we do. We know how to do it, but sometimes we don’t connect it to the why, which is the most critical piece.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. It’s so interesting to hear how you think through that. And like I said, you all have done an amazing job of connecting career services engagement to outcomes to those KPIs of the institution. And I don’t know if your ears were burning earlier today, but I interviewed the uConnect founder and CEO, David Kozhuk, and we actually talked about you as an example of how to connect engagement or career services engagement to outcomes.

Josh Domitrovich:

Thanks. Thanks, David.

Meredith Metsker:

So yeah, that’s interesting timing. So as you were mentioning earlier, you’ve faced a lot of challenges and headwinds in your time at PennWest. Some of them are institution specific, a lot of them, but some are just kind of the external forces impacting higher ed these days. And I am curious, what has made you persist? What’s your secret to just staying in the game, staying focused, staying motivated?

Josh Domitrovich:

Wow, that’s a great question. It’s a heavy question. I kind of get tingles thinking about it because I think we talked a little bit about it on the onset of what Career Everywhere means to me. I mean, understanding and knowing your why is so critical. The work that we do is so important. We are an answer to the return on investment conversation that’s facing higher ed today. We know the impact that we can make. And it’s so easy to go into a meeting where people are challenging or questioning the work that you do and you lay out the impact that you have. Their argument then becomes moot. It is so easy often to rebuttal these ideas sometimes that formulate in people’s mind that they don’t really know the work that you do.

And I’ll mention one example, and then I’ll get back to some of the other ideas. Whenever we presented the information on persistence for the very first time to a group of faculty, I knew, I had an idea, I bet money on the fact that somebody in that room was going to say, “Well, only the good students engage with the career center. Only the top performers come to see you.” So in preparation for that, Serene and I worked on a metric of average GPA.

So what we did was we looked at students who engaged with the career center, what was their average GPA, versus what was the average GPA of students who did not engage with the career center. That statistic has always showed over the course of every single year that we’ve done this, it’s done three, we’re waiting on our fourth year because it’s a lagger data, every single year, the average GPA of students who engage with the career center is lower than the students who don’t engage with us.

Meredith Metsker:

Interesting.

Josh Domitrovich:

Which does not mean only the good students are coming to us. So it’s that type of thing, knowing your why and having good insights on your data and believing in that data and knowing it’s sound data is extremely valuable.

The other thing that I’d probably mention that comes to mind is, I don’t know if other people feel this way, but I feel like this whole thing’s just a game. I know we get paid for it, this is my livelihood, but I don’t know, I have a lot of fun with it to be quite honest with you. I mean, I could be really depressed and sad having three divisions and 12 people of having supervised across this time, but man, has it been fun? Did the challenge, I like the challenge.

I’m not sure I could ever go back to a non-challenging environment. I think I’d get bored. That sounds really unhealthy that I just said that to me. I might have to go to counseling to talk about this. But I don’t know. I love the chaos of it all. And I think that that’s not for everybody. I think I understand that. I think I understand it’s okay to fail forward. And I think that was a big military test. It didn’t matter what we did, you were always wrong. Because the idea there was to try to show you to build resiliency and to not forget how to continue to push forward and find the correct path in the problem that you faced. So that has been a big piece.

None of this is possible without the team. I just get to tell stories, which is what I love to do, and to build insights from the data. But this is all a testament to the wonderful team that we have here at PennWest, and their constant desire and motivation to impact the student in the right way. So without a team that believes in that mission, and to be honest with you, who delivers? Their customer satisfaction from our surveys, every single one, extremely high. I mean, our cumulative years of service is over 100 years of time that they’ve worked in the space.

So they know what they’re doing, they’ve helped ride the wave change, some with resistance, some not, and that’s okay. But they believe in the mission. And I think they also believe in me, which means a lot to me. I’ve been able to help prove to them. And having that support go both ways I think has built a really strong group of people that understand the mission and what we’re trying to do.

And then the other kind of resiliency, I think you said what has made us persist, we just got done talking about it, data. Data has been my friend. It could be an enemy in some cases. But understanding how you paint color to things that are very black and white, which data tends to be, learning how to add color to it that tells a story. And that same data point, you might have to tell it a different way depending on who you’re talking to. I think the term’s like code switch. You got to learn-

Meredith Metsker:

Sounds right.

Josh Domitrovich:

… how to do that. You have to learn the way I would present this to you, Meredith, it could be very different the way I’d present it to David in your organization. It’s just you learn that. And some of it’s trial and error. A lot of it is error. There are many times I got a no. But the question I learned to ask was what would it take to make that a yes? So it’s okay that it was a no. I have to try to understand what does that look like in a yes environment? Sometimes that was, it’s not going to happen anytime soon. All right. So no time soon. I’ll come back in a couple years if that’s the case. But it’s not a reason to give up.

So I think that is it. It’s just staying positive, staying optimistic, leveraging data to learn how to tell stories, becoming open and willing to build relationships with people within and across your division. And not being afraid to experiment and take some calculated risks I think is really important is the things that I’ve learned.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. Yeah. That’s so interesting to hear. And I appreciate your kind of natural tendency to lean into curiosity. If someone gives you a no, you’re like, “Okay, why? Yeah, tell me more. What would it take to make it a yes?” I see that theme of curiosity is kind of a through line through a lot of your work and your approach.

Josh Domitrovich:

Nice. Thank you.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. I mean, you’ve shared a lot of reflection so far in this conversation, but just thinking back over everything that has happened with your work and your team, PennWest in general over the last four years, are there any patterns or learnings that stand out to you now?

Josh Domitrovich:

Change is constant. It’s never going to go away. And I think there were times throughout our journey, whether it was within our team or kind of peers across the management level, things are going to settle. They’ve never settled. And I think it was interesting where we didn’t wait for the settle. We just shot out of a cannon. We were ready to go. We wanted to be the first there and be really thoughtful about how we got there.

To me, that was a huge lesson that I think we take away that has benefited us significantly because it allowed us to tell a really cool story throughout the entire process. To me, that’s probably what stands out the most, aside from the things that we already talked about, which I won’t beat to death. But that is a big thing. Not being afraid to jump in, taking that calculated risk. Don’t wait or assume it’s going to happen because it’s probably not without you trying to be proactively positive in that environment and trying to build allies along that way.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. Yep. And using data to tell your story, of course. I’m curious, what are some of the things you’re proudest of since we first talked for episode one back in, gosh, late 2022?

Josh Domitrovich:

My knee-jerk reaction is surviving.

Meredith Metsker:

I mean, that’s valid.

Josh Domitrovich:

Setting that aside, getting into the strategic plan, Meredith. I mean, if you would’ve asked me, if we would’ve had a crystal ball, knowing I’d be back here for the 100th episode, I’m not sure how confident I would’ve been to say we would make it in the strategic plan. But that is the culmination of all that we’ve done. I mean, every bit of work that we’ve done, whether we knew it or not, was leading to that. And to have pillar four be completely centralized on the work that we do, but also be in the other three, it’s bulletproof. As I think I said earlier, it’s like written in blood.

But now the hard work begins. So it’s going to be neat to see the next evolution of how do we actually now span that work across the ecosystem to ensure that career absolutely is a part of the entire student experience. That screams to me as something that I’m super proud of. Just having an amazing team, truly. They’re such good people. And I think it’s been so rewarding to get more of them in an environment where other staff are disappearing. Other staff are being let go. It’s just been so refreshing to have new colleagues and new perspectives mixing with the longer term tenured colleagues who have great perspectives too. I mean, I’m very fortunate for the team that I get to work with and that I get to manage. There’s such a blessing. So I’m super proud of that too.

And then honestly, I think the last thing is the community this is built. I’m actually, not to get emotional, I’m thankful for this. It feels like you and uConnect were a huge part of our story. And you and the community have helped provide us resources, ideas, perspective, colleagues that we reached out to for guidance. It wasn’t like we knew what we were doing. Some of it was we’re making it up as we went and leveraging people that maybe have been there before. So honestly, I’m proud and thankful that you all kind of walked into our life in the moment where I don’t think we knew we needed it. And I hope that makes sense. It was like that happenstance piece. So that’s the last thing I would say. I’m proud of that, the relationships that we’ve built along the way, especially with you guys.

Meredith Metsker:

Well, thank you. And likewise, I do feel like the timing was very perfect. Again, luck is opportunity means preparation. And I appreciate that you have been such a core piece of the Career Everywhere community that we have been building. Like I said, you were really one of our early adopters in that regard. You are the first person on the podcast. You are probably one of, if not the first speaker, who we secured for our first Career Everywhere Conference. You joined the Career Everywhere community right away. So yeah, I appreciate your involvement in that, you being willing to buy in early, and just always being so generous with your wisdom, your experience, and the relatable way that you share it because I know our listeners and fellow community members really respond to it. So just thank you.

Josh Domitrovich:

Thanks, Meredith. I appreciate that. It means a lot.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. Well, I’m curious, speaking of other members of the community, knowing what you know now and having so successfully integrated career into your institution’s strategic plan, what advice would you give to other career services leaders who are hoping to do the same thing?

Josh Domitrovich:

Some of the advice. How comfortable are you with data? And if the answer to that is not comfortable, to any Likert scale degree of towards not comfortable, I would say you have to get comfortable or you need to build allies with people who are comfortable. I don’t think the data’s going away. I think it becomes way more valuable over the course of the next few years just with things like the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, trying to justify earnings premiums, this return on investment conversation.

I mean, that is probably the biggest piece of advice because for us, it was the thing that helped move the needle and/or served as a shield to help protect the team. So that is a huge piece that is far and above anything else is kind of what is your data informed strategy? Are you collecting it? Are you able to analyze it? And even if you can’t, there are offices like institutional research or effectiveness who might be able to help you do that. So building relationships with those people.

The other piece of advice I think we’ve talked a little bit about also is kind of the relationship building. There was a good mentor that I had who had talked about when you have a moment in your day, or maybe a moment in your week, or if you don’t, you need to force yourself to make time as you walk across that campus, go meet somebody that you haven’t met before. Pick up the phone, make that phone call. Try to learn about their area because you just never know. You never know when your paths might cross. Could there be a partnership waiting to happen that you didn’t know?

Our president, well, former president, our former president always had kind of open office hours. Going to them. What’s new? Could you get any more insights out of him? Jon was his name. Could you get any more insights out of Jon? Not being afraid. I’m going to use your term, Meredith, asking curious questions. Don’t fall on or be satisfied with no. Be respectful, please.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah.

Josh Domitrovich:

Be respectful. But try to understand on a deeper level why it’s a no and what could make it the yes. I think for me, this is the basics. I mean, anybody who’s heard me do any type of presentation, I usually reference Simon Sinek in his golden circle, the why, how, what. I think I naturally did it in this probably. That means a lot to us. And thinking in that way of why are we doing X? Insert it. It’s so easy to remember what you do. And often we jump to that. Well, we’ll just do that type of event or program. Why? The how’s the easy part. We know how to do this stuff. That doesn’t mean the resources are there for it, but you have to remember the why.

So don’t forget your why, make data-informed decisions, and go build those relationships because the allies are out there, but they’re just as overwhelmed as you are, so they’re not going to be thinking about you. And that’s at least the way that we think about it. It’s out of sight, out of mind, and I have to be in their mind. So it’s staying curious enough to go after them strategically to build the relationships. Those would be my lessons.

Meredith Metsker:

I love that. And as a fellow parent of toddlers, I’m sure you’re used to answering why questions, and maybe they’re an inspiration. Just ask why about everything.

Josh Domitrovich:

Yes. Augie, we call him the why why boy, because that’s the phase that he’s in. Augie’s my son for the listeners. He is, oh my gosh, every single day, all day. Why? Why? Why? So Addie, his sister, calls him the why why boy now.

Meredith Metsker:

I love that. I am excited. I am both excited for that phase and also a little intimidated by it whenever it comes.

Josh Domitrovich:

It’s beautiful. It’s wonderful.

Meredith Metsker:

I’m sure I’ll learn a lot.

Josh Domitrovich:

You’re going to do great. You will. Yeah.

Meredith Metsker:

All right. Well, Josh, before I start closing us out, is there anything else you would like to add?

Josh Domitrovich:

No, I think what I would say is please don’t hesitate. If you have questions, you’d love to have a conversation. I thoroughly enjoy having conversations about, not just our work, but the work that other people are doing and trying to learn from them. The amount of information I’ve learned from, whether it was podcast guests or the community members, it’s just so fun and it’s so enlightening that I would say, please don’t be afraid to reach out.

And for anybody who wants to, I’m on LinkedIn. Meredith will share my email and all that information. So you can reach out at any time. I always love to have the conversations. There have been countless post-podcast or post-events that we’ve done in the community. I’ve met one-on-one with people, with groups of people. And likewise, I reach out to people to learn more about what they’re doing.

So please don’t hesitate if there’s anything that resonated with you, or you want to see our dashboard that I talked about for, we call it the impact analysis dashboard. If you want to see that of how we do persistence, I’m happy to share. Because I think what I’ve realized over the test of time, what we do might not work for you. I wish I had a magic key. I sure wouldn’t be here because we would’ve made a lot of money by now. But I also recognize that our variables are very different than your variables at your institution. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t take something from what we’ve done that maybe helps you. So please don’t be shy and feel free to reach out and ask. Happy to help.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. And like Josh said, I will be sure to include his LinkedIn profile, his email, all of that, so you can easily connect with him. Okay. So Josh, I’m going to close us out with this answer a question, leave a question thing that I like to do at the end of every episode. So I’ll ask you a question our last guest left for you, and then you will leave a question for the next guest. So our last guest was Harold Bell, the recently retired director of career planning and development at Spelman College. And he left this question for you. If you could be an answer to any problem, what would that problem be? And what would your answer look like?

Josh Domitrovich:

Holy cow, Harold.

Meredith Metsker:

I know. It’s a deep question.

Josh Domitrovich:

It’s a deep question. I’m going to try to keep it related to our world in higher ed. Why is it so hard for people to understand that career truly is everywhere? Having these conversations across the spectrum of divisions and with people, that to answer the question, why can’t you say yes and see that career is an integral part of the work that we ultimately do? That is the piece. Why is it so hard in their mind to answer that question or see that light?

So I would love to be that solution more so to that problem. And that’s what we’re trying to do. And I think it’s, again, I hope to answer the second part of that, what would your answer look like? I think my answer, it would be, I hope the strategic plan is our answer. I hope that this allows our leverage to be able to say, we as an institution believe in this and this is the direction that we have to go.

So I’m not really sure you can say no anymore. So I hope that’s going to be the truth, but that’s where my mind went with that question. It’s what is that return on investment, being the answer to the return on investment. We are the answer to that. And I hope that the strategic plan is the answer to make that point across the stakeholders that we have at our institution.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, I love that. And hopefully it’ll be a template for other career centers to follow in the future.

Josh Domitrovich:

No pressure. I hope so.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. Well, Josh, what question would you like to leave for the next guest?

Josh Domitrovich:

I’m going to completely deviate from where I think I was originally going to go, but I just finished this awesome book. And I’m curious, what was the last book that the next guest read, and why was it so enlightening to them? That could be any genre. I just kind of leave it at that. So what book did you just read or recently read that was very inspiring to you and what did you take away from it?

Meredith Metsker:

Oh, that’s a good one. What would your answer to that be?

Josh Domitrovich:

Well, I mean, the most recent book that I read was called Red Rising. It’s like this sci-fi space opera. It’s like Dune and Star Wars and Game of Thrones if you smushed them all together.

Meredith Metsker:

Nice.

Josh Domitrovich:

It’s just neat to get out of that perspective. But what was inside of that, if anybody’s familiar with Dune, it is so politically built about power. There were so many major takeaways inside of that to see how the characters navigated that power and how they worked around the power. And I think that’s probably why it was really interesting to me because I feel like that’s our environment so much is what are the power dynamics? How does that person ultimately say yes? And what do they ultimately say yes to? How do the people work around that? That was a really cool theme across the book. One of my favorite books though, if we want to talk businessy, is The Six Thinking Hats.

Meredith Metsker:

I don’t think I’ve heard of that one.

Josh Domitrovich:

So Cliff Notes of the Six Thinking Hats is really straightforward. There are six colored hats. Each color represents a mindset of thinking. So for example, I’m not sure these are the exact, as in the color, it’s been a couple years, but green is creative thinking, white is data, red is negative type of thoughts. And what he goes on to explain in the book is that when you come into a general conversation, most people are coming in looking at, if you think of a house, a square house looking down, they’re coming in from their perspective. They’re ready to defend their area.

But what his argument is, if you all as a facilitator can come in and point at the same direction of the house and you talk about the same thing, we put on a hat and say, right now we’re only going to think creatively. Give me all your creative juices. And if somebody deviates from that, the professional way to bring them back is, well, that’s not the color hat we’re on. We’ll put that aside. When we get to that, we’ll come back to it.

It’s been a really neat… Now I don’t do that in a staff meeting because not everybody knows or has heard of that, but the concept is true. So that was a really unique book that I think helped me as a facilitator of meetings. And just really think differently about how do you set up that meeting and how do you keep people on track to try to achieve that goal in that meeting? That was another cool one.

Meredith Metsker:

That is interesting. And I just have this vision pop into my head as you’re describing it, of people wearing party hats, those cone party hats where, okay, we’re putting on our creative thinking party hat now.

Josh Domitrovich:

That’s right. Exactly. Yep.

Meredith Metsker:

That’s great. I’m trying to think. I’m almost-

Josh Domitrovich:

What’s yours?

Meredith Metsker:

… done with the book, The Lion Women of Tehran, which has been a really interesting read on just female friendship, politics. It’s kind of the story of Iran from the 1950s through, I’m not quite done with it, so we’re in the ’80s now. So just the political shifts there and just the power of family and friendship. And it’s been very interesting so far.

Josh Domitrovich:

That sounds interesting. I think my sister-in-law recommended that book actually now that you bring that up.

Meredith Metsker:

It’s really good. Really good.

Josh Domitrovich:

She’s a crazy reader. She reads 70, 80 books a year.

Meredith Metsker:

Oh my gosh.

Josh Domitrovich:

Yeah, that’s crazy.

Meredith Metsker:

I’m hoping to read 40, I think is my goal.

Josh Domitrovich:

Good for you.

Meredith Metsker:

So we’ll see.

Josh Domitrovich:

Good for you.

Meredith Metsker:

Cool. Well, Josh, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me on the podcast today for our 100th episode. I really appreciate you coming on the show again, and just sharing all of the progress you’ve made, sharing all the details and the secret sauce. Just thank you again for being so generous with your time and your knowledge.

Josh Domitrovich:

Always, I am so thankful to be here, and can’t wait to hear all the future episodes to come. Thanks, Meredith.