How UConn Transforms Student Employment with Work+

Eran Peterson:

So we’re trying to transform student employment, going from a transactional model where maybe students show up for some extra cash to being more of an impactful experience where they’re recognizing that they’re developing and they’re learning skills and feeling like they’re part of something important working on campus.

Meredith Metsker:

Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Career Everywhere Podcast. I’m your host, Meredith Metsker, and today I am joined by Eran Peterson, the associate director of Work+ at the University of Connecticut. Thank you for being here, Eran.

Eran Peterson:

And thank you for having me. I’m really excited to be here.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, I’m really glad to have you. And I’m excited to talk to you today about the Work+ program at UConn and how you all are using it to make on campus student employment an impactful and consistent experience for both students and supervisors. And we’ll get into all of those details here in just a minute. But before I get into the questions, Eran, is there anything else you would like to add about yourself, your background, or your role there at UConn?

Eran Peterson:

Oh, sure. So I’ve been at UConn just about 13 years now. I started as a career coach here and I worked in a couple different career coaching areas of our office. I oversaw our career coaching program and kind of stepped into the Work+ thing just a couple of years ago. I’m also someone who’s had a ton of different types of jobs kind of leading up to my job as a career coach. And so being part of Work+ is really interesting because I think back to some of the skills that I developed through all those various roles and how they’ve applied and helped me along the way. And so it is exciting thinking about my background and how students and recent alums will probably look back on their student employment experience and hopefully see that they develop some skills too along the way.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. Sounds like a full circle moment for you. And as we know, you work with the amazing Nancy Bilmes, who’s a friend of this podcast and has been on a couple of times.

Eran Peterson:

That’s right.

Meredith Metsker:

Love that. All right. Well, before I get into the more specific questions about our topic today, I do want to kick us off with a question I ask all of our guests here on the pod, and that’s, what does Career Everywhere mean to you?

Eran Peterson:

Well, to me and to our office here at UConn, it really means that the building career development intentionally into the entire student experience. For me, I’m focused on helping create a shared language around campus, but also really trying to develop a culture where career development is recognized as critical to the success of students.

Meredith Metsker:

Right. And you all do a Career Everywhere conference or something like that, don’t you?

Eran Peterson:

Yeah, we do. So we have a large scale events, Career Everywhere conference that we run every year, which brings our career champions around to kind of celebrate them, but also to offer some sessions for them and just a time to connect with other career champions around campus.

Meredith Metsker:

I love that. And I love that you guys use the Career Everywhere language, makes me happy.

Eran Peterson:

Yes, we do too.

Meredith Metsker:

All right. Well, now I would love to dig into our topic today, which is again about the Work+ program at UConn and how it’s transforming student employment. So to get us started with some context, can you share more about what the Work+ program is and what it entails?

Eran Peterson:

Yeah, sure. So the way I like to explain it is that we’re trying to transform student employment to going from a transactional model where maybe students show up for some extra cash or to offset some bills or something to do on campus to being more of an impactful experience where they’re recognizing and learning. They’re recognizing that they’re developing and they’re kind of learning skills and feeling like they’re part of something important working on campus. So that’s kind of the gist of what it is that we’re trying to do. We have some stated goals around Work+. So the main goals are that we want students to be able to learn skills and also to be able to articulate them. We hope that through student employment, that they’re developing some of their career competencies. And we’re very intentional about educating students on what the NACE career competencies are and trying to help supervisors point to them so that students can see that they are learning real skills, even though they might not associate career competencies with what they think are skills, hard skills, or whatever the case.

Another thing that we’re really going for is to create more supportive and equitable supervision around campus. And then the final thing is really to help cultivate a sense of belonging, both for students, but also for supervisors that they feel like they’re belonging to an effort on campus and recognizing that they’re important as supervisors and that what they’re doing is creating real change for their working learners. So we focus on both the students and the supervisors kind of in our efforts with Work+. So it’s pretty new here on campus. I mean, we ran a pilot program last year, so during the last academic year, and we had just around, I think it was like 50 supervisors and maybe 150 students or something like that. It kind of ebbed and flowed throughout the course of the year. We’re in our second year right now. So right now, and I did run some numbers, so we do have 125 supervisors right now and 560 working learners, but it’s 100% opt-in.

So the supervisors are opting in to be part of Work+. The students are kind of being told, “Wait, you’re part of this Work+ thing as part of their job.” So UConn has a main campus at stores, and we also have a number of regional campuses, and every one of the regional campuses has Work+ students at it. And in fact, the only campus that has 100% Work+, so every student employment job is Work+ is at one of our regional campuses, and that’s at our Stanford campus. So that’s really exciting that we have all good buy-in from our regional campus folks. The other thing just to know is that we didn’t invent Work+. I mean, not even close. Our early success can really be attributed to ASU and the Work+ collective. So we learned a ton of being part of that process, and we still learn a ton by talking to other colleagues around the nation that are building up their own Work+ or Work+ like programs.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. So the Work+ program and concept originated at Arizona State, it sounds like, and they kind of have made it a thing that other universities can take and kind of adapt to their own situations. Do you know about how many campuses are implementing it right now?

Eran Peterson:

I don’t know for sure. And I actually wasn’t involved in the Work+ thing when we were working specifically with ASU a couple of years ago. But from my recollection, I think at that time, we were one of 12 or 13 universities that were going through their first cohort when they were going on campus and stuff. And I know they’ve had a number of cohorts that have gone through and a number of universities. So I’m not 100% sure how many universities are doing it, but it’s certainly not us. And there are a lot of folks around the country that we model things after because so many folks are doing such great work around this around the country.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. And I imagine it’s nice to have other universities kind of going through the same thing, trying to figure these similar challenges out and you can kind of bounce ideas off each other.

Eran Peterson:

Yes, for sure. And I’ve learned a lot along the way about financial aid and student employment and things that I just hadn’t been exposed to before. But since so many people that are doing this at different universities might be from different offices, they might not be from the career development office. It’s been great to just connect with other folks in different roles at different campuses as well.

Meredith Metsker:

That’s really cool. I also wanted to go back and kind of, I guess, double click on something you said earlier about the sense of belonging, that being one of the goals, because it hadn’t really occurred to me that for the supervisors, that might be kind of a weird spot to be in. They’re not faculty, but they’re still involved and they still can play an important role. So that’s really cool that you emphasize that with the supervisors as well.

Eran Peterson:

Yeah. And one thing I’ll just say, and this probably is not unique to UConn, but people at UConn that supervise student employees aren’t necessarily recognized as supervisors by, let’s say, larger HR. So I know there’s a lot of supervisors that supervise students who it’s a major part of their role and they are developing and utilizing real supervision skills. When it comes time to write about your achievements and activities and your reporting up about your accomplishments throughout the year, I know that supervising student employees isn’t really considered a real supervisor. And that’s something that we’re trying to change because there are actually more student employees at UConn than there are full-time staff members. So it’s a really big part of our workforce and we’re trying to change the culture around that as well.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. And that’s a really cool element of all of this too, because initially you think of the benefit to the students, but there is a whole other group.

Eran Peterson:

Absolutely. And the supervisors really are probably our number one, what I would say, client or customer.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. They have a lot of influence on the students and can have a lot of influence career wise, of course. So I’m curious, why did UConn decide to implement Work+? What problems were you hoping to solve with the program?

Eran Peterson:

So forever, for at least as long as I’ve worked here, our department has hired our student employees, and we’ve always called them interns, and we’ve structured their experience kind of like an internship. And we’re certainly not the only department on campus that does that. There are lots of departments that have on campus internships, which is they’re just taking student employment, but they’re kind of elevating it a little bit, building in maybe a capstone project or some professional development or learning goals and things like that. So it’d been going on on campus for a long time, but there hadn’t been this effort or push in a way that stuck on campus to get it to be more of a full scale recognized thing, despite our best efforts. Really, when the career collective and ASU thing started coming up, we saw that as an opportunity like, “Okay, we can probably show the university that this is a national initiative, this is a really important thing, and we can learn from other folks that are doing it and get some tools and things like that.”

So that’s why we started to shift to be a more official full thrust towards this type of effort, even though it had been going on for a long time. During our process of information gathering and trying to identify, well, what are the issues that we’re trying to solve here, we did do some surveying and interviewing of students and supervisors, and we identified a number of specific issues that we wanted to try to address and create goals around. So those issues, they’re really kind of three groups. So one was inadequate training and development for working learners. So there’s really a lack of structure on campus for onboarding and training students. There’s not really consistent messaging around developing students towards career success and that sort of thing. So at the time, that was a reality. Another one of the kind of pain points was that it was really uncoordinated in supporting working learner success.

So everything from the hiring process and posting of jobs, there’s a lot of, sometimes people post them on one platform, but not in the other or word of mouth, a lot of inequities around maybe even how students find positions to apply to. Even the job application process, job titles and things, it’s kind of messy and very confusing, I think for students. What exactly am I applying for? And then am I going to learn anything? It might be a secondary concept to some students, but that stuff wasn’t really ironed out in a way that was consistent across campus. And then the other really big one was there is or was a lack of clarity and expectations for the supervisor role. So this is a major thing we’re trying to address. There’s no supervisor training that supervisors have to go through on campus. There’s no clarity around what the expectations are, no real skill support, developing skills, providing feedback.

That stuff just didn’t really exist in one place. It kind of be scattered, but it wasn’t really consolidated. So really those are our three major issues that we determined early. And so we set our goals around addressing those things first while collecting more information along the way. So we do a lot of surveying of our supervisors and meeting with them and stuff to learn how could we even make it better, but we still have a really long way to go with all this stuff. I mean, we’re just really getting to addressing things like the job postings and supervisor training and stuff. It’s all very new, but it’s helpful to have these established goals that we’re working towards for sure.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. And that just really reinforces for me that you’re not only doing career development work for the students, but also the supervisors.

Eran Peterson:

Yes. Yeah, 100%.

Meredith Metsker:

Like, twice the work.

Eran Peterson:

Yep. Yeah. But the way I look at it is if supervisors determine that they’re learning and growing and can start to recognize that, I think it makes it easier for them to point to students how they might be doing it in their jobs. So it’s a win-win, I feel, for sure.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, for sure. And it probably makes it feel more worthwhile for the supervisors too, and hopefully keeps them interested in continuing in that role.

Eran Peterson:

Yeah, I certainly hope so.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, I’m sure HR thanks you for your work in that regard.

Eran Peterson:

Well, yeah, unless they catch wind of it and they’re like, “Hey, what are you up to?” But I don’t think that’s the case.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. Okay. Well, I think that’s a good segue into the big question here, which is how are you implementing Work+ at UConn?

Eran Peterson:

Yeah, so it changes all the time, but I’ll kind of give you where we are now and where we’re going. I’ll give you a snapshot of where we’re going as well, ’cause we’ve made a lot of hiccups along the way, so we’ve learned a lot of things, but we’re focusing on two populations as I’ve already mentioned, so we’re focusing on the student development piece and then the supervisor development piece. So for the students, and we call them working learners, we stole that as well from ASU. So we refer to the students as the working learners if they’re part of Work+. What we’re trying to do for them is provide them some professional development opportunities. So we’ve developed a lot of in house content, typical things you would expect from a career center like content about exploring majors and careers, applying for internships, to exploring graduate school.

We have a lot of content around transitioning into the workforce as well, so basics of budgeting and stuff like that. So we give students access to a library of content that we’ve created, and then we ask that their supervisors are giving them some time during the course of the month to do some of that professional development that might help strengthen skills that they might be using in work, but it’s just for their own professional development. We sell this as a benefit to students that, hey, it’s like imagine a job, but you get an extra layer of benefit where you’re going to get paid to learn stuff you want to learn about. We give them a lot of flexibility about what they decide to learn about. So we don’t say, “This month you learn about this.” But we say, “Here’s a menu of things, please explore and dedicate some time to doing this over the course of each month that they’re working.”

We also kind of showcase a lot of campus events that might build their skills, and we encourage supervisors to allow students to go to those potentially paid, that sort of thing, but nothing in an official capacity that says, “Here’s an event, please, you must send all of your students.” So we give supervisors a lot of flexibility in how they approach this professional development thing. For those who are curious, we use Rise 360, which is part of the Articulate 360 package to create modules. And I’m happy to share any of these modules with anybody. If you’re ever interested, you can email me. I’ll share a link so you can see what the content looks like. And then we house a lot of stuff in Suitable. So we use the Suitable Pathways product that they have as part of collecting evidence and stuff. We survey students a lot too, so as part of what we’re doing with students, we’re pre and post-surveying them on their career competencies, but as well as their experience, so before Work+ and post Work+, we ask them a lot of questions.

And then the other main thing that we want them to do is we want a baseline knowledge for all students about their rights and responsibilities as student workers on campus. So there’s a whole module we built that both offsets what the supervisors might feel is like an extra thing they have to talk to students about, but addresses things like, what’s direct deposit and how do I set it up? How do I ask for accommodations? It’s kind of like those basic things. And we make sure all students go through that at least once. And we’ve gotten feedback from supervisors that that’s super helpful because they might go over it again, but they know that at least students have heard about all these kind of nuances once. And then we put a lot of things in their way to make sure that they have structured reflection, goal setting, and competency development. With all that said, I know it sounds like a lot, when we first started the pilot, we went so hard on the student side of this, developing content, tried to giving it to them.

And then we realized that our team here, Work+, we don’t have a carrot and we don’t have a stick. So we can’t make anybody do anything. And so students, although they had the resources that they could use, they weren’t using them. So we shifted our focus very heavily to supervisors. So that happened midstream and I said, “You know what?” And actually this is from talking to some other people around doing other Work+ stuff. They were like, “Yeah, you got to worry about supervisors first ’cause they’re the ones who will drive students to it.” So we do a lot of stuff with supervisors. So I can go into that if you’d like, Meredith, what we do with supervisors.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah.

Eran Peterson:

Okay.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, let’s do it.

Eran Peterson:

So this is kind of where the Career Everywhere thing comes into play because our supervisors are our biggest promoters of Work+ and they’re who we need to do the work. So we need to have them feel both confident and that they can do it effectively and also that it’s not extra. So we go to great lengths to be like, okay, listen, I know what’s called Work+, but Plus doesn’t mean it’s like more work. It just means it’s like an elevated experience, but we’re going to do as much as possible to make your life both easier and more effective. So we do a lot of messaging around that. And it is true. We try to offset a lot of work for the supervisors as much as possible. But we do, and just like we do with students with setting a baseline for their knowledge about what it’s like to be a student employee, we do the same thing with supervisors.

So we have them complete a module we’ve built called Supervisor Foundations. It gives them just baseline knowledge and it’s real high level stuff. It’s nothing very detailed, but it’s just like, these are things you need to know about as being a supervisor. And here’s some general best practices, and they do that one time and they kind of enter into the program. And we have all supervisors become career champions so that we can help them develop the language stuff around what Career Everywhere is and what career champions are and what career development is. We have a dedicated resource hub for supervisors. We also, and this is really successful. It’s probably one of the most successful things we do as supervisors is we have peer led mini sessions. So these are once or twice a month, they’re virtual, they’re around lunchtime and they’re 30 minutes and it’s presented by another supervisor on a topic that might be interesting to other supervisors.

So they don’t have to hear me talk about anything. They show up and it’s like, oh, someone who is a supervisor in a rec is going to be talking about how they manage large teams. Or we have someone from student health and wellness that’s going to talk about recognizing signs of distress in your student employees and how to cope with that and stuff like that. So there’re like little mini topics. We tell the presenter, “You have 20 minutes, allow 10 minutes for questions and answers,” and we put it on everybody’s calendar and if they show up, great. If not, that’s fine too. So we have a lot of folks, a lot of people come to those. So that has been a real success story. And then once a year we do a supervisor summit and we actually invite all student supervisors, whether they’re in Work+ or not.

And we do a half-day mini conference. We feed them and we do mini sessions with some employers, some supervisor led ones and some that are led by us. So those are kind of our big efforts in helping educate them on giving them some tools and on how they kind of function in the Work+ ecosystem, so to speak. And then we do a lot of one-on-one kind of problem solving and troubleshooting with our supervisors.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. That was super helpful overview. Thank you. I was curious, the resource hub that you mentioned, is that something that is publicly available or is that an internal system?

Eran Peterson:

So currently it is accessible to every staff member, faculty member on campus, although we don’t advertise it, but we’re making some changes for next year and it is going to be like a walled garden, so to speak, that you get access to if you’re a Work+ supervisor. So we’re shifting, we’re making it a little bit more restrictive, but right now it’s open, but not really advertised that it’s a thing.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. Would members of the audience be able to access that or is it like in an internal UConn, you have to log in kind of situation?

Eran Peterson:

Yeah, it’s on an internal SharePoint site, so it’s not really accessible by anybody on the outside, but happy to screen share and talk about what is in there and what it looks like and how we have it organized. But yeah, it’s not really publicly available.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. Yeah. I’d be curious if you could just paint a word picture for me, what types of resources or what are some of the topics that you cover? Just like a few examples.

Eran Peterson:

There’s going to be a lot of changes that between what it is kind of now and what it is going to be in the fall. And all the fall changes are actually live, but no one knows about them unless they were digging around and seeing them. So a couple main things that we’ve done, and so the supervisor resource hub is now called the supervisor learning hub because it includes three different components. So it has the start here area, which includes do supervisor foundations, become a career champion, take this questionnaire and action plan, and then annually if we have updates, watch this updates video thing. So that’s kind of the landing page. This is what you do when you’re first a supervisor. Because supervisor foundations doesn’t go into any real depth or detail about topics, there’s another section that’s called micro lessons. And the micro lessons are the deeper dives on topics that are maybe mentioned in supervisor foundations, but they’re really there for when the supervisor needs them.

So they might not need to know about the disciplinary process and the details about how they go about dealing with that. They need to know that it exists in supervisor foundations, but when it comes time that, oh, they have a student that maybe they need to explore some disciplinary measures, what do I do? There’s a micro lesson that’s around that. So there’s like a whole section that has the micro lessons. I mean, they’re actually organized into four different categories. So there’s supervision, style and impact, there’s developing your working learners, there’s equitable recruiting and hiring, and then there’s an area for tools and technology, ’cause we use a lot of the, like, Suitable and stuff, it’s like confusing for some supervisors. So to support the micro lessons, then that’s where the resources come in. So then there’s the resource hub is now also in those same categories, but if there’s a resource that is applicable to a micro lesson, it’s tagged in the micro lesson, but also lives on the resource hub.

So they all kind of work together in some way where there’s the tools area that it’s a resource if it doesn’t require any explanation. If something requires explanation, then that means it’s a micro lesson. So they’re short. Those things are like between, I don’t know, 10 and maybe 20 minutes at the most to get through any of the micro lessons. So that’s what it looks like. And I’m using a Teams communication site to build it out. So it actually, it is pretty visually appealing, I feel, but that’s how we want supervisors to interact with it. The other nice thing about using SharePoint is that there’s a Teams channel that is complimentary to it. So we’re trying to create less places for supervisors to go so they can ask questions in Teams and communicate with each other. And then from there they can access that hub where they can kind of get what it is that they need.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. Wow. That sounds really robust.

Eran Peterson:

It’s been a project.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, sounds like it. I’m curious, all of these resources, the micro lessons, is that all content you created or your team created?

Eran Peterson:

Yeah, our team has created the vast majority of that stuff. A lot of this stuff has already existed in one way or another, so it’s just repackaging them, making them all kind of look and feel the same. So it’s not really as heavy a lift as one might think, but it’s kind of like the way I look at it is we’re doing a lot of front end work now that will then just live there and we can update it and make changes. So we’re kind of spending a lot of time on that aspect this year, but then that’s not going to be something we have to spend a whole lot of time on kind of going forward. We can start shifting back towards the student development content and creating a similar hub for students. So that’s kind of the vision, but that’s not even going to happen next year. It’s probably like a year later thing.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. You got to do these things in phases. And it sounds like what you’re doing now is allowing you to scale. So you’re not having to have all of these conversations constantly with each supervisor.

Eran Peterson:

That’s right. Yes.

Meredith Metsker:

And can you remind me again how many supervisors are currently participating?

Eran Peterson:

Yeah. So right now we have 125 supervisors.

Meredith Metsker:

And you said something like 500 student learners?

Eran Peterson:

560 right now.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay.

Eran Peterson:

Which is good for us. I mean, we have a small team that’s doing it. So growing incrementally is helpful. As we try to scale, we’d like to be able to have … Eventually our goal is for every student to be part of Work+, but if that were to happen tomorrow, we wouldn’t be able to manage or sustain it. And I think we’d have a lot more issues than we’re solving problems for.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. That was what I wanted to ask you about next. So given that you have over a hundred supervisors, over 500 student workers, and you have a pretty small team working on all of this. I think it’s you full-time and then another halftime person. Is that correct?

Eran Peterson:

Yeah. So I think in many ways we’re very fortunate. So we did a restructuring in our office so that we at least have one full-time person, which is me that’s working on this all the time. And I absolutely love it, but it’s a lot for just one person. So we also have an assistant director for Work+ who does work full-time, but her priorities are half kind of work+ and half career coaching and liaison relationships. So she’s not dedicated to it 100% of the time, but she’s at least 50% of her time is spent helping do a lot of this stuff, especially on the kind of student development side is really where her focus area is right now. We also have an intern, so a working learner of our own. She is an actuarial science student. So she helps us with a lot of our data and tracking and technology needs, so it’s great to have her around, she’s phenomenal at what she does.

And she’s only a sophomore, which is great because we can probably try to keep her around for a little bit longer. In addition, we have a supervisor advisory board. So we have a number of supervisors who meet monthly and they help us with different things. So this year we’re focusing on the supervisor experience. So a lot of the elements that are part of that learning hub and categories and stuff like that, those are all ideas that were generated by that subcommittee and that advisory board. And the other subcommittee in that advisory board this year is working on equitable hiring practices. So they’ve got their own projects kind of around that. And then we have a student advisory board as well. So we’re soliciting ideas from some of the students who are heavily involved in Work+ and they help drive a lot of those other things.

We’re actually going to be hiring for a position as well. So we did receive a pretty big corporate donation to fund a position. So we’re really excited about that. It hasn’t posted yet, but that will be really cool to have another dedicated person to Work+. So that’s where we’re at now. So I mean, it sounds like, oh, it’s just one and a half people, but we actually do have a lot of people that are working on this with us. So I think in many ways we’re really fortunate with the workforce that we have around this effort here at UConn.

Meredith Metsker:

Sounds like there’s a lot of delegation going on to help scale the work and then this upfront investment in all the resources so that it’s kind of more like on demand content versus you having to do trainings constantly.

Eran Peterson:

Yeah, that’s right. So we can’t do one-on-one meetings with everybody all the time. It’s not possible. So we rely on a lot of content they can access or periodic meetings or things like that.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. It’s just kind of the challenge of career services in general, “How do you scale?”

Eran Peterson:

Yeah.

Meredith Metsker:

I’m glad you brought up the corporate donation because I was sort of curious, how are you funding a lot of this stuff? Is it coming out of the career center’s operating budget? Is there separate funding? How does that work?

Eran Peterson:

Yeah, so it’s a bit of a mix. We actually have three corporate donors. So, one has really helped us do some of our events and both contributing to our events with content, but also some monetary support for food and things like that. And then we picked up another one who does very similar sort of thing. And then we got the big one, which that funds a position for five years. So that’s really exciting. So we wouldn’t be able to do half of what we do without that support, but we did a reorganization, as I’d mentioned in our office, so one and a half FTE really is coming out of our operating budget. And we’re working with the university for more funding around it. So I think we’re getting somewhere with that, but it’s a fairly lean operation.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, for now. I suppose as you’re building the proof of concept and it sounds like things are going well.

Eran Peterson:

I have high hopes and expectations for sure.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, I’ll be excited to follow the process. I’m curious, what results have you seen since implementing Work+ just generally?

Eran Peterson:

So we do some surveying of our students. We do a pre-survey where we’re kind of asking them, we want to know have they ever been encouraged to do professional development or do they feel that they could talk about their skills? Are you aware of the NACE career competencies? Those kinds of things. So after our pilot year, we had some really good numbers that we could share. One of the things that we asked was awareness of NACE career competencies. So that went from 43% of awareness to 83%. Supervisors encouraging professional development, that went from 69% to 91%. So we’re really excited to see that. I mean, that’s part of what we want them doing is encouraging students to do professional development as part of their job. Another one that we saw was we asked if the students felt that their supervisor was interested in their career and professional goals.

So that went from 74% to 93%. So that was an exciting one. And then I feel like a valued member of the team. So that kind of points to that sense of belonging. That one went from 83% to 98%. So we were really excited to hit that goal. So there are a bunch of those types of stats that we have that we use to build some legitimacy around campus and that it works and people like it and stuff. But we also got some feedback from students that like, for instance, the content that you have is, “I already knew that stuff.”

And this was actually from when we had like, “In September, you’re going to learn about resumes and in October, you’re going to learn about this.” So we changed it based on that feedback to say, “Okay, so you just need more content maybe, and you can pick and choose your own adventure.” So we made a quick pivot to that. But we actually like getting a little bit of the negative feedback ’cause it tells us, well, what could we do to just make it better? So we solicit that as well. But from the initial stuff and meeting our goals, we did see that we made it further than I expected we would at the end of our pilot year.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. Those are some amazing statistics.

Eran Peterson:

Thanks.

Meredith Metsker:

I’m curious, in addition to that kind of quantitative data, have you gotten just any feedback or stories from students or supervisors that also kind of keeps you excited about the work?

Eran Peterson:

Yeah, I mean pretty limited. So we have more qualitative feedback from supervisors because we asked them for it. We needed some quotes and stuff like that. So we got some pretty good stuff. As far as supervisor feedback, it should be good because it’s opt-in. So it’s like the only people that are really doing this are people that are kind of into it as far as supervisors are concerned. I think if this grows to be like the university says, “Okay, now every single supervisor has to do these things,” we’ll probably receive mixed feedback as far as like, “Oh gosh, now this is an extra thing,” so I kind of expect that as it grows. But right now we get great feedback from our supervisors because we’re interacting with them heavily. We’re soliciting their feedback. We’re making changes based on what their needs are. So I fully expect that we get good testimonials from them.

Students, it’s been a bit mixed. We have struggled to really get a lot of great testimonials from students, just period. So getting them to give us some comments, even in our surveys, they’re pretty limited in what they want to share with us. And maybe they’re just trying to spare us their feelings or something like that, I’m not sure. But one thing that we’re going to be doing is we’re going to have a contest sort of thing where we’re going to … Students will be able to get points towards their professional development if they submit things like a selfie with their supervisor, with testimonials sort of thing. So we’re trying to get some fun ways to gather more things that students are saying, but the students who are part of our advisory board, they really like it. They’re very behind what it is that we’re trying to do and trying to help us better resonate with students, I think.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, that makes sense. It’s because it’s opt-in, it’s largely positive.

Eran Peterson:

Yeah. I think the data skewed a little bit, I feel like, because of that, for sure.

Meredith Metsker:

But still, that’s really encouraging early results for sure. You touched on this a little bit earlier, Eran, but what are some of your goals for the future of Work+?

Eran Peterson:

Yeah. So the big thing is the supervisor hub that I talked about before, but another thing, this is another major initiative and one of the big challenges we’ve had … So I’ll tell you about the challenge first and then I’ll tell you what we’re doing. So the challenge is that the model that we’re using now works really well for students who work in an environment where they have regular access to a workstation. So they have access to a computer or a laptop or something like that because of the way that we’re asking them to do their professional development, it kind of necessitates that as a tool. And then the other thing in a lot of the things that we’re trying to get supervisors to do, so for instance, there’s a learning roadmap. So that’s like, “Hey, this is what you should use when you do your onboarding. It will help you establish goals, help them talk about their competencies early. You can frame what they’ll be doing around competencies.”

So it’s like a tool they can use for that. And that has a start, a mid and an end point. So it’s like a mid-evaluation check-in sort of thing and then end of the year evaluation, which has built into it some articulation things. So we ask the students to write some bullet points about what they did and make sure they include career competencies and stuff. So this is a tool that we give supervisors to use. That tool in particular works really well for supervisors who have the ability to meet one-on-one regularly with their students. Maybe they’re only supervising one or five students, something like that, but it’s a real challenge if they have 30 students and maybe they only meet with them periodically in groups, so it doesn’t work that well for that.

So the thing that we’re developing now is initial questionnaire. And so the supervisor take it every year and it evaluates their work environment. So it’s really asking them like, “Okay, do things tend to happen individually? Are students working in groups? Are they working very independently with minimal supervision? Do they have access to a workstation? Is it all the time? Is it shared access or intermittent? Is it no access whatsoever? How often are you realistically able to meet one-on-one?” And then this gives us the ability to suggest other ways that they can help meet our initial goals. So they get presented at the end with, first they learn about what their work environment is because we have them kind of named and then they take an action plan thing. So another thing I stole from ASU, by the way, so they did this really well.

Meredith Metsker:

Shout out ASU.

Eran Peterson:

Yeah. So the action plan restates what our goals are and then gives them checkboxes for things that they plan to do this year that will help meet that goal. Those checkboxes actually show up. They’re kind of driven by the questionnaire and action plan. So they’re only going to see a checkbox for something that requires workstation all the time if we know that they have a workstation. So there’s a lot of logic built into it, but so then they’ll see an array of checkboxes under each one of our goals. When they complete that, that turns into their checklist that they’ll do over the course of the year. Now, each thing is then tied to the learning hub. So if they said that they’re going to do this thing, but then there’s a resource that supports that, they get pointed to the resource in their checklist.

So then if they’re confused at what they should be doing over the course of the year or they need a refresher, they can just look at their checklist that they took and they will be directly pointed to each one of those resources that might help them do that thing. So that’s the part of the questionnaire and action plan. That will then change a lot of things. So we have different types of professional development opportunities for students who might not have workstations, different roadmap versions for supervisors who either need to do it in a group or they need to do a real streamlined one. So there’s three different versions of the roadmap now. This is all just to help broaden our reach to reach more of the service type jobs on campus, but also to help some of the supervisors who might not really have the capacity to be doing things in the way that we’re asking them to do them now.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, that sounds really interesting ’cause it makes sense that this next phase of Work+ would have more nuance, but it’s always hard to scale that. So it was really cool to hear how you’re planning to do that.

Eran Peterson:

Yeah. And I mean, one thing is I look back on what we’ve been doing so far and I’m like, “Man …” Sometimes I’m like, “I wish I thought about doing that from the beginning.” But then the reality is, no, we had to learn that things weren’t working first. So the pilot phase in making all the mistakes is critical to the success ’cause otherwise you can’t anticipate what your needs are going to be. You have to kind of fail a bunch of times and then try to fix stuff along the way.

Meredith Metsker:

That’s a good perspective for sure. And that’s kind of a good segue into my next question. So you have offered a lot of great insights already, but what advice would you give to other career leaders who are interested in implementing Work+ or something similar on their campuses?

Eran Peterson:

Well, the first thing I would do is probably check out the Work+ Collective. And I think their web address is workpluscollective.org and it’s like P-L-U-S. So that’s where you can kind of see a big bank of how other people are doing it, resources and stuff like that. Definitely pilot, as I had mentioned, if you’re thinking of doing this, don’t be afraid to just kind of jump into it and just say, “Hey, full disclosure, all your supervisors getting involved in this, it’s going to be a ride. Buckle up, but we need your buy-in and we need you to let us kind of flail about for a little while before we figure things out and start with your supervisors.” I mean, I think that is a big thing that we learned early on is that everything has to start with the supervisors because they’re the ones who can really get the message out and they’re the ones who have to do the work with the students. You’re not going to be able to really do that and influence that, influence the students without being able to influence the supervisors.

Meredith Metsker:

I’m curious in regards to getting supervisors on board, especially early in a pilot program, do you have any advice about making the pitch or selling them on the idea?

Eran Peterson:

I mean, what we did is we have a pretty robust career champion program. So we already have a lot of people that we know kind of have drank the Kool-Aid, so to speak, or they get it and they’ve been involved. And there’s a lot of departments that we work with closely that might be advisors or people that we know are supervising students, but are also inherently excited about student success and want every opportunity to be able to influence that. So there are a lot of customers out there when it comes to supervisors who will, you know, they’ll be glad to be part of this. We also sold it as like, “Hey, be on the ground floor or something that is going to be huge. You’d be one of the first supervisors, hey, do you want to be on an advisory board?” Kind of like amping it up and pumping it up and letting them know that it’s like they are the people we need.

They’re the important ones, is the supervisors. So for us, it wasn’t that hard to find a lot of people to start. And again, we only really started with less than a hundred supervisors. So that might be a lot for some campuses, but for us, it’s like this is a big place. So there are so many people out there supervising students and you probably know a handful who are going to buy into this immediately anyway.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, that’s good advice. And I think at least from my experience when I worked in higher ed, usually folks who work on a college campus, they’re there for a reason. They want to help students or at least be a part, even if they’re kind of in an adjacent role, they want to support students. Well, Eran, before I kind of start our closing segments here, is there anything else you would like to add about Work+ or anything else we’ve talked about today?

Eran Peterson:

Just one other thing about recruiting supervisors. It’s really funny to look at how we’ve gained the most supervisors after our pilot program. So what I anticipated was that word of mouth would work really well. People would be inviting their friends who were also supervisors. And that did work. We did go a lot of people that way. But when we started posting positions on our internal job posting board, so we used 1220 for stuff, we created a checkbox that says, “Is this a Work+ position?” So anyone on campus who’s posting a position, they have to select whether it’s a Work+ position or not, and then there’s an info button. So then they’re like, “Wait, what’s Work+?”

So they click on that, and then that brings them to our webpage, the about thing, where there’s a button for them to schedule a meeting with someone to learn about it. And as soon as we did that, it’s just been a flood of people who that’s how they’re hearing about it. It’s just through the postings. So if you are kicking something off, consider that as including some indication on your, whatever the job board is that you use when supervisors or employers post.

Meredith Metsker:

That is an awesome pro-tip. And as a marketer, hats off to you. That is some good organic marketing. Eran, if people would like to connect with you or learn more from you, where is a good place for them to do that?

Eran Peterson:

You could email me directly. So my email is Eran, it’s E-R-A-N as in November .peterson, P-E-T-E-R-S-O-N @uconn.edu.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay, perfect. And I’ll be sure to include your email and some of the other resources we’ve talked about in the show notes so folks can reach out to you and learn more about some of the things we’ve covered. And now I would like to close this out with the answer a question, leave a question segment I like to do with every interview. 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 guests were Amber Gorham, Jess Johnson, and Derek Gill of the University of Central Missouri near Kansas City, that is relevant context here, and they left this super serious question for you. Do you think there’s any city or region that comes close to Kansas City when it comes to barbecue or is Kansas City just king? Little bit of a leading question there too.

Eran Peterson:

Living in the Northeast, I can’t claim to be any expert whatsoever on barbecue. It’s just not something we have up here, honestly. So I’m going to say Kansas City is got to be king of barbecue if that question even exists as a question. So I’ll make a deal with you all, Amber, Jess, and Derek. You can take me out to barbecue when I’m down there at some point, and I’ll take you out to pizza up here in Connecticut. So Connecticut is where we like to be known for pizza. And there’s a little bit of a rivalry, I think, between Connecticut and New York as far as pizza is concerned and some funny things that are going on around here about that. It’s like advertising the best pizza in the world is in Connecticut, in New York is something that people are doing. So yeah, I’m going to say Kansas City must be the best for barbecue, but love to try it, I think, when I’m in the area.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, I love that. I’m sure they would be more than happy to take you out for some barbecue. Okay. So what’s the Connecticut pizza? I’ve never heard of that. What’s the difference? What’s the claim to fame?

Eran Peterson:

The claim to fame is the New Haven style pizza. So it’s like the brick oven, thin crust, kind of burned on the bottom, super salty, limited topics. And so there are a number of places in Connecticut, but most of them are concentrated in New Haven that people would recognize as the best pizza. Best style pizza, I really enjoy it. It’s not my favorite style pizza, but there’s a pizza place every half mile in Connecticut. So people just love pizza around here. New York has a different, it’s like a different style, larger slices, softer crust on the bottom sort of thing.

Meredith Metsker:

Next time I’m out in Connecticut, I’m going to have to go get some pizza.

Eran Peterson:

Absolutely. Yeah.

Meredith Metsker:

That sounds delicious. All right. Well, Eran, what question would you like to leave for the next guest?

Eran Peterson:

So I guess my question for the next guest would be, what was your first job and what skill or skills do you think you developed there that you still rely on for success?

Meredith Metsker:

Ooh, that’s a good one. Those first jobs always teach you so much.

Eran Peterson:

I agree.

Meredith Metsker:

I’m curious, what would your answer be to that?

Eran Peterson:

Ooh, so my first job was I worked for a summer camp for kids with disabilities. It’s called Camp Horizons. I feel like it’s still around. I worked there for two summers and most of the staff there were actually international. And so I had a really good exposure to some different international culture and stuff like that from a young age. And I think I still take that with me. I think a lot about that experience as a high school kid working there and the types of folks that I interacted with there on a day-to-day basis.

Meredith Metsker:

I love that. It sounds like a very formative experience.

Eran Peterson:

It was.

Meredith Metsker:

Well, Eran, thank you so much for taking the time to join me on the podcast today. This was such a fun conversation. I learned a lot. I know our audience is going to as well, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you have a bunch of folks reaching out to you-

Eran Peterson:

I look forward to that.

Meredith Metsker:

… for more information. So yes, just thank you again and have a great rest of your week.

Eran Peterson:

Thank you. Thank you for having me on.