How WashU Centralized Career Services Without Losing a Single Position

Danny Pape:

When most people hear unification, they often think of consolidation being the main goal, which was not the case. You referenced earlier that we didn’t lose any roles. And in fact, we actually gained new positions, a few to really focus in on some new key initiatives. So really, it’s been a wonderful couple years where we’ve promoted a lot of people internally. We’ve gone through some hiring over the last two to three years, and we are, as of today, fully staffed. So saying all of that, I think the unification has been a fun journey, and we’re still, I would say, in the beginning stages of it.

Meredith Metsker:

Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Career Everywhere Podcast. I’m your host, Meredith Metsker. And today, I am joined by Danny Pape, the Executive Director of the Center for Career Engagement at Washington University in St. Louis. Thank you for being here, Danny.

Danny Pape:

It’s so great to be here. And thank you for coordinating this awesome career everywhere mindset around our work.

Meredith Metsker:

Yes. I am so glad to have you, and I am excited to talk to you today about how WashU recently moved from a decentralized career services model to a centralized one, which, I imagine, was a massive undertaking. So we’ll dig into why the unification was necessary, how you all did it without losing a single position, I might add, and what the career services function looks like now, how you’re using technology to scale your work, and, of course, what your goals are for the future of career services at WashU. But before I get into my questions, Danny, is there anything else you would like to add about yourself, your background, or your role there at WashU?

Danny Pape:

Yeah. I’d love to first just share a little bit about my background. So I’ve played every role in a career center from career counseling, helping students navigate major and career exploration to career coaching, helping students look for opportunities in their field or fields, to employer engagement where I’ve been out there building relationships with employers, and by the way, this is probably my favorite job that I’ve had in my career, to most recently being in leadership and administration, running a four-person, small centralized career center, a decentralized small, two-person school-based career center, and now at WashU, a large 65 plus employee central career center.

Also, important to call out that I’ve worked at a variety of institutions, from large publics to a midsize regional public institution, to now being at an elite private institution. And I feel really lucky to get to do this work to help students navigate career. So really at the end of the day, I view that our work in career services is that we’re in the people business. It’s to help support students, employers, professionals, staff, faculty, and everyone where we’re trying to build that ecosystem.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. I love that, the description of it being a people business, because that’s so true. It’s about helping students build meaningful lives and careers.

Danny Pape:

Love it.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. Cool. Well, before I get into my more specific questions about our topic today, I do want to kick us off with the question I ask all of our guests here on the podcast, and that’s, what does career everywhere mean to you?

Danny Pape:

Yeah. So to me, simply, career everywhere means being woven into the fabric of the institution. We should not be a nice thing to have, but we should be a required part of the student experience and journey at each of our institutions, which, by the way, comes with challenges. Early in my career, I would’ve said that my favorite part of my job is that students wanted to be in front of me. And while I don’t want to discount that, now that I am further into my career and moved into leadership, I see the bigger picture around our work. We as career center leaders and employees, we need to get comfortable that our role is changing from that of being a practitioner to that of being more of a facilitator or an influencer. It doesn’t mean we still don’t do the work. It just means we have to think about our work a little differently. So at WashU, we want to empower a career ecosystem where students maximize their potential for lifelong career success. That is the way we think about the infrastructure.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. Yeah, I love how you described it as being woven into the campus culture. I hear a lot of career leaders talk about the ecosystem, like building a career ecosystem versus just a career center, which I think also speaks to your point about being facilitators instead of just the sole providers. So cool.

Well, now, I would love to dig into our topic today, which is, again, how you all moved from a decentralized career services function there at WashU to a unified centralized model. So to help set the stage, Danny, can you just walk me through that process and what you all did to centralize?

Danny Pape:

Yeah, I’d love to. So to give you a little bit of the context of WashU. WashU [inaudible 00:04:52] siloed and decentralized for years and years by design, by the way, and it worked. It’s what made WashU sort of this amazing institution that’s known around the world for research and the student experience. But our current chancellor, he came in 2019 with a vision to really leave a legacy around creating a one WashU philosophy to really meet the changing times in higher education. So really, the idea behind that is that we set some expectations around constituent support being one of those major goals. What that means is we want people to consistently have a great experience engaging at WashU no matter the input to their engagement, right?

So the Chancellor and our Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs in 2022 focused this philosophy around the career space and in the career ecosystem on campus. And so they announced the unification of the career centers with three major goals. Those goals were to provide a new, improved, scalable and consistent delivery of service for all of our students, two, to establish a one-stop shop for employers, alumni, and family who want to support WashU students and alumni in their career journey, and three, to create a brand that invites all students to utilize the center for career engagement.

So with those three goals being the focus, we really focused our attention early in the unification that we were going to really change models from serving students via their major or which school they were in to more of their career interests. That large shift was really used… We used data to inform that, which I’ll tell you a little bit more about later.

But I want to highlight that in the last couple of years since that 2022 announcement, we have built a new mission, vision, and values for our organization, created a five-year strategic plan with goals, objectives, and strategies that will guide our work to get us through until 2029. And last, I want to highlight that when most people hear unification, they often think of consolidation being the main goal, which was not the case. You referenced earlier that we didn’t lose any roles. And in fact, we actually gained new positions, a few to really focus in on some new key initiatives. So really, it’s been a wonderful couple of years where we’ve promoted a lot of people internally. We’ve gone through some hiring over the last two to three years, and we are, as of today, fully staffed. So saying all of that, I think the unification has been a fun journey, and we’re still, I would say, in the beginning stages of it.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. It sounds like a really exciting process. Can you remind what, I guess, the size of the teams and how many career centers you used to have in the decentralized model and then what the centralized team looks like now?

Danny Pape:

Yeah. So we had, I would say, two or three very big career centers that existed, and then a few smaller satellite career centers that existed through mostly the colleges. And so those teams were comprised of very different sizes and models in how they did their work. And so you had a business school career center, for example, that had a lot of people power and resources behind it. You still had a strong central career center that had pretty similar size to that business school. And then you had some smaller shops.

So as we brought it all together, we are now a team of about 65 individuals broken up into four functions. Those four functions are career coaching and career communities. Of course, that’s our biggest, so being every career center’s bread and butter. We have an employer engagement team that’s out there proactively building relationships with employers. We’ve got an events, experiential learning and impact team that is a mix of events professionals, experiential learning professionals, as well as a focus on data. And then we’ve got our brand new team, academic and campus partnerships, which is out there building relationships with our faculty. And that team of three, while that number might feel small, I think it might be one of the larger academic and campus partnerships teams in the country in a career center where their whole job is focused on building relationships with faculty.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. And for the audience, just so you know, I want to have Danny back to talk about that academic partnerships team. So we’ll dig into that in another episode because I do want to hit on that. But thank you for that context. I think that’s interesting to hear how you have structured your new team with those different units.

I’m curious. Earlier when you were talking about your background and how you went from managing one of the smaller career centers in the decentralized model to now managing this big career center in the unified model, how has that transition been for you as a leader?

Danny Pape:

Yeah, that’s a great question. I think the only difference is, change is hard no matter how small or big operations are or culture shifts are within an organization. And so actually, even when I’ve run small career centers in the past, I always say to the staff members, “We’re going to run this career center like a large career center.” And what I meant by that is we’re going to think about how to make major impact. We’re going to think about how to scale our work. We’re going to have the tenets of what large career centers do just with less people. And by the way, that doesn’t mean that I’m expecting people to work more hours or do things differently. I just want them to think a little differently, think a little bigger.

And so that transition was, while hard, probably the most exciting opportunity. I viewed it as an opportunity to get to help lead a large operation, move into their next chapter of what it was going to look like. So I viewed it as sort of a once in a lifetime opportunity to get to be a part of that. Lots of growth, lots of opportunity to make mistakes and learn from those, lots of opportunity to take what I’ve learned in my career and built, but more importantly, lots of opportunity to connect with others out in the career center field and learn from them and take their lessons learned. And so this community, as you have been building the career everywhere mindset, as you have probably found out that this community is pretty amazing. And so I used all of those resources to help me navigate that change.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, I love that. The community is wonderful. I know I have mentioned in the past and past episodes that I just love working with the career services industry because everyone I have come into contact with who works in this field, they’re just genuinely kind, thoughtful, empathetic people who just want to help. They want to help students, they want to help their peers at other campuses. And I think that’s just so rare to find that so consistently across an entire field.

Danny Pape:

It’s sort of an understatement in my mind.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah.

Danny Pape:

And it is why sometimes it leads us into challenges where we take on too much or we try to be all things for all people.

Meredith Metsker:

Yes.

Danny Pape:

And so I, of course, will always view it as a positive quality, but also, it can help us figure out how to build a path forward and what our roles are as leaders to help protect the team, to be able to figure out what’s next and what we’re building towards. So people are here for the right reasons, really, is the best way to sum that up.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, that’s a great way to put it. I want to go back to the unification process. But I am curious, from your perspective, what were some of the early signals that unification was necessary? I know some of that came from the chancellor. But what were some of the other signs you were getting?

Danny Pape:

Yeah, great question. So there was a lot of confusion for sort of all of our constituents that was consistently sort of bubbling up over time. So I’ll share a few of those perspectives. For students, depending on what they were studying, they had access to a different set of resources as I shared. And as peers do, they talk to each other. And so often, they would share and say, “I went and took advantage of this resource. You should as well. I know you’re interested in that field.” And then often, we’re getting turned down because they didn’t have the same access to that based off of the school or their majors that they were in.

So an example I often use is that for students who are interested in the field of consulting, which is a really popular career interest here at WashU, if they were studying in the business school, they had access to a certain set of resources to help them prep for that field. If they were a student outside of the business school, another school on campus, they had access to a completely different set of resources through a different career center. And often, students had uneven experiences in terms of that support. So that’s just one example of how students were sort of navigating this.

For our employers, depending on their hiring needs, they often would’ve to call four or five different people on campus to sort of get the support they needed, right? So similar to students, employers had to access to different resources and often different philosophies on best practices to recruit depending on who they were working for, which often sent a different message and tone to the recruiter. And then they would call someone else and might get a very different answer or philosophy on how to best recruit. So employers was one. I know we might dive into that a little bit later.

For faculty and staff, so as you have probably heard through your podcast and through the community, career centers are trying to weave career into the classroom so that we do become part of the fabric of a student experience. Well, here at WashU, depending on who those faculty and staff were working with, which career center, which leaders within those career centers, there might’ve been very different philosophies on the best way to do this. So we needed to create a more streamlined approach to serving faculty and staff that we wanted to truly build that career ecosystem that was mentioned earlier.

So I’m a firm believer that for an institution our size and type, if you resource a centralized career center correctly, you can really elevate and meet the goals of weaving career into the fabric of the institution, right? And I firmly believe that, and I firmly believe that’s happening here at WashU. So those were some of the sticking points and then some of the reasons why we’ve navigated into a different direction of philosophy.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. I’m curious, what have been some of the responses you’ve gotten from those stakeholders, from students, from faculty, from employers with this new unified model?

Danny Pape:

Yeah. Students are finding that they feel like it’s much easier to understand where to start and where to go. They understand that there’s more of a centralized hub to be able to get started. We started a student advisory board this past academic year that finished. It was our first time doing that. And we really heard from students and got feedback from them about our model. And they would both tell us that they… The best thing about students is they’re not afraid to say when things are going well, but also, when they think something can be better. And so they told us that. But the focus is on the things we were doing well is that it felt easier to connect in the career communities better aligned with their career interests versus getting served via their school. And so they were really excited about that.

What we have heard from employers has been very much on, “I can now focus more on building relationships with students because I know where to start in terms of the infrastructure of what recruiting looks like at WashU.” So that one feels good.

And then for faculty and staff, they now feel like they have a team that they can reach out to that help them navigate this, right? Versus often I think career center leaders, directors, and others are doing that relationship building with faculty and staff. And while we should be doing that in our roles, we often don’t have the time to then implement the types of ideas and the types of things and resources they need to be successful in the classroom to help weave career in. So to have a team dedicated that’s doing listening tours, that’s building toolkits for faculty to be able to take and put them into their courses, either online or in-person, to have someone to help them sort of react to the things that are happening to their students has been really powerful. And I would say is a really, really important step in building a career ecosystem.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, absolutely. It sounds like everyone across the board just has more clarity on where to start.

Danny Pape:

You got it.

Meredith Metsker:

That’s a great result. So you just mentioned that in your new centralized model, the career center serves students based on career interest instead of major. So what was the thought process behind that and how are you implementing that approach?

Danny Pape:

Yeah. So the thought process was sort of twofold. I want to focus on two things within that. First is the data-driven approach. So we looked at landing data back from sort of a five-year period where, by the way, we get typically a 90% knowledge rate. So this is a true sort of good sampling of where our students are going. And we found that about 95% of our students were landing in about 25 industries regardless of their academic major and discipline, right? So that told us that there are some key community alignment that we could build around those industries where our students were interested in going to and where they were actually landing regardless of what they were studying. So that data really helped inform creating those career communities.

Second, this is a key message to leaders, you always have to meet students where they are at at your institution. So the WashU student is naturally interdisciplinary, right? So some basic data to back that up. 65% of our students earn a major and a minor or more than one major, right? So a typical story you hear at WashU is, “I’m double majoring in this and this. I’m also minoring in this,” right? More than 33% of those students completed requirements for two majors. And some of them, in fact, the majority of them were two degrees from two different schools on campus, right? So maybe, say, one in the business school, one in the school of engineering.

So to me, this is how we should serve them. If they are naturally looking at intersections of academic disciplines and the interdisciplinary of those as they think about what they want to do in their career, we should serve them in that same way versus segment them out via what they’re studying or what they’re doing. And I believe that universities that figure out this interdisciplinary education are going to thrive as we move into these sort of new times in our field.

So we decided on six industry-based career communities and two population-specific career communities. And just to give the listeners a little bit about what we view career communities as, they are industry-aligned, learning communities that provide opportunities for students to explore their skills, values, and interests, gain valuable industry knowledge, and build key connections with career coaches, professionals, and mentors in that space. Each career community sort of has inputs or facets that sort of highlight what makes it a community. And that includes things like in-person and virtual programming, pure coaching where we engage students in the coaching process, student club engagement, so as you engage with clubs across campus, career tracks to local, regional, and national industry hubs, and on-demand content.

So that leads me a little bit into where I would love to end this, which is that, I mentioned earlier you need to meet students where they are and how they want to be served. And students often are thinking about career when our teams are not working. And so on-demand content to me is so important to this current generation of college students. So we decided to onboard uConnect to be able to curate content for our students around these career communities so students can access these resources at any time. You have to take those barriers away. You have to make it as easy as possible. So it’s a little bit about our career communities and then how on-demand content and online content is sort of woven into that structure.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. And I definitely want to dig into more about how you’re using uConnect and technology to scale your work. But I am curious, what were the six career communities that you landed on and the two population-based ones?

Danny Pape:

Yeah. So we have an arts design and media career community. We’ve got a business career community. We’ve got a healthcare and sciences career community. We’ve got a government policy and social impact career community. We’ve got a technology data and engineering career community. We have a career exploration, a career community, which I think makes that group a little bit unique. And then our two population-specific career communities are PhD and postdocs is one. So serving PhDs and postdocs specifically. And then our graduate business career community, which serves our graduate business students programs like MBAs, specialized master’s programs, things like that. So those are our eight career communities. And by the way, we do plan to evolve them over time. And that’s the beauty of it is as students career interests and as the job market changes, we can mold and change those over time because we should be serving students via what they’re actually interested in and not what we think they are or what their peers are talking about.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay. So you’re also serving graduate students.

Danny Pape:

We are. We serve all students. In fact, WashU is a school of 16,000 students. 8,000 at the undergraduate level, and 8,000 at the graduate level. So that 50/50% split, I think, is a little different than a lot of other institutions. So making sure we’re serving graduate students effectively is absolutely a part of our charge and what we’re doing.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. Okay. You all are probably very busy then.

Danny Pape:

That’s right.

Meredith Metsker:

Yep. Okay. Well, on that technology note, as a newly centralized career center, how has technology helped you scale your work?

Danny Pape:

Meredith, I love this question because scalability can mean different things to different people and in different contexts. So when I was running that small four-person career center for 12,000 students, we onboarded uConnect with the goal of scaling our work of our small team so that we could serve more students. It truly was about serving more. The goal was to really automate that curated personalization that uConnect offers to each student so that they got access to the resources, jobs, and opportunities that make sense for them. Here at WashU, we clearly have more people power than that, right? So the goal around scalability for us was to create access to our resources in a more meaningful and curated way and to take ownership over our career content. So I’ll focus on access first.

So at many institutions, we often hide a lot of our resources and content behind a login. And while that might seem like a really small barrier to us that do the work every day, research actually shows that it’s a larger barrier than we think in terms of actual access to that. And we work in a really resource-heavy field. I mean, I get five to 10 emails a week from new vendors or new resources that exist in our field, right? So we constantly have a really resource-rich database of resources students might be able to take advantage of.

And so saying all of that, we need to get better at triaging students and their needs. So uConnnect’s mission, which is to take all of these resources that we have access to in our field and take away that barrier of a login to engagement with that tool so that more people will consume it, right? That’s the goal. And what we have seen through our uConnect platform is that it leads to more engagement with all those tools that we have access to and really helps us uncover the power of those technologies. So that’s access.

Ownership. So often for website content, I’ll focus on website content here, career centers typically have to work through an intermediary office on campus to update this information on their site. And while these offices do really important work on our campuses, it often can be a barrier to our organization to update this content that we really need and in time to be able to serve them correctly. So for us, using uConnect, our teams can now more seamlessly update content and curate resources for their students, and we own that responsibility, right? And I think anytime someone has ownership over something, I’m a firm believer that you’ll ultimately see a better product and outcome of that work when someone feels like they have the ownership. So access and ownership were the two big focuses for us around uConnect and around scalability.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. I’m so glad you mentioned that. And your point about having more ownership over your content and the ability to make changes in real-time as you feel you need to make them, that’s what was going through my head when you were talking about the career communities. And you said, “We can change this at any time. We can update this.” And you don’t have to go to an IT team or a marketing team to build that for you. You can just do that through uConnect platform.

Danny Pape:

That’s right. And we can customize that and add things and change things over time. And I think that’s what we should be doing because the one constant thing on a college campus is change. New students coming in, students graduating and going out. And if we’re not constantly changing with them, because I don’t think we often change quick enough to change with the students, then we’re not serving them to the flight fullest capability. And so that sort of helps us realize that goal of meeting the needs of the students that are there with you at that moment, because a year from now, that’ll look different even, right? Often we think about our work in four-year cycles for undergraduates as they go through their experience, but I actually think we need to be looking at things in sort of a one-year cycle because you always have new students coming in that the next generation may have very different ideas of how they want to think about career.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. Especially as more institutions start catering to adult learners too who may not need the full four-year experience.

Danny Pape:

And that’s right.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. I’m curious, so on your note about access, I think one thing we hear from a lot of uConnect customers is that uConnect helps drive more engagement with those tools that you already have, like you were mentioning, and that you already pay for. So I think nothing is more frustrating than paying for a tool and then nothing. It’s crickets from the students.

Danny Pape:

That’s right.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah.

Danny Pape:

In fact, when we unified all the career centers, we kept a lot of the technologies that existed across all the career centers for a couple of years. And so I sort of joke, we almost had too much technology, but that was by design because we didn’t want to sort of take anything away in the moment. And now, we’re going through the evaluation process of the technology that we provide. And having uConnect first before we do that helps us then making sure we’re weaving these technologies into our website platform so that we give them the best shot to be used and give them the best shot to be put in front of the right set of students that need access to that.

And so I’m glad we did it that way versus doing sort of a technology review and then onboarding uConnect. We sort of started with the website, and then now, we are evaluating sort of our tech platforms and where we think we’re going to best be served to serve students. So that is right. That should be the goal is that we get these resources in front of the right students at the right time.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. That’s a really great way to approach it, bringing in uConnect first and giving those other technologies their best shot at getting in front of students. I also wanted to highlight for anyone watching or listening that uConnect provides a lot of engagement data for those tools. So I imagine that’s probably what your team is looking at as you evaluate what tools to keep, which you rid of.

Danny Pape:

Yeah, Meredith, that’s actually a perfect example because we just upstarted a technology committee. And each person on the committee is in charge of looking at one of the softwares that we have access to that we pay for. And I have tasked them with coming up with monthly statistics to highlight how that specific technology is being used. Well, many technologies on their back-end, just because of how they’re set up, this is not calling them out, there are no data points to showcase how that product is being used. However, for some of these products, we can then go to the uConnect data insights and look at the data behind the scenes to say, “These resources had this many page views and clicks and engagement within.” So it actually now has given us some power, some data to be able to make better decisions about, “This is working.”

This resource that sort of we didn’t have any data behind because of how it’s organized and set up, we now have some data to prove that students are using it or not, and then we can make those decisions about what’s best for us. So I think that’s really powerful. And sort of while often you’re going to think about the data just for your website, you can really dive into the nuances of what’s actually in your site and which parts of your site are the most used and which resources sort of get the most attention connected to them via clicks and page views.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. I imagine that same approach can be applied to your career community pages to help you get an idea of, “Are these pages the right themes? And are students engaging with them like we think they are?” I imagine that gives you some good insight as you plan your goals.

Danny Pape:

Yeah, it’s really powerful. So many of our career communities from their career community page have links out to industry-specific resources, right? So I’ll just use business as an example. You’ve got investment banking, you’ve got consulting, you’ve got marketing. And when you click on one of those, then it opens up a page that provides you all of the necessary resources to understanding what it means to work in consulting. And what we are able to see is which fields are the most popular, so which of those pages are being visited and which aren’t, and then even then as you dive into that consulting page, which resources within that page specifically get clicked on the most and get used the most. So it’s really powerful insight and data that teams career communities can use to then help curate more content or write content, or sometimes we might need to edit the content so that it’s easier for people to engage with. So I love that you can really dive in a little deeper than just some of the superficial ways, I think, we’ve often thought about what success looks like on a website.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. I love how you all are thinking about it. It’s more than a website. It’s like a total management system. And it sounds like it’s working really well for you all in this new centralized model. So that’s exciting to hear.

Danny Pape:

You got it. It really helps us take ownership of our language and content. And I think that’s powerful.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. Especially when you’re a newly centralized model and you have to rebuild your brand a little bit, say who you are to all of the different stakeholders that you’re interacting with. So that’s really cool to hear.

Danny Pape:

And that’s good.

Meredith Metsker:

So I want to dig into the employer side of things. We touched on it a little bit earlier, but you had mentioned that this was a pain point with the previous decentralized model where it was tough for employers to engage with career services. They didn’t know which office to talk to or they had to talk to a bunch of different offices. So what changes have you seen on the employer side since shifting to your unified centralized model?

Danny Pape:

Yeah. So as was noted earlier, we heard a lot of frustration. There was a lot of frustration within the employer community with navigating the decentralized career ecosystem previously. And it was very common for recruiters and talent acquisition professionals to sort of have the same conversation about hiring WashU talent with multiple people across different schools, departments, sometimes even on the same day. They would have very similar phone calls. This really not only led to mixed messages, but also made the process just truly inefficient and time-consuming for really busy recruiting teams, right?

So since we’ve centralized, we have become more of a strategic hub for employer engagement. So we view that that team’s role is to make recruiting WashU students easier and more streamlined. That very simple statement is the goal, right? And it sounds simple, but it’s much harder in practice. So now we view that our role is that we serve as connectors. We ensure employer partners are guided to the right people on campus because sometimes that might not be within our area or office, to the right programs that exist, and to truly other opportunities that might exist on campus to help them build their brand. So this one-stop shop approach means that their job and internship opportunities reach the most relevant student populations, really increasing visibility and recruiting success, which is ultimately what they care about.

Employers really have responded positively to this. Some things we’ve heard is they appreciate the coordination, the consistency, that word consistency is important to me, and the partnership that helps them meet their strategic hiring goals without unnecessary duplication of efforts. So I want to highlight that a lot of employer engagement teams, often we feel the burn around being reactive, right? We’re reacting as they’re calling, but this is allowing us to more strategically partner with these organizations to meet them where they are and help them succeed. And we really take the time to understand each employer’s unique goals and build a strategy that makes sense for them because one size does not fit all in terms of recruiting.

So I sort of highlighted this earlier, but I want to call it out again. So we recently heard at a conference that we attended that one particular organization through a panel they served on called out house centralized career centers like ours, and they called us out specifically, which always feels nice, like ours simplifies recruiting and helps them focus more on building relationships and hiring top talent rather than navigating the organization. So centralization of this didn’t just improve our internal operations, which is a great thing. It ultimately has improved the employer experience, which, I think, should always be the goal.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, absolutely. I imagine it makes them more inclined to want to work with you if they feel like the experience is not only effective, but it’s simple.

Danny Pape:

That’s right. You have to make things easy. Just like with students where I talked about a barrier of log in feels small, it’s actually a bigger barrier. That’s also true with employers. If they feel like the support that they need to be successful is not going to be answered through an email or a phone call, that you have to be able to respond to those things and make those things happen easy versus feeling like there’s any perceived barrier. So it often is pretty similar to students.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. Like you said, it’s all about meeting them where they are.

Danny Pape:

That’s right. And the talent acquisition space is changing really quickly right now too as organizations figure out how they’re going to recruit the best talent. And so we have to be able to find that partnership, right? Partnership should feel connected. They shouldn’t feel sort of one-sided or one way. And so partnership to me is like a key word with almost all of these constituents.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, absolutely. That makes sense. So now that this big unification process is complete, what are your goals for the future of career services at WashU? I know that’s a big question.

Danny Pape:

Yeah, I love it. I’ll tell a little bit some anecdotes about what we’re trying to do. So simply, we’re trying to provide excellent service to our constituents. And with students specifically, we’re going to go into it with what I call and what WashU calls, this isn’t specific to the career center, a name and story mindset, right? So no matter your role on our campus, you are involved in to know students’ name and story. And so that individualized experience, I think, is really important. Students want to be heard, right? We all want to be heard and thought about as individuals. And so that’s one, having a mindset of name and story, getting to know students, helping them really individualize their WashU experience based off what they are thinking and what they need.

Two, we want to continue to evolve as our constituents do. As I shared earlier, we have new students coming in and students graduating and going out into the job market in the world. And we should constantly be evolving with them. And so the career community model, as I shared earlier, is just one example of how we can continue to monitor what industries, what career interests our student have, as well as the job market how it evolves to be able to better serve students.

And then we want to tell our story, right? Often career centers are really good at doing the work, but not as good about telling the work that we do because we are empathetic, really care about our students’ work. We need to get better at telling that story. So we can do that through quantitative and qualitative data and through our professional associations in and outside the field through writing and participating in podcasts like this, through presentations at professional conferences, through writing and participating in research. We have a lot of ways that we can tell our story about our work.

So if I had to sort of state it down to what our mission is, which this truly is our mission, we live by this, we want to elevate WashU career engagement and cultivate relationships with local to global employers and community partners to support the student career journey. If we are doing things that align with that mission, we know we are hitting the mark and building. And what those things are might and should change over time.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. Sounds like you have some really great, big goals to work towards.

Danny Pape:

Yeah.

Meredith Metsker:

So I’ll be excited to follow along. You’ll have to keep me posted.

Danny Pape:

I would love to.

Meredith Metsker:

So based on what you have learned throughout this complex unification process at WashU, what advice would you give to other career services leaders?

Danny Pape:

This was probably my favorite question you have on the docket. So I have a couple of thoughts. First, you need to meet the unique needs of your constituents in campus as there is no perfect model. If there were, we would all be doing it and following it, right? So you have to listen to the needs of what’s happening on your own campus to serve your students and constituents. So that’s one. You have to meet the needs of who you’re serving. Remember that we are in the people business, and change management is hard. So recognize the history, always share the why, and be consistent in your aligning narrative. If you do those things as a leader, you’re going to get people on board to be able to navigate forward.

Related to that, one of my colleagues here in the career center would say this to me all the time as we were navigating this change and we were either making decisions and communicating on those to the organization or saying, “We don’t have a decision to be made yet on a particular topic, and here’s why.” She used to say to me, “People just want to be able to be mad,” or really she was saying they just want to be able to react however they want to react to something specific rather than not knowing the path forward. If people don’t have certainty, that’s going to be hard. If they have certainty, even if they disagree with it, they at least have something specific to be able to react to and think if they’re excited to get on path. So that message hits at home with me is that when you can, you have to be able to give people, “This is where we’re going and here’s why.” And then people will go through their process of working through if they want to be excited about that or not.

And then lastly, I think this might be the most important one, find a pure collaborative mentor to support you in this process as leading change can be lonely. So I actually have another career center director that I meet with monthly. We’ve been doing this for about five years now, and we both play the role of mentor and mentee all in the same relationship and call every month, right?

And so if it’s okay, I want to call out that, for me, that person is Sarah Smith, who’s the Career Center Director at Regis University in Denver. And she really helped me navigate this change and think through this because often as leaders, you might not have someone you can talk about the things that are happening and the decisions that you’ve had to make and how that has affected people. And if you can have an unbiased, someone who doesn’t live in the same campus bubble that you live in to be able to navigate that, I think that’s critical. So those are a few things for leaders to talk about, and I think critical to be able to take care of yourself so that you can ultimately take care of others.

Meredith Metsker:

Those are all such great pieces of advice. Thank you for sharing. Especially, I love that last one with finding a peer mentor. I think that’s so smart, and that’s one of the reasons that we launched the Career Everywhere Community. So if you haven’t joined that already and you’re watching or listening, you should go and check it out. I’ll include a link in the show notes. But that can be a great place to just ask questions and find your own mentor like Danny has with Sarah. So I just wanted to give a quick plug for that.

And, Danny, I wanted to go back to the first piece of advice you shared, which was around really tailoring your goals to the needs of your specific constituents on your campus. I’m curious, as you and your team were coming up with the goals for WashU, how did you go about determining the needs for your constituents? What indicators, what data were you looking at to come up with that?

Danny Pape:

Yeah. I think it was both quantitative and qualitative. Some of the quantitative data is looking at the landing data where our students were landing post-graduation. Some of the qualitative data was more things like what employers were saying, what issues they were facing around wanting to recruit on campus. And so you combine all of that feedback into sort of a strategy and method to move forward. And I’ll share that it was really leadership. It was really the Chancellor and the Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs that really developed those goals, right? So when you have leadership that says, “This is important and here’s why,” versus just the career center leaders and team sharing that that’s the goal, then you have this opportunity to really make an actual change, right? So that was powerful. So to me, having leadership really buy into this and really honestly leading the charge in making these changes and then giving the tools necessary to the leaders to make those changes, it really was the powerful sort of mix here that made this all work and is what’s moving us forward, right?

So that’s a little bit about how we looked at that. But now that we’re sort of in this model, now we’re doing a lot, we’re trying to make sure to do a needs assessment for many of our constituents every couple of years so that we’re continuing to listen to them. Of course, we continue to collect that outcomes data where our students are landing. So that’ll continue to help us. Our employer engagement team, every six months, provides industry reports around the career communities that they support. So they put together a one or two-page report sharing what they’re hearing in their industry around recruiting and what changes might be coming. By the way, we put that out on our uConnnect website for anyone to consume so that they can see that.

So those are just some of the ways that we’re continuing to listen to our constituents because when you made the change, that was at a time and a moment where the data was speaking to that. But we have to continue to make sure that we’re looking at our users and meeting their needs now because it could be different. Even just two or three years later, things could be different, and you have to continue to follow that.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, well said. Well, I’m going to start wrapping us up because I want to be mindful of our time here. But, Danny, is there anything else that you would like to add?

Danny Pape:

Yeah. So we’re in both challenging and exciting times in our profession. So outside of this topic, which we talked about sort of how our organization is structured and fits into our university, I know there’s many other topics that are interesting. One particular to me is how we attract, recruit, and onboard, and retain top talent in our profession. So for anyone out there, if you’re interested in having a peer mentor or having someone to talk to about this topic or others in our field, please reach out or please engage the uConnect team so these topics can be talked about in our field. And just know that I’m always excited to brainstorm and bounce ideas off with someone as they’re thinking through how it fits into their context. So I just wanted to call out that we are focused really on sort of where we fit within the university structure today, but there are many other great topics that I know, Meredith, you’re leading in the podcast and have led. And so excited to build off of this into other conversations as we build forward in our profession.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. That’s a great call out and definitely a super important topic. This reminds me of a couple episodes ago. I talked with Dylan Houle of Santa Clara, and he was talking about more like the pathway to senior leadership for career services. Basically like, “How do we get presidents with a career services background? How do we develop that talent pipeline?” So it sounds like it’s definitely top of mind for a lot of the leaders in career services right now.

Danny Pape:

I love that topic. And something I sort of worry about in not just career services, but the higher education field at large is that we’re all getting a little too siloed within our areas and building. And it doesn’t mean someone can’t have a career path, say, in our operation where they stay in one function their whole career. Of course, they can, but I want them to have exposure to the other areas and functions so that they understand how we all work together and build towards each other.

So as I shared my background, I feel lucky that I’ve been able to sort of play every part in a career center because I think that’ll ultimately make me hopefully a better leader because I understand how things are getting done and how the work happens. And so I just want to make sure we do that across our field. We’re giving people exposure. So this podcast that you run gives people an opportunity to hear from different people in different areas of career services. And I just think that’s really important. So I hope people carve out time to listen and to keep building and learning because that’s the only way we’re going to evolve and get better.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. Agreed. That’s why we do this. All right. Well, sort of on that note, Danny, if people would like to connect with you or learn more from you, where is a good place for them to do that?

Danny Pape:

Yeah. So LinkedIn is always a wonderful place to do that. So my specific URL is /dannypape, D-A-N-N-Y-P-A-P-E, or, of course, you can email me at pape@wustl.edu. That’s P-A-P-E@W-U-S-T-L.edu. And I would love to connect, love to talk. If you want to do a quick 30-minute, jump on a call, and just talk out what’s happening in your world, happy to do that. If you want to dive into a specific topic, happy to do that. Or we have many conferences that’ll be coming up over the next year that many of us might be at. If you want to connect at one of those, I would love to do that. So that would probably be the best way to get in touch.

Meredith Metsker:

Cool. All right. And for everyone watching or listening, I will be sure to include a link to Danny’s LinkedIn profile and his email address in the show notes so you can reach out to him there.

So, Danny, at the end of every interview, I like to do this, answer a question, leave a question thing. 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 Lexie Avery and Melissa Lawson of Binghamton University, and they left this question for you. Are you a sweet or savory breakfast person? And what is your breakfast of choice?

Danny Pape:

I love it. So cop-out answer, but it’s both for me. I love donuts and cinnamon rolls and cinnamon bread, but I also love a sort of standard savory breakfast of eggs, bacon, potatoes. But, of course, don’t have that every day. So my everyday breakfast is oats overnight, but probably my favorite breakfast of any kind is a breakfast burrito. So I gave you lots of answers there because breakfast is just a wonderful meal and it’s a great way to start the day.

Meredith Metsker:

It’s my favorite meal. And if you like breakfast burritos, you’re going to have to come out here to Colorado because as maybe Sarah [inaudible 00:50:49] just told you, we put green chili on everything, slather our breakfast burritos and green chili, and it’s delicious.

Danny Pape:

Love it. That is sort of a perfect breakfast for me.

Meredith Metsker:

Yep. Agreed. All right. Well, Danny, what question would you like to leave for the next guest?

Danny Pape:

Yeah. So in my downtime, probably my way of sort of as an introvert of debriefing a day is I like to watch TV. So my question is, what’s a guilty pleasure TV show you watch that might surprise people?

Meredith Metsker:

Oh, that’s a good one. I’m curious, what’s yours?

Danny Pape:

Yeah, I love the show American Pickers-

Meredith Metsker:

Okay.

Danny Pape:

… on the History Channel. I just think it’s so interesting. And I totally know that it’s probably all pretty set up and it’s not as organic as sort of the way that it might be described. But I just think it’s so interesting to see how people collect stuff and keep stuff and then how that stuff evolves over time in terms of how much it’s worth and the value. And I just think you get to see some interesting people. I’m not someone that I would consider myself sort of a collector or someone who keeps a lot of stuff, even just in general. But I just think it’s so interesting to see how other people live and how they accumulate wealth. As they say in the show a lot, they say, for many of these folks, all the stuff that they’ve accumulated over their lifetime is their 401k. It is their way of how they are going to be able to either pass that valuable item on within their family or convert it into money and be able to pass that on to their family too. So I just think it’s really interesting. So-

Meredith Metsker:

That is interesting.

Danny Pape:

Yeah. Probably got more in depth than you wanted there. But American Pickers, I can turn that on at any time and just sort of smile and feel good.

Meredith Metsker:

I love that. Mine, I think, that people wouldn’t expect is that it’s The Walking Dead. I have seen that show, I don’t even know how many times, probably at least 10 times all the way through. I’ve read all the comic books. I’m all about the zombie life and the walking dead.

Danny Pape:

It’s your show, right? And-

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah.

Danny Pape:

… probably what I think it says, it can be really telling about someone. I’m someone who I… So my wife is an avid reader and she really only reads for the most part fiction. I can’t do fiction. I have to sort of do something that’s happened or real. And that’s why a show like American Pickers for me is interesting because these are real people. And so I think you clearly have an imagination and you can sort of-

Meredith Metsker:

Yes.

Danny Pape:

… probably put yourself into that place of like, “How would I respond in this environment?”

Meredith Metsker:

Exactly.

Danny Pape:

Yeah.

Meredith Metsker:

It’s not so much the zombies. It’s the human element of it.

Danny Pape:

Yeah. So that’s really telling. So that’s also why I asked that question because I think it could be an insight into someone’s sort of personality and mindset more than you might think from the surface just by throwing that question out there.

Meredith Metsker:

I love it. Well, we’ve covered everything on this episode. We’ve covered career services and moving to a centralized model. We’ve covered American Pickers and zombies and breakfast. So we’ve hit everything.

Danny Pape:

I love it. Thanks for hosting.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah. Thanks for joining me on the podcast today, Danny. This was such a fun conversation. I feel like we covered a lot of really great advice to other career services leaders. So I just really appreciate you taking the time to join me and for sharing your wisdom. So thank you.

Danny Pape:

Thank you. Thanks for hosting this. And thanks for helping uplift the career services community. Thank you.