Harnessing the Untapped Power of Career Services Leaders

Meredith Metsker:

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Dylan Houle:

Why are career services office at most institutions institutionally prioritized as a mid-level office where the services are opt-in? There’s no requirement to visit the career center. And this has been discussed ad nauseam by NACE, by The Career Leadership Collective, in podcasts such as ours, it’s like, “How do we get better integrated? How do we come more visible to students? How do we make sure the students are accessing our resources?” But my question is why does that misalignment exist? Why haven’t universities responded to the public, I would say, outcry and the loss of public confidence in the value of a college education with more explicit elevation of career services?

Meredith Metsker:

Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Career Everywhere podcast. I’m your host, Meredith Metsker, and today, I am joined by Dylan Houle, he’s the executive director of the career center at Santa Clara University. Thank you for being here, Dylan.

Dylan Houle:

Meredith, thank you so much for having me. I love your podcast and I’m excited to be here.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, I am super excited to have you. And I also love your podcast, which we will talk about a little bit later, but I’m just really excited to talk to you today about what you’ve called a misalignment in higher ed between student expectations around career outcomes, and then how career centers are positioned within the institution. And I’ll let you explain that more here in a minute, but, basically, the core question is if career outcomes are a major reason most students choose to go to college, why isn’t the career center better positioned, better resourced, and more valued? So this is obviously a very complex and fascinating topic, and I know it is very relevant for our audience. It’s so relevant in fact that it’s the focus of your dissertation, right?

Dylan Houle:

That’s right.

Meredith Metsker:

All right. And, again, we’ll talk more about that later, but it also led you to start your own podcast, as we mentioned, it’s called the Career Services Leadership Podcast, which we will talk about later as well. Before I get into my questions, Dylan, is there anything else you would like to add about yourself, your background, your podcast, or your role there at Santa Clara?

Dylan Houle:

Yes, thank you. I’ll provide a little bit of context about myself that might help inform the rest of the conversation today. But first thing to know is I’m born and raised in Northern California, I’m from a town called Vacaville, and I graduated high school with a superlative most likely to become a teacher. And I went to college with that goal in mind. I earned my bachelor’s degree in English from San Francisco State University. And after undergrad, I moved to New York City and earned my master’s degree in teaching from Fordham University. And I taught in New York’s public schools for a couple of years before realizing that I didn’t actually want to be a teacher. To this day, those couple of years of teaching was easily the most challenging work I’ve ever done, but I’m grateful that my hardest job was my first one, because everything since then, I’ve had that to compare it to and go, “Okay, at least there’s no books being thrown across the room or any fights breaking out in the classroom or any other unexpected calamities.”

But the year after I quit teaching, I call that my year in the wilderness because being a teacher was the only career I had planned for myself. And so when I wasn’t a teacher anymore, I really didn’t know what to do. So I spent a year trying on different jobs. I was a freelance reporter, I was an HR assistant, I was a database administrator before. Finally, I was hired by a company called TheLadders, and they’re still around today, but at that time, their value proposition was jobs that are $100,000 and up. So it catered mostly to mid-level managers to the C-suite executives. And I was hired to be an in-house certified professional resume writer, which is a job I didn’t even know existed until I applied to it and got the job and went through the certification process. But over the next course of the year working at TheLadders, I probably wrote over 500 resumes, cover letters, LinkedIn profiles for a really wide range of clients.

One memorable client was an ex-NFL player who was transitioning into the workforce after his NFL career to a lot of mid-level managers, director-level managers, C-suite executives, and, occasionally, new college graduates who had parents basically that were trying to push them to get started in their career. But for each client that I had, I would do an intake call to find out what are your goals with this resume, what skills do you want to highlight, what accomplishments do you want to highlight, what are you targeting next, what other types of jobs are you looking at. And I found that I actually really enjoyed those conversations and I really enjoyed writing resumes. I came to think of it as the art of artful hyperbole, which is how do you make something that’s mundane, your day-to-day job, sound exciting, really pop? I love the design of resumes getting into Microsoft Word and actually visually designing them so that they looked really clean and crisp.

All of that was really compelling to me. And then also, those conversations gave me some ideas about how to manage my own career. I was asking them what their skills were, what their insights into the through line of their career, what connected all of these different experiences that they’ve had together so that the resume could present a unified narrative. And so I reflected on my own situation. I was young at the time, I was 23 at the time, and I had a master’s degree in teaching and a certification in resume writing. And I thought to myself, “Where do those two worlds meet? How can I make it so that these two things are complementary rather than distinct or separate things that I’ve done in my life that don’t necessarily meet?” And I thought to myself, “I could teach people how to write resumes.” And so who does that? So I started doing some research, some investigation and university career services do that. And I wouldn’t know because I didn’t go to my career services office. So many career-

Meredith Metsker:

Same.

Dylan Houle:

… service directors… Yes, like you as well. So shoutout to my big homies, Diana Martinez and Maxine Sugarman at Pace University. They took a chance on me, gave me my first job as an assistant director of career services at Pace in Downtown Manhattan. That’s where I got a taste of this line of work, decided one day I want to be a director of a career center, really enjoyed it. I spent a year there. I moved back to California to be at the University of San Francisco, closer to my parents. Then I took a job at Menlo College, which is in Atherton, California, right near Menlo Park where Facebook’s headquarters are. And I was working under Zach Osborne and Angela Schmiede until I was promoted to the director position.

And then to wrap this story up, in 2022, Santa Clara announced they were hiring for a new executive director. And I had two different friends of mine, Alex Hochman over at the University of San Francisco and LT Rease Miles, who’s a faculty member here at SCU, but I knew her from Menlo College, as well as my wife at the time, all really encouraged me to apply. And I’ll be honest with you, Meredith, that encouragement was needed because I was a little intimidated about making the jump from Menlo College, which was a two-person team supporting 700 students to Santa Clara University, which would be, all in, a 20-person team supporting 8,500 to 10,000 students, the bigger budget, much more name recognition, much higher levels of visibility. But I’ll say that as intimidated as I was, every day, I’m glad I took the leap because working here has been really a rewarding and wonderful experience. So that’s a little bit about me and, hopefully, that provides some context to everything else I say in today’s episode.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, that’s some great context. Thank you for sharing that. I always find it fascinating to hear how people in career services come to be in career services, because as I’ve said several times on this podcast, there’s no degree for career services. And so everyone is coming here from somewhere else and bringing a lot of interesting life experience and perspective.

Dylan Houle:

Absolutely. And that’s one of the themes. We’ll talk about some of the themes that have emerged from my own podcast, and I’m sure it’s emerged in your podcast, but that’s a theme. Most people that work in career services did not set a plan to work in career services. They got into it through some circuitous or non-linear route.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. I also really related to what you were saying earlier about how your career vision was to be a teacher and you had to figure out, “Okay, well, that’s not going to work out. So now what do I do?” I had a similar journey where I started in journalism. So when I got my degree in, that’s… I envisioned going to the big leagues. I was going to work for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post. That was my goal. And maybe a couple years into being a full-time reporter, I got super burned out and it was like, “Okay, I can’t do this lack of work-life balance, this intense public scrutiny. I need to figure something else out.” And that also led me to higher ed. I worked on the central marketing team in higher ed for about four years, and that was a great learning ground and definitely set the tone for the rest of my career.

Dylan Houle:

That’s awesome. It’s the exact experience of a career transition or a career pivot or having some disappointment with our first plan and realizing, “I need to do something else that’s going to be fulfilling or provide me the balance that I need,” that makes us qualified to be career services professionals or work because we can talk to students about like, “I had an experience that you’re probably going to have yourself, and so let’s prep you for it. Let’s talk about how you can develop some resilience, some tolerance for ambiguity, et cetera.”

Meredith Metsker:

Yep. I could not agree more. And I definitely have heard that in this podcast. Everyone who ends up in career services often had that moment of questioning what’s next, “What am I going to do with my career and my life?” And so that does give them, I think, a lot of empathy for students who are facing the same challenges. Okay. Well, now before I get into the specific questions about our topic today, I do want to kick us off with a question I ask all of our guests. That’s what does career everywhere mean to you?

Dylan Houle:

So I love that you ask this question of all your guests, and I’ve given this some thought and look back at some of the answers others have given. And in the hopes of offering a unique answer, I’ll share two thoughts. One, I work at Santa Clara University, which is a Jesuit Catholic university. And one of the terms you’ll hear a lot at a Jesuit Catholic school is vocation discernment. And in Latin, the word for vocation is vocari, and that actually means calling. And the absolute ideal is for your calling and your career to be one and the same. And in our career center, one of our taglines is, quote, where your greatest talents meet the world’s greatest needs. And that’s a Venn diagram in which the circle of career and the circle of calling are perfectly overlapped.

And another thing we say in the career center is that we help deliver on the promise of higher education. A good job, social capital, and economic mobility in pursuit of a more humane, just, and sustainable world. That last bit is cribbed from our university vision statement. And a good job, one of the promises I think we make to students is that higher education, a college degree will lead to opportunities for a good job. A good job, in my opinion, in its most ideal form, is one that facilitates the achievement of self-actualization. Your fullest expression of self. So when I think about vocari or self-actualization, I don’t see a division between one’s self and one’s career. The two are inextricably linked, in such a way that you are enacting your career at all times because it is also your life’s calling, and there is no clocking out when you’re in that situation.

And that’s one idea that comes to mind when I hear the term career everywhere, that my career is everywhere in my life because it’s also my calling and I get a lot of passion and fulfillment out of it. The second thing that makes me think about is something that’s been on my mind for a while in this line of work, which is work as contribution to society. And let me see if I can explain this a little bit. All of us who work are engaged in this giant global team effort to maintain a functioning society. Sometimes it’s dysfunctional, but we’re doing our best as a collective humanity. And the job that you do, no matter what it is, exists because it’s meeting some societal need or want. And in the US, we live in an advanced economy. And in advanced economies, you have highly specialized jobs. So highly specialized that it can be easy, I think, to sometimes lose sight of the job’s purpose to society, the root need it might be helping to meet or fulfill.

But I like to think, what if you could rewind the history of your own job to see how it came to be that someone was needed to perform those specific tasks or how it came to be that a company you work for was needed by society? What service or product they’re offering that other humans could benefit from or need it? And if you were to rewind it all the way back, not just decades but centuries, thousands of years, to the root reason your job exists, you’d see how your job today is connected to the very foundation of the global society we live in today. That’s powerful to me, Meredith. It honestly gives me a sense of awe when I think about how all of us have literally been working together for 300,000 years to build and maintain this incredibly complex system. So when I think about career everywhere, I think about how all our careers everywhere, our very sincere and even sacred contributions to society. And I am aware how melodramatic that sounds, but I wanted to put that out there for your consideration and for your listeners’ consideration.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, I love that. I mean, it’s definitely different from past answers. So that was great. And it just reinforces for me what something that I have just really come to appreciate about the career services field and the people within it. You’re all just incredibly thoughtful, not only about your work, but about your lives and how those integrate and the work you do with students. I have not come across that in other industries that I’ve worked in. And so, yeah, I was just thinking about that as you were giving your answer, I’m like, “I just love working with career services folks.” Y’all are so nice and so thoughtful.

Dylan Houle:

Thank you for those kind words to the profession. And I agree, I really love working in this field. It’s given me so much intellectual enrichment. Everyone I speak to is not only kind, but really smart, really intellectual, really giving a lot of consideration to how this work influences the course of history in minute ways. Because as Daniel Newell in my podcast in episode one said, “If we change the course of one student’s life, we change the course of history.” And we get an opportunity to do that every single day. It’s pretty powerful.

Meredith Metsker:

That’s a great way to look at it. I love that. Okay. Now, on that note, I would love to dig into our topic today, which is, again, about this misalignment between the importance of career outcomes and then the positioning of most career centers on a higher ed campus. So it feels like this conversation is growing more timely and relevant every day with this increasing scrutiny on the cost and the ROI of higher ed. So to get us started, Dylan, can you just set the stage and talk more about this misalignment? What are you seeing and what are you hoping to explore in your dissertation on this topic?

Dylan Houle:

Thank you. So the organizational misalignment that I observe is I think one that is broadly observed by the field, which is career outcomes are, I would say, based on my research so far, one of the three main indicators of institutional quality. The other two are access and affordability, and then retention and graduation rates. And then the third one is post-graduation career outcomes. What does the college degree lead to? Despite it being such a prominent part of the value proposition, and I would say colleges are explicitly promising, college will lead to economic mobility, will lead to social mobility, that’s a value proposition that we’re making, to an increasingly diverse student body. Right? So we’re enrolling first-generation students, we’re enrolling students from increasingly diverse backgrounds, socioeconomic backgrounds, and we’re making this promise. This is a good investment because it’s going to lead to social and economic mobility.

Why then if that is one of the key tenets of the value proposition and it’s one of the main motivations that students go to college and it’s one of the main concerns of families and the public… And when I say the public, I mean both public opinion but also public as expressed through government policy and government concerns. We saw the college scorecard under Barack Obama, and since then, a lot of attention has been paid to what is the value of a college education. So given all that, why are career services office at most institutions institutionally prioritized as a mid-level office where the services are opt-in? There’s no requirement to visit the career center. And this has been discussed ad nauseum by NACE, by The Career Leadership Collective, in podcasts such as ours, it’s like, “How do we get better integrated? How do we come more visible to students? How do we make sure the students are accessing our resources?”

But my question is why does that misalignment exist? Why haven’t universities responded to the public, I would say, outcry and the loss of public confidence in the value of a college education with more explicit elevation of career services? And the example I bring to mind is chief diversity officers. Universities, in the past decade, have elevated a chief diversity officer, hired a chief diversity officer in response to public concerns. Why hasn’t that same thing happened following the 2008 recession, and the student loan crisis, and ROI, and employment outcomes happen with career? Why haven’t we seen more chief career officers? Now there are a few. There’s Kathleen Powell at William & Mary University, and I think she might be the only one I know of that actually has that as a title. But why haven’t we seen more of that? I’m curious about that. And so let me stop there before I jump into my theoretical frameworks and ask if you have any follow-up questions on that.

Meredith Metsker:

I think that’s such a great question. And, yeah, it really boggles the mind why that hasn’t been at the forefront. I mean, if senior leaders know that this is an issue within the court of public opinion, why aren’t they investing in the one main office that’s there to solve that problem? It’s like they already have all these specialized and highly skilled people on their campus working with students every day. Man, yeah, why wouldn’t you just invest? So that’s my one reaction there.

Dylan Houle:

I agree. And I’ll share a little bit about these different frames, Bolman and Deal’s frames, but even, symbolically, to have a chief career outcomes officer, what would that do to communicate to parents, and families, and prospective students that you’re taking this seriously that there is someone at the cabinet level, the senior leadership level accountable for those outcomes? Because, right now, at the senior leadership level, it’s not clear who is accountable for career outcomes. And that’s why it’s so odd that the office is this mid-level because the person accountable, me, ostensibly accountable, is three layers down from the president for something that’s one of the main value propositions of the institution. So it’s mysterious, it’s mystifying, and that’s where my dissertation comes in. So if I may, I’ll share a little bit about the framework I’m using.

Meredith Metsker:

Yes, please do.

Dylan Houle:

The first is Pierre Bourdieu, a French sociologist, came up with a theory on the forms of capital. His theory also includes something called habitus and fields. Habitus is basically your internalized sense of what is socially normal, and we might recognize this as privilege or it might manifest as acceptance of oppression. I accept the conditions that I’m in because it’s my lived experience to be that this is normal, or I accept that I am given all these access and opportunities because that’s my lived experience that it is normal. So there’s habitus. And then there’s fields in which capital and habitus play out. So there’s your church, your school, your work. Within each of these domains, power is allocated to different people differently.

But the one I’m focused on is capital. The forms of capital. And the forms of capital, there’s three main ones, and then there’s a collective one. There’s economic capital, which is money. It could be literal cash or it could be homeownership where money gets institutionalized in something. Two, cultural capital, which is, on one end, it’s the things you know and have experienced. Have you been to Paris? Have you been to the great museums? Have you seen the works of art that everyone should be familiar with? And then cultural capital can also be in an objective form, a college degree. So that could be a form of cultural capital. And then there’s social capital, which is who you know. Who’s in your network. And all three of those collectively combine to give you what’s called symbolic capital, which is your level of prestige in society.

So when I think about the forms of capital, I’ll just give this example. I can use my economic capital to purchase a college education. That college education is cultural capital. The cultural capital facilitates access to social capital. Because now that I’m in college, I’m interacting with peers that are also college-going, I’m interacting with professors who are highly-educated and well-networked, and then I’m going to graduate into a alumni network that is likely going to be able to open doors to other economic opportunities. My first job, my first internship, things of that nature. So you have economic capital leading to cultural capital, leading to social capital, that social capital giving opportunities for economic capital and creates a closed loop that’s hard to penetrate. And in our society, access to education has been one of the main ways we’ve tried to break that loop from just replicating itself within a certain population.

With that, there’s two different responses to Bourdieu. One is ED Hirsch who came up with this concept of cultural literacy. And he wrote a big book about it, thousands of terms, ideas, concepts that every person should know in order to be culturally literate. And it was everything from the Pythagoras’ theorem to Seinfeld, just the things that you need to be culturally literate to understand the society you live in. And ED Hirsch’s contention was that cultural capital was a binary. You had it or you didn’t. And if you didn’t have it, those that had it had to give it to you by teaching it to you. Well, decades later, a scholar named TJ Yosso, who is now at UC Riverside I believe, came up with the community cultural wealth model where she applied an appreciative inquiry lens to capital and basically is arguing, it’s not a binary, everyone has cultural capital. It’s just a matter of whose cultural capital is valued by society and whose cultural capital is not valued by society.

And she was looking primarily at communities of color in, I think, K-12 settings. And she aggregated a lot of different research and she came up with these six different forms of cultural wealth. And they are aspirational wealth, linguistic wealth, familial wealth, social wealth, navigational wealth, and resistance wealth. And I encourage people to go read her article, Whose Culture Has Capital?. It’s very enlightening. What I took away from that is this appreciative inquiry lens, how she reframed cultural capital. And it made me think about career services leaders. Are there forms of capital we possess that are not currently valued by the institutions we work at or that may be valued but are not currently being tapped and exploited for maximal organizational impact? In this aligning of student expectations with prioritization of career services. Is there something the institution is missing about what we’re bringing to the table?

And so here are my three research questions. Are there forms of capital that career services leaders possess but that are not widely seen or valued in higher education, thus limiting their opportunities for career advancement and organizational impact? Two, what forms of capital are currently seen or valued in higher education but that career services leaders have no or limited opportunity to accumulate, thus limiting their opportunities for career advancement and organizational impact. And then three, how my career services leaders accumulate and convert their career services capital to achieve organizational impact. And let me stop there before I jump into Bolman and Deal and ask if you have any reactions to that or thoughts.

Meredith Metsker:

Mostly I’m just really excited to hear what you find out in your research process. And also, as you were talking, I was thinking, I’m like, “It makes sense to me that he began his career as a teacher. I get it.” I’m learning something this episode. So that’s great.

Dylan Houle:

Oh, fantastic. Fantastic. Yeah, I’ve been learning a lot through this dissertation. Bourdieu was new to me. I may have encountered it in college, I don’t remember, but it’s been great. And Yosso has been great. And Yosso, that’s all couched within the critical race frameworks, which I’ve learned a lot about as well. So to answer those questions, I have another framework, which is Lee Bolman and Terrence Deal. Their four frames model, which many listeners may be familiar with. It’s a common organizational change leadership framework, which is basically there are four different ways to look at any organizational issue. And if you can only look at organizational issues through one frame, then you’re only going to come up with one type of solution. To a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Bolman and Deal are basically saying if you can apply multiple frames to an organizational issue, then you can come up with a wider range of solutions and probably a better set of solutions.

And so the four frames are structural, which is basically what’s the hierarchy of the organization, what are the rules, what are the policies, what are the roles, there’s the human resource frame, which is hiring the right people for the right tasks and giving them the right incentives to stay, to retain them, grow them. And then the third one is political, which is how are decisions made, how do resources get allocated? And then four is symbolic, which is what is the story we tell ourselves about working at this place? So what meaning do we attach to our work. And how you apply those different frames and you can apply one or two or three or all four frames to any given issue and it’ll come up with different solutions. So my idea is that I’m curious to investigate by interviewing career services leaders, how they might understand their forms of capital through each of those four frames.

So for an example, structurally, you know from your podcast, and I know from mine that career services report all to different offices. Some of us are in academic affairs, some of us are in student affairs, some of us are enrollment, and some of us are in development, and some might be entirely different places. But based on where we report, do we have certain capital that we possess? So for example, if you’re reporting into development, is one of your forms of capital access to high net worth individuals and donors and super engaged alums? So I’m curious to hear about how career services leaders might understand their structural forms of capital or similarly, symbolically, like I was mentioning, because universities, one of their key value propositions is career outcomes, and that’s a major indicator of institutional quality, how can career services leaders exploit that to achieve organizational impact? Career services is important and symbolically important, but in other ways as well.

So those are some of the ways I’m thinking about using Bolman and Deal’s four frames to ask leaders about their forms of capital. And we’ll see what the conclusions are, but one example that comes to my mind as a concrete example is data capital. And in most career centers, at least at Santa Clara, I facilitate the First Destination Survey. I collect that data with our institutional research team. I’m the first to know, at a large aggregate scale, if our students are getting jobs at high profile companies, in addition to average salaries and the outcome rate, but how can I leverage the fact that I might be the first to know if a student got a job at Google or a student got a job at Microsoft to work with our marketing and communications team or share that with the president to make it so that the career center is a valuable and rich source of data that should be consulted regularly. So I’ll stop there.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, especially the data angle you just mentioned, because I think that is a strong suit that a lot of career centers have and a great excuse to get access to some of the senior leadership and other departments across campus. And I was also thinking too when you were talking about how career centers report into other different departments and how that gives them different levels of capital. I think I was thinking of some of the career centers that report into enrollment and does that give them more capital, because that’s where a lot of the resources go to on campus is enrollment, do they get some of that maybe more than other career centers do?

Dylan Houle:

My hope with the dissertation is that we’ll be able to identify these forms of capital and career services leaders can then think strategically about how they do this work to leverage their capital so that it is seen, so that it is appreciated and that they can really optimize wherever they are at the institution.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. So to summarize, it sounds like your goals with your dissertation are to look into this question about the misalignment between career outcomes expectations and how a career center is positioned. Yeah. So to look into that, identify these different areas of capital and how that is impacted by where you report into and what level of leader is that for the career center? And then are you also planning to make recommendations based on this?

Dylan Houle:

Well, that will be determined by the findings of the research. But you know what it is really, is let me step back a little bit because one of the things that motivated my podcast and some of my initial questions is I’m here at Santa Clara University, I’m the executive director and what’s next for me? There’s not a career path laid out that others have followed. And fun fact, I’ve done a little bit of historical research. No one that has held my position has ever advanced any higher within the institution at Santa Clara, dating back to the 1950s when career services was founded here. No one has ever been promoted up or taken any other position higher than this. I mean, I’m 39 years old, I’m still rather young in my career, the question is, “Well, what do I do next now that I’m here? Even though I’m not looking to go anywhere and I’ve only been here for about three years, but it is an interesting question. What are the career pathways for career services leaders?

I see a couple of trends. One, you take the same position at bigger, more prestigious institutions or you exit to industry like we’ve seen a couple of folks. A couple examples that come to mind are Kevin Grubb going to Strada, or Christine Cruzvergara several years ago… Many years ago and now at this point, six, seven years ago, going to Handshake. But I’m interested in what Branden Grimmett and Farouk Day have done where they’ve elevated within the institution and generated a larger portfolio for themselves beyond the career center. I think that’s the future of career services is that career services leaders should start thinking about, “How do we move up?” Because of that misalignment, that misalignment is going to get corrected. And one of the ways universities are going to correct that is by elevating people with career services expertise.

And so I think what I’m hoping to do with this dissertation is surfacing the qualities that we have that would make us really great executive leaders, that would make us really able to step into the cabinet-level positions and have a portfolio that is not just overseeing the career center, not just the career center being elevated to the cabinet, but for the person with the career services experience to be elevated and oversee a larger portfolio. And from that position, they can, with influence and authority, execute a career everywhere strategy because overseeing multiple offices now, that’s where I think career services leaders should start casting their gaze is to those leadership positions.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, that’s a really great point about how it’s far easier, maybe in some cases, more effective to implement career everywhere strategies if you have that position, if you’re overseeing more of a career ecosystem versus just the career center. So I think that makes a lot of sense. It’s not only about maybe the optics of the level of your position, but literally who and what you’re overseeing and have a hand in.

Dylan Houle:

Yeah, I think it makes a big difference. And one of the other common realities is that most career center directors report to someone who’s never worked in career center or career services. Most career center directors might report to someone who might not have a lot of experience even managing a career center. So there’s a lot of education up, but imagine if the career center director themselves was promoted. There would be less education up and a lot more, I think, strategic execution of these principles of career everywhere, career ecosystem, curriculum integration, et cetera.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, imagine if you reported directly to the president or to a chief career officer who reports to the president. Yeah, that would be amazing. Is there anything else you wanted to add about what you’re hoping to accomplish with this? What led you to it? Because I know we have a few other, I want to talk more about your podcast here in a little bit.

Dylan Houle:

Yes, I know, and I’ve been giving long-winded answers, so thank you for bearing with me. But I think that’s sufficient on the topic of the dissertation for now. Thank you.

Meredith Metsker:

So as I mentioned earlier, you host and produce your own podcast called the Career Services Leadership Podcast. And if I’m recalling correctly, you started that podcast to help inform what you might want to research as part of your dissertation, which is a great idea. You get those answers and ideas directly from folks in the industry, and you’ve interviewed at least 20 leaders so far. So I’m curious, what are some of the common trends or themes that you’ve been hearing and what have you noticed about the state of career services in higher ed right now?

Dylan Houle:

Good question. And just so you get ready, I’m going to ask this question right back to you about your observations, but I’ll share a couple that stand out to me. First is one that we’ve already touched on, no leader I’ve talked to set out a plan to become a career center director. And I also mentioned how I think that that can be a strength for being in this position because it allows you to have candid conversations with students. But it also makes me curious about how we, as a field, develop our talent pipeline from intern to entry level to mid-level to director. And is that something we as a field or higher education generally could be more intentional about?

And I asked that question piggybacking on what I was just talking about with career center directors should be casting their gaze towards more senior level leadership positions because if career services does eventually become a pathway into senior leadership positions with broader portfolios, I think you’ll see different types of people attracted to the work. People that have that cabinet-level leadership aspiration. So we might fundamentally change who’s coming into the profession, what their goals are, and how are we developing that pipeline, how are we cultivating talent, educating people on the skills that are needed to eventually make that leap all the way to the C-suite or to the presidency itself. Another question that I ask is about leadership and frameworks or leadership frameworks and philosophies. I ask that to all of my guests, like how you ask the career everywhere question to all of your guests.

And what I will say is there is no consensus among career services leaders on what framework or philosophy should guide this work. Everyone uses something different, and I wrote a few of them down just to give you a sense of the range. New public management, social change ecosystem framework, situational leadership, adaptive leadership, the village approach, leadership that prioritizes consensus, leadership that prioritizes reflection, a leadership that draws on sociological concepts like conflict theory and structural functionalism, Tuckman’s model of group development, transformational leadership, appreciative inquiry, positive psychology, authentic leadership. So almost every single person I speak to has a different idea of what type of framework or philosophy they should be using, which is good, but also curious because we, as a field, is there a framework or philosophy that would serve us well and do we want to talk about that or are there some different things we can put together as a framework for people that do this type of work in career services? I’m curious about that.

But I think underlying a lot of the conversations has been… Even if the guest didn’t say this, is this idea of servant leadership, which is a concept from Robert Greenleaf, I believe, back in the 1970s, and no one articulated this better than Hilary Flanagan who was remembering some advice she got from the Coast Guard early in her career, “You work for them, not the other way around.” And I think a lot of career services leaders operate with that mindset, that leadership philosophy. We are here to serve not only the students, but our staff. There’s a lot of emphasis on caring for our staff, professional development, work-life balance, things of that nature. So that’s another thing that’s come up through my interviews that I’m curious about. And the third one I’ll say is I’ve had the opportunity to interview some international guests, Arne over at King’s College London and Rosaria at Queen’s University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. And I will say if you’re an American institution and you’re looking to do curricular integration, look to your colleagues in the UK and in Australia, because they are further down that road than we are.

They’ve got, I think, some government mandates that have made that possible, but they’ve also put just a lot of intellectual power into figuring out how to do that. Those are some places I’m looking at as I think about curriculum integration. One of… Arne, in particular, when I asked her like, “What do you think in the next 5 to 10 years is going to happen with career services?” And she said, “I’d like us to see career services become academic developers where we’re embedded with the faculty and helping them develop all of their curriculum.” That stood out to me because I think one of the things we think about is getting a career class into the curriculum, but she’s talking about something much more integrated. And Rosario is doing the same thing, which is whatever you’re teaching, how can career services help embed elements of career services into it? And that’s why, I mean, they’re a little bit further down, I think, in their thinking on the topic.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, that’s fascinating. I love that you got that international approach too. Yeah, it will be interesting to see if we can get some of that over here as well, because I’m just thinking of some of the guests I’ve interviewed and there is that embedding into curriculum, but it’s maybe a few assignments here or there. It’s incorporating certain resources like videos or articles or labor market data, things like that. But it’s not quite that same level of close collaboration from the beginning that you’re describing.

Dylan Houle:

Which would be intense. Right? It would be an intensive effort.

Meredith Metsker:

It’s a complete paradigm shift there.

Dylan Houle:

But perhaps one worth engaging in, especially as I think about Jeremy from The Career Leadership Collective has been advancing this idea of a career ecosystem. And a couple of thoughts come to my mind there is everyone is empowered and encouraged to basically provide career services to students, and then career services becomes less of a finite place that students go to, which is fine, but then how does the career services office actually embed career services throughout the curriculum? And that academic developer model that Arne mentioned, I was like, “That’s probably one of the ways in which it gets done is you actually have to be instructional developers.” So those are all some very interesting ideas. Let me ask you, Meredith, in your podcast you’ve interviewed… I think you got started a year and a half before me, so you have a larger roster. What trends or themes have emerged for you over the past couple of years?

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, I love that I get to answer questions. It’s fun. Given the core concept of the show around this career everywhere idea, a lot of the common trends and things I’ve heard have revolved around how does the career center scale, how do they reach more students with a small staff, how do they scale their work with limited budget, limited resources, or as you’re talking about, limited capital really. So I’ve seen a lot of that. There’s career centers, they have different circumstances, and head counts, budgets, but they all have crazy student-to-career coach ratios. Even the biggest teams are still… There’s nowhere near one-to-one. I’ve interviewed leaders with dozens of staff members, and I’ve interviewed several teams of one or two. And so they’re all facing those different challenges, but it really stems from the concept of scale. So I hear that a lot. Many of our guests are uConnect customers and use the virtual career center to help with that scale, some are not and they’re figuring out other methods.

But yeah, that’s a big one is how can people scale, especially with limited budgets, budgets are getting tighter, staffs are getting cut, or there’s hiring freezes, and I think we’re probably not out of the woods yet on that front. So, yeah, I hear a lot of that on scale front. And then related, I hear a lot of guests talking about, as you just mentioned, the career ecosystem. So it’s not just about building a great career center, although that’s important, but it’s about trying to go beyond the walls of the career center, help facilitate this ecosystem, engaging students, faculty, staff, senior leaders, ideally employers, alumni, families, government officials, and so on. And really just getting them all prepared to have career conversations with students if they come in contact with them.

Dylan Houle:

I have a couple of thoughts on all of that. Scale is so difficult, and I think one of the ways that universities have tried to respond to the scale is by adopting a lot of platforms like technology solutions. Here at Santa Clara, we have Jobscan, Big Interview, PeopleGrove, Handshake. And I think one of the interesting challenges is we have all these platforms that students are engaging with, and then you have all this incredibly rich data as a result, like when are they engaging, what are they engaging with, how many of them are engaging. And it’s created this need for data analysis, data competency, in our career centers, but very few of us have on staff a data analyst. So it’s interesting that we have these really powerful tools, but I sometimes wonder if we’re not fully exploiting them in terms of the data that they can provide and the insights that they can provide. So that’s definitely one question that comes to my mind around scale.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, and I don’t want to be overly promotional here, but that’s one challenge that uConnect does solve. And I remember Audra Verrier, who I know you’ve had on your podcast, she mentioned this in her interview for my podcast, is that one reason that they invested in uConnect was because she got to LMU, this was after Branden Grimmett had left, and she was like, “Oh, we have all the bells and whistles. We have all these great resources. None of them are being used as much as I wish they would be. It’s hard to get insight into how students are using them or why they might not be.” And so, anyway, that’s why she brought us in was to help get some insights into those things.

Dylan Houle:

I think career centers have to be able to extract that data and tell that story, especially for all the money being invested into these platforms as well.

Meredith Metsker:

Exactly. Someone’s going to be asking what the results are.

Dylan Houle:

Exactly. Exactly. Well, thank you for sharing some of your insights from your podcast. And I’ll say that I just enjoyed listening to it. It’s been funny that we’ve had some of the same guests, even within a similar window of time. So I’ve been listening and watching you from afar, so this is so exciting that we get to finally be on a podcast together.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, our first crossover episode.

Dylan Houle:

Yeah. Yeah. Well, let me ask you one more question. Based on what you’ve learned through your podcast interviews, what do you hope the future of career services will look like or what do you think the future of career services might look like?

Meredith Metsker:

I’m going to turn this question around back at you too after this. We’ll see if and where we line up. But my hope for career services is that they are well-funded and that career centers finally get their moment in the sun. Because I think, for too long, career centers… As you’ve mentioned, they’ve been in this middle management area of the university. They’re doing really important critical work that are helping students every day, but they don’t get nearly enough recognition. I feel like all the focus and resources is going towards enrollment and not enough is going towards the people that are [inaudible 00:49:08] making a big impact on outcomes.

So my hope is that they finally get some recognition, they finally get those resources and the funding. And I think given the increase in conversations around the ROI of a higher ed degree, increasing government scrutiny around career outcomes, students and parents demanding more data as we’ve talked about and information around outcomes, I think, or at least I hope, that career services is on the precipice of their big moment, that senior leaders will finally realize that there are already highly skilled and passionate people on their campuses doing this work, but they need help, they need support, they need acknowledgement. So I guess that’s what I hope to see is that career services is going to have their moment.

Dylan Houle:

We’re going to have our moment. It’s going to happen.

Meredith Metsker:

Yes.

Dylan Houle:

I could see the sun rising in the east.

Meredith Metsker:

Yes, exactly.

Dylan Houle:

No, absolutely. And it’s interesting because I feel like with the advent of the First Destination Survey in the post-2008 focus on career outcomes, there was this… I was reading a book by Manny and Trudy, Voices From the Field, reflections from different career services leaders, this was published 10, 15 years ago, it was in, I think, 2012, and they were talking about how there’s this new focus on career outcomes, and this is our moment in the sun. And I think it is the case that institutions started to prioritize outcomes as part of what they wanted to communicate. But then that’s where the misalignment started to happen.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah.

Dylan Houle:

The signaling went out, but the resourcing didn’t come in at many institutions. I’m with you. I think we’re going to have our moment of the sun, the second half of the sun. We got the focus on the work we do being important as the reason students go to college and the value proposition, and then the second half is like, “Well, now let’s resource it and prioritize it within the institution.”

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. I also wonder too, if more funding for higher ed institutions, especially public ones, will be tied to career outcomes and how that will impact career services.

Dylan Houle:

Which is a dangerous game because as much as we put into this work, we’re only one half of the puzzle. Employers have to hire. Right? We have to have an economy where they’re hiring interns and hiring entry-level talent. There’s really not much we’re in control of on that front. We can do all the great preparation that we want, but when Silicon Valley tech, just the job market disappears for a year or two, we’re in a little bit of limbo. And I can see that’s where the tension has always existed, right? It’s like we don’t want to tie too much of our value proposition to things that we’re only 50% in control of and that we have to depend on the economy or market incentives or for-profit companies to pick up the other half of it.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, that’s a good point. It’s going to be interesting, this future of career services. It will be interesting to watch, for sure.

Dylan Houle:

Yeah, absolutely.

Meredith Metsker:

Well, is there anything else you would like to add or any advice you would want to give to career services leaders who are trying to scale, but maybe are still dealing with this misalignment between outcomes and their position within the university?

Dylan Houle:

I’ll make this short. One of my internal mantras is success through visibility. And one of the things that, if you’re connected with me on LinkedIn, you’ll know that I post regularly. When I started my job here at Santa Clara, one of my very first actions was to start a monthly director’s message where I emailed staff and faculty basically the good news of the career center, things that we were doing, how successful our events were, awards we’ve been nominated for speaking engagements we’ve been invited to to try and increase our visibility, our credibility, and just general excitement for what we’re doing.

So that’s come up in my podcast a few times is you have to share the good news. You have to be out there and vocal about all the great things that you’re doing. Student success spotlights, partnering with your UMC team to write press releases every time you bring on a new platform or initiate a new partnership. All of that is, I think, really important to getting the type of resources that you need. And one specific outcome of that for us has been donor interest, getting parents and alumni excited about the work that we do by being really visible and celebratory about all the things that we do. And I think that’s another unexplored area for career services is donors, but one that we should absolutely be leaning into because I think a lot of parents and donors are very interested in supporting the career and professional development of our students.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, it’s interesting you bring that up because I have heard of revenue coming in from employer sponsorships and maybe the occasional donor if you have a named career center or something like that. But I’d be interested to get families and parents involved too.

Dylan Houle:

They’re ready and willing to help. You just have to have a compelling value proposition for them.

Meredith Metsker:

Would you be willing to share an example of one of those directors’ emails that you send out?

Dylan Houle:

Yeah, they’re actually all listed publicly on our website. Yeah, they’re in the staff about page. So right underneath my profile, I link to every month that I’ve sent out so anyone can read them. And I also link to my podcast so that parents, prospective students can listen, get a sense of the philosophy I bring to the work. Yeah, it’s interesting.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. Yeah, that’s a great idea. And for everyone watching and listening, I’ll be sure to include links to those examples of the directors’ messages and a link to Dylan’s Career Services Leadership Podcast, so you can check that out as well. And, Dylan, if people want to connect with you, where’s a good place for them to do that?

Dylan Houle:

LinkedIn. I’m all over LinkedIn. So feel free to send me a connect request. I’ll be happy to connect. Happy to jump on a call with anyone that’s interested in exploring any of the topics that have come up today. And I’ll put a call-out to any career services leaders who would be interested in participating in my study. I’m still finalizing exactly the parameters’ timeline, but if any of what I said intrigues you and you would like to be a part of it, shoot me an email or connect with me on LinkedIn and it would be great to connect.

Meredith Metsker:

Awesome. And I’ll be sure to include Dylan’s email in the show notes as well so you can reach out to him. All right. Dylan, at the end of every interview, we do an answer a question, leave a question thing. So I’ll ask you a question our last guest left for you, and then you’ll leave a question for the next guest. So our last guest was Erica Kryst of Cornell University and she left this question for you. When you were in kindergarten or in first grade, what was your answer when someone asked you what you wanted to be when you grew up?

Dylan Houle:

So I gave this some thought, I don’t remember kindergarten or first grade, but I do remember a few years later around fourth grade when the 3 Ninjas came out. I don’t know if you remember that movie, but it was a movie about three brothers that were also ninjas and they had to fight off Hulk Hogan among other various enemies. And I love that movie. And one of the brothers was named Rocky. And I always, on the playground with people, when we were playing pretend and people wanted me to be someone different, I said, “I’m Rocky and I’m a ninja.” So I wanted to be a ninja when I grew up. And I loved the Ninja Turtles when I was younger. So that’s my first memory of wanting to be something when I grew up. A ninja.

Meredith Metsker:

I love that. It’s a non-traditional answer.

Dylan Houle:

There you go. Yeah. And then my question for the next guest is, if you had to write a dissertation and you had to conduct a research study, what would you research?

Meredith Metsker:

Oh, that’s a good question, and I’m sure we’ll get a good answer to it. Awesome. All right. Well, Dylan, thank you so much for taking the time to join me on the podcast today. This was a fun discussion, and I know we easily could have gone for another hour.

Dylan Houle:

Absolutely.

Meredith Metsker:

But I just really appreciate you taking the time and being willing to share your wisdom.

Dylan Houle:

Hey, right back at you and you’re doing great work, Meredith. Thank you for your podcast. And I look forward to putting this out there in the world and seeing what reaction we get.

Meredith Metsker:

That’s all for this episode of Career Everywhere. Thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed it, please be sure to hit subscribe and rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. We’ll see you next time.