Integrating Academic and Career Development Study
Strategies to scale experiential learning and reflection across the curriculum
Colin Koproske, Managing Director, Research Development
Explore our report for 34 best practices to incorporate meaningful career exploration into the academic curriculum.
Executive summary: The debate surrounding career preparation
Growing public concern about the return on investment (ROI) associated with higher education has created pressure for both public and private institutions to assume greater responsibility for students’ post-graduation outcomes.
Rather than attempting to radically reinvent curricula with immediate workforce demands in mind, a middle ground is needed between critics who assume traditional academic study is impractical and those who view college as an intellectual refuge from the job market. This false dichotomy between liberal education and career preparation is stymieing productive conversation on campus.
This study will help you incorporate meaningful career exploration and experiential learning into the academic curriculum and migrate from a “last stop” career service model to a continuous and reflective post-graduation planning approach. You will also learn how to reach at-risk and underserved student populations who often face barriers to accessing internships, co-ops, and other professional development.
Equip students to align curricular and cocurricular plans with personal goals
Those students who do avail themselves of cocurricular opportunities and career services are often the least in need, leading to an additional “achievement gap” that leaves first-generation and resource-constrained populations with less support.
Practice 1: Cocurricular planning tool
The first step toward career alignment is the selection of a well-aligned major. Despite the weight imparted upon this decision by advisors, academic departments, and the institution as a whole, undergraduates struggle to make well-informed, thoughtful decisions about both academic and professional trajectory pathing. Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada supports undergraduates in the College of Arts and Sciences during major selection and the pathway planning process with visually compelling, holistic major maps.
Major maps are not an entirely novel idea, but the Queen’s University major maps possess a set of features that make them more useful for students as they consider their long-term professional ambitions. The map alerts students to both curricular and cocurricular programming, ensuring that they are aware of both academic and parallel non-academic enrichment opportunities. The four-year structure normalizes participation in a diverse assortment of programming at specific times, including an internship between a student’s third and fourth year.
Practice 2: Point-based engagement incentives
Structured curricular planning is inherently motivating for students because academic credits incentivize full participation. However, linking academic credits to cocurricular programming can be controversial, especially among faculty members, despite the academic value of the programming itself. The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (UTC) uses a point-based, non-credit incentive system to promote persistent, long-term engagement with experiential learning and career development.
Undergraduates receive points for participation in different kinds of experiential learning and career development programming. Point values vary based on the impact and time demands of each activity—with more involved activities, such as an experiential learning course, earning 20 points while a low-impact activity like a study abroad informational session earns a student two points. The reward structure is two-tiered, with near and long-term incentives promoting engagement throughout a student’s time with UTC. The program increased 4-year participation in structured experiential learning at UTC, and even produced 1,143 additional hours of student-initiated experiential learning.
Practice 3: Proactive major alignment pathing
Providing undergraduates with timely, high-quality information about major and career options early in their academic careers is critical to preventing poor decisions and late-stage program changes as they get closer to graduation.
Below we have combined two institutional practices—a pre-application career interest survey administered by Florida International University and an orientation-hosted major selection model employed by Purdue University—to illustrate how a pre-matriculation career alignment conversation might look in practice.
Practice 4: Hybrid intake advising
Academic advising—particularly when professionally staffed and focused on students’ first year of courses—should be much more closely integrated with career advising, and even merged when possible. Bringing the two services into closer alignment promotes the development of shared programming and resources. It also ensures that academic planning decisions help inform and inflect career advising, and vice versa. This kind of alignment can emerge organically if the two advising units are co-located, or can be directed from above through explicit and structured collaboration.
Practice 5: Industry-based career coaches
Providing high-quality career counseling to undergraduates demands a level of industry-specific expertise that few institutions have in any great abundance outside of their alumni network. In an effort to enhance the quality of career counseling many institutions house them within colleges or clusters of similar academic departments, allowing the counselors to learn the specific needs of students in those programs and the industries with which they readily align. George Mason University has instead built its career advising model around clusters of similar industries.
Practice 6: First-year field exposure
Even structured advising can still result in misalignment between a student’s intended program of study and their interests and career goals. This can be corrected late in a student’s academic experience, but on occasion shifting trajectories can present students with set of very serious challenges that will increase time to degree, decrease persistence rates, and require the assumption of additional cost and student debt.
Early opportunities for application allow students to test long-term goals
Institutions should mitigate this risk by allowing students to test their assumptions about career alignment early during their first two years in college. While many institutions offer brief opportunities for students to test their career plans during first and second year, typical programming often lacks structured reflection or rigorous learning outcomes.
Encourage ongoing reflection and narration
That said, some types of cocurricular programming are more accessible and more attractive to underserved populations than others. The final two chapters of this study explore leading edge approaches to reaching these students, including one of the most difficult populations to engage in career development—graduate students in traditionally academic programs.
Practice 7: Experience-spanning reflection exercises
It is not entirely surprising that students struggle to explain their college experience to employers— their resume or first job interview is typically the first time they are asked to do so. Institutions can help students prepare to articulate the value of their education—both academic and professional—to employers by incorporating a structured, three-stage reflection process into cocurricular activities.
Typically these kinds of reflective exercises take place once during a student’s experience, and with little structure or oversight. The most progressive institutions have built pre-experience, duringexperience, and post-experience reflection exercises into cocurricular opportunities in a way that prepares students to communicate the value of their education to a wide variety of stakeholders.
Practice 8: Thematic core curriculum pathways
Articulating the value of general education presents a serious challenge to undergraduates. While affording students the opportunity to explore academic opportunities is valuable, without structure to support this exploration students end up selecting courses based on convenient times or the opportunity take classes with friends.
This presents a lost opportunity, as many students enter as freshmen with mission oriented interests, but lack the forethought to plan around these goals and interests. Northern Illinois University and Virginia Tech help students bridge this planning gap by structuring their general education requirements around broad themes instead of unstructured exploration.
Practice 9: Vocational alignment capstone
Even in cases where students are intrinsically motivated to think intentionally about their college experience and personal ambitions they can still struggle to understand how these experiences will impact their post-graduation trajectory.
Stanford University helps its students, many of whom tend towards goal-oriented academic pathing, to reflect on how their experience at Stanford will impact their future through a very popular course called Designing Your Life.
Practice 10: Syllabus competency matching
Many of the soft skills that employers look for in entry-level employees are developed through the activities that make up traditional coursework. Unfortunately, students struggle to identify the broad competency crossing skills developed in typical course assignments and activities. Few students discuss their coursework in a skills-oriented vocabulary. Memorial University helps its students to develop a skills-oriented vocabulary by requiring faculty to articulate the skills developed by each course activity on their syllabi.
Memorial U found that employers were more likely to interview students who discuss coursework in terms of competencies than subject matter or academic field.
A committee of deans, faculty members, and administrators at Memorial University developed a list of general skills that students develop during their coursework and faculty map these skills to specific assignments on their syllabus. The initiative required little faculty effort and did not require any course redesign—simply a clearer articulation of the skills faculty members already believe students develop in their courses assignment by assignment.
Practice 11: Student-facing reflection tools
When attempting to help students better articulate the value of their college experience to employers, it can be tempting to blame the traditional job application process for its inability to capture the professional value of a college education.
This impulse motivates many institutions to look to potentially disruptive credentialing formats as a method to overcome the limitations of the traditional resume—especially cocurricular transcripts, e-portfolios, and badges. Unfortunately most hiring managers are unfamiliar with these resume alternatives and rarely display interest in reviewing documents outside of a traditional resume.
Augment the core curriculum to address skill and experience gaps
This relationship between breadth, depth, and boundary-crossing competencies is best reflected in the concept of the “T-Shaped Professional.” The “T-Shaped Professional” is a person that displays all three aspects. Such individuals are considered ideal employees because they possess both soft skills that allow them to collaborate, as well as technical skills that allow them to innovate.
Practice 12: Applied learning opportunity portal
To develop those essential boundary-crossing competencies, students must build and test their skills in application. Opportunities for this kind of professional development exist on campus, but many students may not be aware of the opportunities provided by their institution. Centralizing a list of applied learning options in a single place can help generate student awareness and saves students the time and frustration of locating this often widely dispersed information.
The University of Toronto has done this through their STEP website, a portal designed to connect their students in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences with specific curricular and cocurricular opportunities. The portal is tailored to the specific needs and interests of Arts and Sciences students because this group is in particular need of opportunities to further develop their technical breadth and depth. They are also less likely to be aware of the opportunities that exist on campus, as well as which ones are the best opportunities to support their needs and interests.
Practice 13: Embedded professional tracks
Instead of limiting their students to minors, Mount Holyoke developed Nexus, a set of professionallyoriented tracks focused on in-demand fields including engineering, global business, and non-profit management.
The tracks are shorter than a minor, making them easier for students to complete.
The shortened length does not diminish practical skills building. Several tracks require career development components like professionally-oriented experiential learning. They also require students take the “Curriculum to Career” course to help them reflect on and translate their Nexus experience into a professional asset.
Practice 14: Problem-based experiential fellowships
Instead of launching professionally-oriented minors or tracks, institutions can engage students by orienting their entire academic experience around real world challenges and issues that resonate with students’ personal mission-oriented goals and interests. The University of Montana’s Global Leadership Initiative (GLI) is a four-year structured pathway that provides students with experiences that are easily narrated to future employers.
To participate in this program, students must apply prior to arriving at University of Montana. While GLI is considered prestigious and competitive, the institution uses a lottery-style application system to ensure the program is a representative cross-section of the student body.
Practice 15: Applied degree core
Employers have long complained about a “skills gap,” noting that job applicants often lack the right combination of soft, professional skills and technical knowledge required to do their jobs. While public debate typically focuses on the liberal arts, students in more technically focused fields also need opportunities to develop essential soft skills.
Expand faculty engagement with experiential learning
As valuable as these opportunities are for students, many faculty members, especially outside of pre-professional disciplines, believe they do not enhance the academic experience of their students. Those institutions that successfully engage faculty members in experiential learning refocus faculty on five themes that encompass the broad scope of experiential learning and are resonant with existing academic priorities.
Practice 16: Cohort-based faculty fellowship
Even when faculty members recognize the positive impact of experiential learning on student success, many will hesitate to embrace it believing they lack the necessary pedagogical expertise to develop an experiential learning opportunity for students.
Others will resist out of concern that their efforts will go unrecognized or unrewarded. The University of Alabama at Birmingham overcomes these concerns about expertise and recognition to engage faculty in experiential learning with a faculty fellowship. By framing pedagogical development as a by-application fellowship UAB signals to faculty that their efforts will be valued by colleagues and academic leaders. The Faculty Fellows in Engaged Scholarship program also attracts many young faculty members who believe that the fellowship will make an appealing addition to their academic curriculum vitae. In addition, the fellowship’s mentoring program ensures that senior faculty members already engaged in experiential learning are not alienated by the new programming.
Practice 17: Community partnership liaisons
The most daunting challenge facing faculty members interested in developing experiential learning opportunities is building successful, long-term community partnerships. Most faculty members are unsure what community partners will make the most sense for their discipline, let alone how to build and maintain such a partnership.
The University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa leverages the staff of their Center for Ethics and Social Responsibility to support faculty members in identifying, building, and maintaining community partnerships.
Practice 18: Central support portal
The logistical burden of managing an off-campus community partnership is significant and most faculty members are unaware of the compliance and risk management issues entailed in working with students off-campus. This can include logistical challenges from scheduling reliable transportation for students or the compliance requirements associated with working with at-risk populations such as hospital patients or the homeless.
Related resource: York University Experiential Education Toolbox
York University supports faculty efforts with their Experiential Learning Education Toolbox which centralizes all of the required compliance and risk management paperwork, along with a list of frequently asked questions and detailed answers for faculty members.
Lower access barriers to applied learning outside the classroom
Practice 19: Student-run consulting services
Augustana College addressed this lack of local employer capacity by creating the EDGE1 Center. The EDGE Center is an on-campus web-design service that currently completes projects for 220 local employers. These local employers do have projects that could be completed by interns but they lack the capacity to provide students with onsite training. The EDGE Center allows Augustana to leverage the external partners’ demand and combine it with the expertise and teaching capabilities already present on campus.
Started as a small student group that offered web design services to the community, the EDGE Center is now run by the career center and supported by small grants. Students are taught the technical skills required to complete their projects allowing students of any discipline to participate. Clients are drawn to the center for its low fees and the faculty’s involvement in final projects. The students leave the EDGE Center with practical experience working for a client, new professional skills, and a portfolio of their web and graphic design projects.
Practice 20: In-class, client-based projects
Clemson University also leverages local employer demand to increase experiential learning opportunities for students. Clemson, however, increases accessibility for students by incorporating the employer-proposed projects directly into courses thereby eliminating the need for students to devote extracurricular time. A director-level staff member dedicated to the program, sources ideas for projects from small local businesses, non-profits, and university departments. The director and faculty assign the projects out to a variety of class sections and request that the employer visit one of the first class sessions.
Students are given enough time to complete the majority of their project during class time as Clemson recognizes many may not be able to visit the employer site or dedicate extracurricular time to the employer project due to other commitments.
Practice 21: Online mini-internship crowdsourcing
Institutions struggling to meet student demand for internships, often those outside of major cities, can leverage the crowdsourcing power of the internet to surface real-world projects for their students to undertake. The University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business partnered with the digital learning platform Coursolve to offer short-term, online internships at scale.
These virtual, mini-internships are collaborative projects that companies post online and students complete on a short-term basis, with Coursolve facilitating the connection between companies and the students. At the University of Virginia, a business professor piloted these internships as a part of a popular Coursera MOOC, Foundations of Business Strategy, and called them MOOIs (Massive Open Online Internships).
Practice 22: On-campus partner satellite space
Even if there are local employers with intern capacity, many students still find the commute to be a significant barrier to internship and co-op participation. Reliable, affordable transportation is out of reach for many, and the time it would take to commute off-site may conflict with students’ academic schedules—posing a potential threat to timely completion.
Practice 23: Student worker professional development
Prior work commitments (e.g., work-study, on-campus jobs) can also pose a barrier to participation in professional development. Although most students see on-campus jobs as merely opportunities to make money, Ryerson University saw greater untapped potential. Through the ‘Career Boost’ program, Ryerson turned these work experiences into valuable preparation for students’ careers by developing learning outcomes and then aligning on-campus job responsibilities.
Ryerson embarked on this initiative after recognizing low productivity and engagement among student employees in some departments; within these identified departments they piloted a process to rewrite student job descriptions to incorporate more rigorous learning outcomes.
Practice 24: On-campus internship
Beyond traditional student employment, colleges and universities are also able to offer substantive, paid internships on campus—providing dozens of new experiential learning opportunities to students who may be place-bound or unable to find external openings. The Service Learning and Career Development Office at Western Oregon University (WOU) has partnered with administrative units and departments to develop paid, on-campus internships complete with learning outcomes, assessment, and reflection free of charge to the partner unit.
Practice 25: Enterprise co-op program
Entrepreneurship and start-up development are a common part of the Millennial narrative. Unfortunately, participation is limited by the financial risk involved. Students facing significant levels of student debt are unlikely to see entrepreneurship as a viable option, even if they do have a strong interest or promising idea. The University of Waterloo, however, offers an “Enterprise Co-Op” that allows students to develop an entrepreneurial venture within the safe and funded environment.
Students from all disciplines are invited to submit an entrepreneurial idea. If accepted, they are matched with a faculty member who provides guidance and structure throughout the semester. Students have access to university facilities, a concurrent entrepreneurship course, and grant funding by application. The university support lowers the risk of developing a start-up and ensures that, even in failure, the student will have met a series of valuable, career-oriented learning objectives.
Practice 26: Interdisciplinary project incubator
Entrepreneurial career development can be very attractive to students, but participation tends to cluster around a few disciplines—business, engineering, computer science. Ryerson University broadened interest by structuring entrepreneurial experiential learning around ten zones, or business incubators. These zones are focused on atypical industries, and are multidisciplinary in nature. For example, the Legal Innovation Zone has developed a technology to improve lawyers’ ability to track their billable hours.
Practice 27: Career readiness bridge program
Hamilton has built a formal structure to encourage low-income and first generation students to begin the career exploration process early. Participation in First Year Forward is incentivized by the promise of small group instruction and an institution-funded, career-related experience over the following summer if they complete all required program components.
More affluent students benefit significantly from modeling the professional skills of their family and community members. First Year Forward aims to help students that may lack that environmental support to build confidence in areas like interviewing, networking, and employer outreach.
Engage graduate students in career development
Practice 28: Graduate student pathway planning tool
Motivated by the success of their undergraduate major maps, Queen’s University developed similar maps for their master’s degree and PhD students. These maps ensure that students explore both curricular and cocurricular opportunities during the most appropriate phase of their graduate school experience.
The career-development row includes both academic and non-academic programming to motivate participation in both. A list of employability skills helps graduate students better understand and explain the professional value of their advanced degrees.
Practice 29: Graduate student-specific career advisors
Essential to engaging graduate students in career development is increasing faculty awareness of the services and resources available to their students. PhD students look to their faculty advisors for career guidance. However, many of these faculty typically know little about career discernment and the multitude of paths available to graduate students upon degree completion.
The University of Notre Dame introduced a model for their graduate career services unit to offer discipline-specific career consulting within a broader professional development framework to address some of these challenges.
Practice 30: Gamified research articulation exercise
Despite the fact that many graduates students enter into non-academic careers that are unrelated to their academic specialty, it is essential that they be prepared to discuss their academic research with hiring managers. While discussing their research is something that comes naturally to many graduate students, few are prepared to explain it in a vocabulary and format that will be accessible to non-academics and demonstrate the presentation skills that non-academic workplaces value. The University of Queensland in Australia helps students develop these skills through their “3-Minute Thesis” competition.
Practice 31: Business school-led transferable skills workshop
Helping graduate students to identify their transferable skills is an essential part of non-academic career development, as is developing the ability discuss these transferable skills in a vocabulary accessible to employers. While many faculty members lack the experience necessary to help graduate students with this, faculty in pre-professional and business programs are uniquely qualified to do so. Administrators in the Career Diversity for Historians program at the University of New Mexico invited representatives from the business school to offer a workshop to their history PhDs about the language used in the business world.
The business school’s career services representative leads students though an exercise in skills translation, where they practice answering common employer interview questions about their experience in a PhD program using a business-appropriate vocabulary. At the end of the workshop students were able to identify the skills developed in their graduate program and articulate them in a workplace appropriate vocabulary.
Practice 32: Non-teaching graduate assistantship
Experiential learning can be difficult to build into a graduate student’s already busy schedule. Engaging in an internship might necessitate forgoing a teaching assistantship and disrupting longterm funding. Many graduate students will also avoid programming that is focused on the needs of undergraduates. The University of Miami overcame these concerns through their UGrow Non-Teaching Assistantship, which is outlined below.
Practice 33: Graduate student-specific reflection framework
The University of British Columbia offers a co-op program specifically designed to meet the needs of PhD students in the History and English faculties. While the co-op experience is valuable on its own for graduate students interested in non-academic careers, the impact for students is enhanced through a multi-staged training and reflection framework.
This framework persists throughout the student’s co-op experience and ensures that co-op participants are prepared to derive the maximum value from their co-op and articulate that value to both academic and professional audiences.
Practice 34: Subsidized professional development certificate
In many cases institutions offer professional development programming that would meet the needs of graduate students interested in non-academic jobs—typically offered through colleges of business.
Unfortunately these programs can be prohibitively expensive for graduate students to access. Stanford University has bridged this gap for graduate students by subsidizing participation in Stanford Ignite for non-MBA graduate students.
Stanford’s Office of the Vice Provost for Graduate Education provides funds to offer access to Stanford Ignite at a significantly reduced price for non-MBA graduate students. Additional financial aid is available for those students that are unable to pay the reduced price.
Track, assess, and report experiential learning outcomes
Elements of an integrated approach to career development already exist on many campuses. Unfortunately these elements are typically scattered throughout campus, isolated in specific programs or colleges, unable to reach those students who need this programming the most. An incomplete and limited picture of an institution’s career development programming makes it difficult for advisors and faculty members to match students to best-fit programming. It also complicates identifying those programs which are truly high impact and ideal for growth and investment, and those programs that do little to support student success or career development.
There are three stages of effectively tracking and measuring the impact of experiential learning activity. The stages build upon each other and should be collected in order. The first stage, participation, requires a clear image of all of the career development opportunities available on campus, even those isolated to a single department. The second stage is learning outcomes—the effect that program participation has on student success. The third stage, impact, is focused on the long-term, post-graduation benefits of programming participation—although focused on a more holistic measure of career success than most first destination surveys.
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