Small Team, Big Impact: How Career Services Teams of 1-5 Can Drive Outsized Outcomes

Meredith Metsker:

Hello everyone. I’m Meredith Metsker. I am the Director of Content and community here at uConnect. I also write our weekly Career Everywhere newsletter, manage the digital Career Everywhere community and host and produce our Career Everywhere podcast. And for those of you who maybe aren’t as familiar with uConnect, we are the creators of the first all-in-one virtual career center. Our goal is to make career services accessible to anyone, anywhere, anytime, by helping career leaders create a central hub for their resources, increase usage of those tools and technologies they already pay for, and ultimately to engage more students regardless of their backgrounds or circumstances, especially those students who maybe can’t physically come into the career center. So I am super excited to welcome our three incredible panelists today, all of whom have a lot of in the trenches experience with either being teams of one or leading very small career service teams, and still making a big impact, still reaching a lot of students.

So we have Anita DeCianni Brown of SUNY Empire State University in New York, Nick Edwards of Hardin-Simmons University in Texas, and Tyler Orr of Southern Virginia University in Virginia. So I will let each of them introduce themselves here in just a minute. But before we do that, I do want to just quickly go over a few housekeeping items.

So first, this webinar is being recorded and we will send the recording and any additional resources to you by tomorrow. Second, please feel free to use the chat as we go to share ideas and keep the conversation going. And if you have any questions, you can drop those in the Q&A box, which you should see at the bottom of your screen. And we will leave about 10 to 15 minutes at the end of the webinar for dedicated Q&A. But if I see a question in the question box that’s particularly timely, I will do my best to work it in to the conversation. I think that is everything.

So I will go ahead and have our panelists introduce themselves. Anita, why don’t we start with you and then Nick and then Tyler?

Anita DeCianni Brown:

Hi, everybody. Thanks for inviting me to be part of this panel, Meredith. My name is Anita DeCianni Brown and I’m the Director of Career and Experiential Learning Services at Empire State University. We are part of the SUNY System, so the State University System of New York. Our University is an online University, and the majority of our students are non-traditional students. With an average age demographic of about 34 years old, we serve both students and alumni, and we are nearing about 18,000 students. We’re just under that amount, but we’re quickly approaching that number of students. From 2014 to 2024, I was a team of one and then was able to now grow into a team of four people and certainly we’ll talk more about that later. So thank you for having me.

Meredith Metsker:

Great. Thanks, Anita. Nick, I’ll pass it over to you.

Nick Edwards:

Yeah, so likewise, thank you, Meredith, for having us aboard, part of this conversation. My name is Nick Edwards. I’m the Director of Career Services here at the Hardin-Simmons University in Abeline, Texas. We are a very small private Christian University with a student population of under 2000. I think we’re about 1,500 this semester of undergrad. Prior to higher education, I’ve come from a vast array of industry. Many years working in corrections, I’ve done public education for the last seven years. Before that, various odds and end jobs. But ultimately, coming into higher education was a little bit of a different route for me, in the fact that I was finishing up my doctorate degree. I knew I wanted to go into higher education at some way or fashion, so I started just looking for opportunities and this position happened to come up and two years later here I am still. And so like many of you, we wear lots of hats within this role. And so I want to take this time and then thank y’all for being a part of it and looking forward to learning and growing.

Meredith Metsker:

Thanks, Nick. And to clarify, you are a team of one serving those 2000 students, right?

Nick Edwards:

Yes, which has definitely made me have to think more carefully and strategically with where I want to devote time and resources.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, I imagine that’s quite the ratio we’ve got there. All right, Tyler, I’ll throw it over to you.

Tyler Orr:

Yeah, like they said, thanks for having me on for this. Being on this call makes me feel like I should feel less bad about my own ratio because I’m a team of one supporting about 850 total students. So a little bit of a different animal, smaller, and I should have my ducks in a row because of that smaller ratio. I’m not sure how well I do. But yes, I’m the Director of Career Services here at Southern Virginia University. We’re a small private faith-based liberal arts institution in rural Virginia. So in that sense, similar to what Nick is working with, our University’s summarized mission is Gather, Lift, Launch. So we’re actually called the Launch Center, which is a really fun name that we get to play around with a little bit.

Like I said, about 850 total students, all undergrad level, no grad programs here. I’m an office of one. I’ve got seven student workers helping me out for a few hours a week. Prior to me getting here though, the function existed in name, but not really in practice, so I’ve been building it from the ground up. I’m far from home, both geographically and professionally. I grew up primarily in Utah, so we’ve swapped sides of the country, and I’ve got a master’s in HR and an MBA, and I worked in corporate HR for a large company for a couple years before transitioning into higher ed a little over four years ago at this point.

I initially worked at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, so go Vols, and I cut my teeth in career services there. Then I got here to SVU about 11 months ago, 11 months ago this coming Monday actually, which is crazy. I feel like I was still at UT last week. And then most importantly, I’ve been married a short 10 years and I’ve got three insane little boys who are both exhausting and very cute. So that’s me.

Meredith Metsker:

Cool. Thank you for that context, everyone. And I saw Amy posted in the chat that we are in good company. She’s also a team of one and just hit 2000 students. So yeah, we’re all in good company here. And I think it’s great that we have such a wide variety of years of experience in career services, different professional backgrounds. I think that’s a beautiful thing about career services. Everyone usually comes from a different background because there’s no degree for higher ed career services. So it’s always interesting to hear people’s journeys.

Okay. Well, now I would love to dig into our discussion. So as you all just mentioned, you are all either teams of one flying solo or you’re in Anita’s case, leading a small career services team. So given those constraints and the number of students you need to support, how are you scaling career services? I know that’s a big question, but I think we should just get right into it. So yeah, I’ll just toss that out there. Feel free to jump in. How are you scaling?

Nick Edwards:

Yeah, I’ll start this one-off. So for my office, when you’re leading a one-person office, the key to my success is just realizing that you can’t do everything yourself. One of the first things that I always rely on is faculty and staff partnerships. That’s been one of the most critical things that I learned in this short amount of time. Faculty, whether it’s regularly inviting me into their classes to just give short career talks or to run workshops, or whatever the case may be, this ultimately just gives me the opportunity to reach that larger number of students all at once, in a setting that they’re typically already should be hopefully engaged in.

Another way that I scale that is by providing faculty and staff with plug and play career assignments that live within my website. These assignments are really pretty easy to integrate into courses already, whether it’s resume writing or networking exercises, reflection prompts, whatever the case may be. It’s just a simple add-on for faculty to use that are just really easy plug and play, ready to go out the door. And then having those two pillars in play, it really makes it easier because then faculty are a little bit more engaged with it pushing students to attend those workshops and career events. And when students hear those encouraging words from their professors, they’re usually a little bit more inclined to show up and engage. It’s kind of a multiplier effect. So instead of me just being the only one promoting career services, faculty and staff are able to really just amplify that message when I’m not in the room with them.

Meredith Metsker:

That’s a great strategy. And Nick, to confirm, did you mention that those assignments are on your virtual career center?

Nick Edwards:

Yes, they’re under the people we serve, faculty and staff. I’ve got it developed based on NACE competencies as well as just different career readiness related activities.

Meredith Metsker:

Cool. Well, we’ll definitely be sure to share that resource with folks so they can go check out what your assignments look like.

Anita DeCianni Brown:

I can jump in next. So at SUNY Empire, when I started here, I’ll just give a little bit of the backstory, when I started here at the end of 2014, career services was a webpage, not a website, that had three links on it. And in my initial onboarding, had built out a static career website where we eventually built in a job posting platform and had gone through a couple different platforms over the last 10 years. And then my boss in 2023, we had had our one-on-one and she suggested, “Just do some exploration, see what’s out there.” Because I was looking at a platform to integrate some video feeds as a resource for our students. And I happened to be talking with the rep who started talking about Forage and a few other platforms and said, “uConnect.” And I said, “Well, what is uConnect?” And that brought me to the uConnect family.

And that has been, in the last two years, has been so impactful on the building of career services here at SUNY Empire because we do have a large number of students. And though at the time I was a team of one and meeting one-on-one with students, there’s only still so many hours in a day to be able to provide information for our students who are studying online, they’re not coming through a student union. I can’t go to the res halls to meet with them. So we were able to find a resource that could be used by students across the country, which is where our students are.

Tyler Orr:

And I mean, I’ll double down on that really quickly. I know we’re planning on talking about uConnect and technical platforms a little more later too, Meredith, but so we implemented uConnect and Handshake within a couple months of me coming on board 11 months ago and putting all this together. And it definitely helped us go from zero to 60 infinitely more quickly than we could have otherwise. We have a great web team and internal IT partners, but they just have way too many irons in the fire to have been able to help us build out a website and reliable online resources for our students without a tool like uConnect. So it’s been really helpful.

And I always want to say, and I think everybody would probably agree with me, including other people who are in the client directory for uConnect, the website, my page is far from perfect. There’s always things that I’m wanting to… Nick, plus one on that pretty hard right there. But there’s always more that I want to be improving on and adding to it. It never feels complete. I know that I’ve had student workers that help me out quite a bit, which is part of what I always talk about as far as scaling, is definitely leveraging some student help. They spend a lot of time helping with walk-in hours, and then they also do a lot to help me publish and update resources on our website. And then help out with a bunch of other things on the side.

But the pros and cons, of course, of student workers, I know we’ve got some links out there that they were testing something and trying to create something on the website, and then that died. And so there’s probably a link to nowhere in a couple spots. There’s always things like that. But just the fact that as simple as when a student comes in looking for resume help, and I can quickly and easily say, “Oh, have you looked at our website and our page with resume templates and resources? Go there, check it out. We got a bunch of great stuff for you, use that to get you started and then you can come back and ask for more detail to help as needed.” Even just things as simple as that make a huge difference for us.

I will say really quickly too though, Meredith, I wanted to comment, I’m the kind of person that honestly, I am trying to grow into a scaling mindset. I think that this is difficult for any of us in career services probably. We love the one-on-one interaction so much. That’s why we do what we do. We love helping and being a blessing to specific students. So it’s sometimes hard to preserve the time to focus on getting scalable processes in place if there’s a student knocking on your door asking for help, and there’s always a student knocking on the door.

And so that’s been a challenge for me, but I just wanted to, I don’t know, give some empowerment if there’s anybody who was in a similar spot as Anita and I both were when we started our roles. And Nick, I can’t remember for sure if you built your office from the ground up too, but if you’re in that situation, you’ve just started your position or something and you’re starting to build career services from the ground up with a tiny team, be really clear with leadership upfront about setting a ramp-up timeline, if at all possible. Rather than immediately opening the floodgates and sending a message out to all students saying open for business, that was one of the mistakes that I feel like I made.

If I had taken a couple more months before we had blasted our name out to the world, we would’ve had time to be in a lot better shape as far as what we were providing on our website and the processes we had in place. And I loved the impact we had on students immediately, but if I could go back, I would be a little more intentional and careful about our ramp up there. And shout out to Lexi Bartimioli at Arizona Christian University, who’s an awesome human that I’ve talked with who recently did that and is doing some really cool things. So I would give her a follow on LinkedIn and check in on what she’s doing for advice there.

Meredith Metsker:

What I’m hearing is maybe we need another webinar on how to build the career services function from the ground up.

Anita DeCianni Brown:

Yeah, I hear that.

Tyler Orr:

I’ll be telling you all the mistakes.

Anita DeCianni Brown:

I’ll echo what Tyler said because I did have a little bit of a cushion time. I might’ve been able to use a little bit more, but I started in November of 2014 and students didn’t know that I was here. The official launch wasn’t until June or July of 2015. So during that time, had to go build the website, had to think about what career services was going to be. And then even for building out uConnect, even though at the time I was still a team of one, I didn’t do that in a silo. So I had faculty input, which was incredibly important, as well as our other functional offices.

So before it was launched to students, I had gone on, I called it the roadshow and shared out what the resource was, asked for feedback. And what they saw was when they gave me feedback, when they gave me recommendations, I was putting… Those were immediate. I could go right in because the platform is so easy to use, you can go in and make those changes immediately. And then the faculty and the faculty chairs were seeing that these resources were being used and they could recommend it to students. So it wasn’t, again, just a career silo. It was something that was throughout our student success division and academic affairs.

Meredith Metsker:

I’m glad you mentioned the ease of making changes. That’s something that I’ve heard a lot. You don’t have to engage marketing or IT for every little change or updated resource. You can just make those changes in real time, which I think, as you all know, our career services is super important because the workforce and the world of work changes on a daily basis. We can’t wait months to make updates.

So on that technology note, I mean, you’ve all touched on it, but how are you using technology to scale and what does your tech stack look like?

Nick Edwards:

Well, I’ll start, if y’all don’t mind. So technology is definitely one of those things that I have used to help scale my working environment, and especially through the virtual career center, through uConnect. The platform, it’s been so important to the work that I do. It serves as that central hub for everything career related at Hardin-Simmons. The way we’ve got it built out, students can access career paths that are organized either by major or their industry. Each of those pathways have curated resources, whether it’s videos, articles, whatever the case. And because the site is open 24-seven, students don’t have to wait until 8:00 in the morning when the library doors open and they can come into my office, or reach out and make an appointment on my calendar. They’re able to explore everything. They’re able to explore what careers are out there. They’re able to build skills. I’ve got a little new section that I’ve built out that helps upgrade skillsets.

In today’s world, meeting the students where they’re at and not only where they’re at, but when they’re there, is crucial. That’s the key to what we’re doing. And so it doesn’t matter what somebody’s story is, whether it’s the parent that’s completing their degree virtually that needs resume advice at 2:00 AM, we’ve got you covered. The student athlete that can’t make it to the office because of practice and workouts and classes, but they need work on interview skills, we’ve got you covered, and everyone in between. No matter the day or time, the website has information that’s hopefully able to help them be more successful.

Tyler Orr:

I guess I’ll jump in really quick, Anita. My tech stack right now is still very simple. It’s uConnect and Handshake. I intend to add more, including, I definitely want an AI resume mock interview and LinkedIn feedback and review tool, and I want more career exploration or assessment resources. But for now, from where we started a year ago, the job and internship board, career fair and event management, first destination tracking, appointment scheduling and tracking, and email capabilities through Handshake have covered our initial biggest needs outside of what uConnect helps us with as far as the virtual career center. But yeah, we’ve got a lot more room to grow. But again, I think those two tools have been the essentials for us in getting the ball rolling.

There’s some more things that uConnect does that we… Well, we’re the newest of the three in our use of uConnect, and so we’re still figuring some things out. There’s some great email automated newsletter functionality and things like that that we haven’t made happen yet. So there’s some other things that I think we’ll be able to use to help us scale and get the word out more effectively to students about our website, because right now the greatest awareness for students is still from those who have come in and had conversations with us, and we clearly explicitly directed them to the website for a thing like a resume template or for reviewing a page about a particular career path. So there’s definitely more to come for us, but it’s been a huge help.

Meredith Metsker:

Sounds like you’ve got a good foundation. Anita, how about you?

Anita DeCianni Brown:

So just before joining with uConnect, we were a Handshake school and that was our technology. And I will say that the adding uConnect has more than quadrupled the use on Handshake. We might’ve had 50 or 100 applications per month at the time, and now we’re seeing 500, 900 applications per month. So having that increased usage of Handshake. In addition, after we launched our career hub, we also joined on with CareerShift, which I think is a really great tool. I used it many years ago when I was at another university, in the career center there, and I really like being able to use it as far as even doing some outreach to alumni. And I can certainly use LinkedIn, but I like the fact that I can also get email addresses which aren’t always available on LinkedIn.

And then this semester we’re launching for students FOCUS 2 and Big Interview, because we didn’t have that mock interview tool. And so we looked at a few different platforms. This semester as a University, we also introduced a Spanish-speaking BBA bachelor’s program, and Big Interview has a module or a component where it’s entirely Spanish-speaking. So we have students at the undergraduate and graduate level, because we also have a couple certificate programs that are now Spanish-speaking certificate programs. So we wanted to have resources available for all students. And then we also use the labor market insights on uConnect, which is just O*NET on steroids. I love being able to use it and share it. And each time that I’m even sharing it with our colleagues, they’re like, “Oh my gosh, it has so much information. We can drill it right down to counties that someone is looking at.” So that has been incredibly helpful. And then we also use LinkedIn Learning and Forage on the site. I feel

Meredith Metsker:

I feel like I need to ask you.

Nick Edwards:

Oh, sorry.

Meredith Metsker:

Anita, I think I need to ask you to do marketing copy for the Labor Market Insights module. O*NET on steroids.

Anita DeCianni Brown:

Yeah. Yeah, it is.

Meredith Metsker:

Trademarking that. I’m sorry, Nick, go ahead.

Nick Edwards:

Oh, no, I forgot to mention the rest of my tech stack, and I apologize. I get so narrow-minded sometimes. So we do use Handshake for the job postings, career events, everything, which I love the fact that it works so well with uConnect, but it just auto-populates into my site without me having to really do much of anything, so I absolutely love that. As far as the resume service, we utilize a service called SkillsFirst. Absolutely love SkillsFirst. It not only helps students create resumes and cover letters, but they’re able to do practice mock interviews and receive immediate AI-driven feedback and guidance that’s really helpful to help students independently at least start their career readiness documents before they make the initial visit to my office. And so I can’t say enough about that service.

At one time, we did have FOCUS 2, and it did well enough for us, but we were wanting to figure out more aptitude rather than just interest surveys. And we actually settled on a service called YouScience, and it is aimed a little bit more towards the high school students, but the biggest difference is that it tests our own aptitudes and tells us not only… And it has an interest survey built in, which is amazing too, but it actually tests students’ aptitudes to see if they’d even be, I don’t want to say good enough, but to see if they would even be successful in certain roles. And so just having that information, you don’t want a student, I always make this reference, but you don’t want a student to get into their sophomore or their junior year of engineering and realize, “I don’t like math or I’m not very good at math,” because then they wasted a lot of classes. And so by having them evaluate their own aptitudes early on and match that with careers, it’s so important.

Meredith Metsker:

Yeah, agreed. Well, it sounds like you all have really interesting tech stacks with a lot of breadth there. I’m curious, since adopting all of those tools and uConnect, what would you say has changed for you in terms of what you’ve been able to focus on or prioritize, especially as teams of one, in Nick and Tyler’s case, and a team of four in Anita’s?

Tyler Orr:

I’m the newest to uConnect, so I’ll let you guys… And started with it. So love to hear your thoughts.

Anita DeCianni Brown:

I’ll start if you don’t mind. So I will say that since joining uConnect, my approach to being able to strategize, having access to more resources, and I don’t just mean the uConnect platform itself, but I’ve said this to Meredith numerous times. I listen to the podcasts all the time, and I also read the comments and follow along in the conversations in the Careers Everywhere community. And that has been incredibly helpful to have me rethink, not that I necessarily have more time, but just different ways that we can help our students.

So at the beginning of the summer, we started having a career liaisons. So we’re part of the Student Success Division, and we have liaisons on 10 different offices, which include enrollment management as well as the Student Success Division. And we’ve been able to not just share what’s going on in the career office, but also thinking about how we might be able to collaborate with other offices. And some of this came about by listening to your guests on the podcast and reading the conversations in the Careers Everywhere conversations. And though our students are primarily adult students, there was assumption, I’m going to say it was my own assumption that, all right, if we put this out there, they’ll understand what it is. They’ll know how to use it.

And there was a guest that you had on one of your podcasts that I was listening to that talked about the welcome mat. What does the welcome mat look like? And I started thinking about what does our welcome mat look like in an online University for adult students? And so through working with our career liaisons, we developed a couple of career kits that break down the whole career process. Why should you be using Handshake? How can you be using Handshake? Why should you be using FOCUS 2? What’s the advantage of practicing your interviewing skills on Big Interview?

So breaking it out into six steps that walk somebody through exploration through job search. And so by joining in the uConnect community, I’ve been able to, I think, scale up strategizing how we can help our students and alum.

Meredith Metsker:

And Anita, remind me, are those the kits, your “welcome mat” per se, are those on your virtual career center?

Anita DeCianni Brown:

Not yet. So like everything else, before we publish something, not necessarily publish on the career hub, but if we’re going to create a new program or initiative, we are working within the university to get feedback. So right now it’s in the, I’m going to say the review stage of our student success division. And then I’m also going to be sharing it at our colleges meetings and sharing it out with faculty to be able to get feedback from them. But I’m hoping in the next month or so that we’ll be able to at least put the initial pieces on the career hub for our students.

Meredith Metsker:

From Maria and Jacqueline in the chat, you’ll have to wait a little bit, but we’ll have those up in the next couple months. And I’m guessing maybe you would be willing to share those in the Career Everywhere community once-

Anita DeCianni Brown:

Yes.

Meredith Metsker:

… they’re alive and open to the public.

Anita DeCianni Brown:

Yeah. And I’m not sure who it was that talked about the welcome mat, but whoever did, thank you for that idea because that really did help our office.

Meredith Metsker:

Love to hear it. All right. Nick, anything to add on your end?

Nick Edwards:

I don’t know how I could top of that, but I mean, in all honesty, before we had the uConnect platform or any of the tech stack that we have, our online presence, much like Anita was saying, was kind of hidden behind everywhere else on the University website. When I took the position over, half the links on that one page were down, half of them didn’t work. And unfortunately, the information just wasn’t available or actionable for students. And so during that time, a significant portion of my job was more reactive. It was more answering repeated questions via email, sending piecemeal resources, walking students step-by-step through processes that weren’t at the time clearly documented. It was very time-consuming, and it limited my ability to focus on the bigger picture items.

But thankfully since implementing the UConnect and SkillsFirst and such, the experience has changed just dramatically for not only my students, but myself. Students are now coming to the appointments and the interactions that we’re having, they’re more prepared instead of just asking the general, “What can I do with this major?” Kind of thing. They arrive having already explored those pathways, the resume information, and they may say something more along the lines of, “How do I make myself more competitive in this field?” And so we’re having those deeper interactions and the deeper questions because they’ve already had the information readily available for them.

Even students who might not have ever walked into career services ever during their four or six, whatever years at Hardin-Simmons, they’re at least more actively interacting and having those resources available to potentially make that difference in their lives.

Meredith Metsker:

Tyler, anything to add? I know you’re relatively new on uConnect

Tyler Orr:

I think they did a great job, and I would echo a lot of the same things. I know we’re already starting to run short on time, so I’ll be quiet.

Meredith Metsker:

Well, this question has come up in the Q&A box, and it’s one that I also wanted to touch on for sure. So as super small teams with limited resources, how are you able to advocate for the funding for technology?

Tyler Orr:

Yeah, I can jump in since I didn’t say much on the last one. Of course, the easy justification for you uConnect is that it costs less than hiring additional full-time staff would. Obviously, I would say Nick and I both are very motivated to follow in the footsteps of Anita and work toward growing our teams as well. But in the interim, a decent justification for any of these tech tools is the impact, of course, that they’ll have as opposed to having to hire somebody additional right now. So those numbers obviously are fairly easy to communicate. But when I was advocating for these tools when I first came on, I think one, I was very clear about, of course, pulling from some of the content and resources, marketing collateral from uConnect and Handshake to help our leaders understand, but I was very clear and explicit about what our students would get and what SVU would get.

So I remember very specifically outlining those two different columns of value that we would be receiving, and then tying those things to admissions and enrollment was a big help as well, which I know uConnect has been talking a lot about recently. I know you’ve had a few good podcasts and webinars on that subject, and it’s been talked about a couple times today already too. So I think helping leaders understand that having these tools will give you a stronger presence online to be able to refer to when talking with parents or prospective students about what resources exist and the support that they would have here. I think that goes a long way as well, in addition to, of course, just having more resources more easily accessible to the student body.

And I think I haven’t been following the chat religiously because it’s hard to do when you’re on a webinar, but I know somebody in there mentioned asking whether we have resources for prospective students on our pages as well, and we do have that page. Again, all our pages I want to improve upon and add more resources and information, but we do have a page that helps to try to more easily direct prospective students’ attention to where we want them to go, including to the admissions or application page for the university.

So I think those are some of the things that I’ve done. And I was going to talk about this a little bit more with a later question, but I’ll mention to here. Again, tying to enrollment and admissions, but also you just tie everything that you do back to the mission or the strategic imperatives or pillars or whatever of your institution. Find how your space ties to whatever the University has said their priorities are. There’s going to be a connection somewhere in there, nowadays. Especially I think there is growing recognition, of course, across higher ed that there are shifts that need to happen in the value that we’re communicating to students and their families on the backend of their expensive degree. And so there’s usually somewhere we can tie into the university imperatives that will help us both just elevate the name of career services across campus in general and help us to advocate for funding or resources related to tech.

Meredith Metsker:

Great advice.

Tyler Orr:

Yeah, kind of echoing what Tyler was saying. One of the most important lessons that I’ve learned is very similar. You can’t advocate for resources by framing them as, “career center needs”, and instead finding ways to counter that and connect them to those, like I said, the priorities of the University. And one of the easiest and best ways to do that is with data and actual stories, actual anecdotes when you’re advocating. The data shows the leadership, how many students are actively engaging with the platform, but the stories in my eyes is where you have the real impact. A student that used the career center to not only find an internship, but to tailor their resume based on advice from the website, and ultimately culminating to obtaining this internship opportunity that could potentially shape their career direction. But the combination of all of it is just so powerful in gaining the support.

Anita DeCianni Brown:

And I’ll just give a quick snippet. So at SUNY Empire, when I first started exploring the uConnect platform, I worked with Doug as my account rep and certainly shared out a lot of different resources. And one was a case study from, I think, one of the Texas schools that talked about how they were able to obtain uConnect by using the technology fee. And in talking with my boss, we have a student activity fee, and I had made a pitch to our student government association. I shared out what the platform was going to look like and made the pitch. And our student government association supported our getting the uConnect platform. And then as far as the additional resources, our chancellor in New York, Chancellor King, is a huge advocate for experiential learning, applied learning, and he had launched a new initiative three years ago supporting students that were participating in internships.

And as part of that, our proposal included growing the career office by adding a couple staff members as well as some of the resources that we’ve now implemented. So that’s how I was able to lean into these gifts or opportunities, not necessarily gifts, but opportunities to help our students.

Meredith Metsker:

Well, thanks everyone. That’s good advice. I think that’s a good segue into a quick poll question that I wanted to launch for everyone attending. We’ve talked a lot today about technology or about how technology and specifically uConnect can help small teams scale their work and engage more students. If you are not already a uConnect customer and you’d like to chat with our team about how uConnect can help your career center, please select Yes in the poll, or of course you’re always welcome to reach out to me as well. I’m always on LinkedIn or in the Career Everywhere community.

Okay. So panelists, I know we have maybe 12 minutes left, so I have one more question from me, and then I would like to move into some Q&A from our attendees. So as we talked about earlier, Nick and Tyler, you’re both teams of one, Anita is a team of four, and I would love to hear how you have advocated in the past or are planning to advocate, for hiring additional staff members and growing your team?

So Anita, why don’t we start with you because you just recently did this and expanded from being fly solo to a team of four.

Anita DeCianni Brown:

So like I mentioned, we were able to obtain the funding through our State University System for our initial growth. And by using the uConnect platform, we have been able to really look at data and data can tell stories. So as I look at other ways that we can grow either by technology resources and/or people, as our student population grows, so will the need to help support them. And a team of four may not be enough as we do continue, I’m not going to say if, as we do continue to grow, and I believe now that we will have the foundation with the data for all the different platforms to be able to show, okay, this is the reason why we need additional resources.

Meredith Metsker:

Cool. And Anita, would you mind sharing what the additional team members you are? So there’s you as director.

Anita DeCianni Brown:

And then we have an assistant director, we have an internship coordinator, and we have a military and veteran career advisor. SUNY Empire has the largest number of veteran and military… We’re the largest serving SUNY University for the veteran military population.

Meredith Metsker:

Okay, cool. That makes sense. So Nick and Tyler, so you’re both teams of one. I’m curious about any plans or efforts you’ve got coming down the pike for hiring additional staff members or growing your team?

Nick Edwards:

I wish I would. I mean, obviously, yes, looking ahead, I would love to expand the team. I’d love to get that outreach even larger across to every student on campus. It would definitely have to be gradual, whether it’s starting with peer mentors or student workers, which I don’t even have student workers for, and then potentially upgrade that to graduate assistants or whatever the case, and then eventually advocate for more professional staff. But it definitely seems that this is the only office that has a team of one on campus, but I can’t complain. I mean, I do what I can with what I can and provide the best service that I potentially can for the students.

Tyler Orr:

So I actually did already have the go ahead to hire somebody else underneath me, and then they paused hiring across the University for a couple months to get some other ducks in a row. But I think there were a few different things that I was doing that helped with it. One was I do think it was influential that I applied for a grant here in Virginia and received that grant and have some great plans going forward for how we’re leveraging that. And it’s from the state, and so there’s obviously some significant reporting coming along with that, but there’s a lot of great resources and accountability too on our University to leverage those grant resources effectively to help our students out. And so I think my University is also, it’s a fairly new one. It’s only about 30 years old, which in higher ed years is just a little toddler, I think.

And so there’s some things like grant applications and things like that that honestly, the University just hasn’t done a ton of before. And so I’m now seen as a little bit of a trailblazer in bringing in some of that additional funding. And so I think there’s a couple of those external engagement things and bringing in funds that has gotten people excited about this space and what we’re doing and the potential for further growth that I think helped sell that. And I’m confident that as soon as the University is no longer pausing things broadly as far as hiring, that we’re going to be one of the first ones they’re looking at because like Nick, I’m one of the only departments here that is still a team of one, and I think they see the need for it.

The other thing I was going to talk about is just consistently listen to podcasts, read books, consume articles, and share those with your partners across campus that are relevant to their spaces, but that also help influence about the importance of experiential learning and the importance in the marketplace today of demonstrating solid outcomes and things like that. And I think along with that, an underlying principle there is relationship building and finding ways to give back around campus so that you’ve got a bunch of advocates in the room for you even when you’re not there.

And so whether that’s finding ways to help support events that other offices are putting on, or whether that’s volunteering your time or consistently referring students over to these other departments to help them feel like you’re a true partner and to start over time getting a sense of, oh, what else could we be doing together if they had more capacity? The other thing that I personally want to get better at is when additional work and opportunities are put on my plate, getting a lot better at saying, “Great, if you want me to do that, what are we taking off the plate?” And helping over time build a really clear pile of things that we could be doing or that we used to be doing and no longer are because you are not supporting us in having an additional resource to help build that.

So that’s something I want to get better at. Right now, the strategy for me is more like look like I am a chicken with my head cut off, running around like crazy all the time, and hopefully that’ll convince people that I need somebody else. So that’s not a strategy, that needs to change, but those are my thoughts.

Meredith Metsker:

I love that idea of creating the list of things you could be doing if only you had a person, two people, more technology, whatever. It’s a good idea.

Okay. Well, we’ve got a lot of questions in only five minutes, so I’m going to try and be a little selective here. I wanted to ask this question from Camille, she’s the Director of Employee Relations at Georgetown University School of Foreign Service. And she asked, “I’m curious, how do you approach scaling programs and events, especially those with employers as a small team?”

Tyler Orr:

So I’m definitely not there, Colleen, but one of the things that I want to work on is better leveraging student workers to help me with these things. We need a much clearer process for me to be able to have the initial engagement with employers or grad programs or whoever I’m interacting with, be able to get a general sense of what we’re planning on doing, and then be able to tie in a student worker that I trust to help with actually scheduling space and getting it listed on Handshake or wherever else you post events, and engaging with any faculty or staff that you also want to partner with on those events. That’s one thing that I know I need some work on still to help me better scale events instead of me managing all the little details.

Nick Edwards:

And then scaling events here at Hardin-Simmons, I rely a lot on our deans and chairs. Most of them come from industry, so they know the people that are needing to be involved from the community standpoint. And so just relying on them and their connections and hopefully attaining those connections in the process as well is definitely one of the big things that I’ve learned about mostly the scaling of the events, maybe not so much the programs.

Anita DeCianni Brown:

And SUNY Empire being an online University, we don’t have that large central campus. We have several locations across the state. So we have smaller job fairs, for example, that we partner with the New York State Department of Labor and work with them to promote the event. And then as far as other ways that we engage with employers and alumni, I have a weekly series called Ask5, where I have a career conversation asking the guest five questions and they’re all career-related questions. And all of those get posted on our career hub, and then I can share that with faculty to share with students. So it may not necessarily be that large scale, but it is something that’s manageable as well as informing.

Meredith Metsker:

Cool. Thank you. That’s super helpful. Okay. We have one minute left. I have one question I’m going to direct to Anita because it is for Anita. And then I think any remaining questions, what I might do is create some kind of a post in the Career Everywhere community, where we can continue this conversation, panelists if you’re super up for it, maybe answering some questions in the comments there. But let’s see, Anita, Roberta Buckberg asked “Do you manage internships or do the academic departments and faculty do that? And what is your office’s role in internship?”

Anita DeCianni Brown:

Our office manages the process for non-clinical and non-teaching experiences. Students that are participating in a credit bearing internship, we work with the faculty and the faculty chair or the department chairs on the process. We handle logistics. So we are the liaison between the host site and the University as far as getting affiliation agreement and certificate of liability insurance. We are also the ones that track the experiences and be able to report out to our provost and the State University System. And then the faculty are the ones that are developing the learning contract. They are deciding what the academic component of the internship is. So we work together on it.

Meredith Metsker:

Cool. Thank you for answering that one. All right. We are right at the end of the webinar here at the end of the hour. So thank you very much, Anita, Nick and Tyler for sharing your time and your wisdom today. This was really helpful. I don’t know if you’ve seen the chat blowing up over here, but a lot of folks are thanking you, and just thank you everyone who took the time to join today. Again, we recorded this. We’ll send the recording and any resources that were mentioned today to you all by tomorrow. So thank you again and hope everyone has a great rest of your week. Thank you all.

Anita DeCianni Brown:

Thank you.

Nick Edwards:

Thank you guys.