By: Sara Melnick, Chief of Finance and Special Projects
Reading time: 5-6 min.
Over the past 10-15 years, many NCAN members that started out as college access organizations have decided to broaden their programming to include college persistence and attainment. The rationale for that shift pertains to the reality that it’s not enough
to get our students into college, but we need to support them through college as well, ensuring that they graduate with a high-quality degree or credential. In the past few years, some members are expanding their focus even more to provide career
advising services to their students.
But how do you begin integrating these services into your current programing? What needs to happen at the organizational level, including garnering buy-in from the board, securing additional resources, and adapting your organization’s strategic plan?
How must your organization enhance staffing and professional development activities to be able to provide these services? And what partnerships must be secured to successfully implement this work?
Below are some tips NCAN members Bottom Line and KIPP Forward shared in a recent webinar for how these organizations went about adding career advising services for college students to their programming. This webinar is part of NCAN’s Career Advising for
College Students project funded through a generous grant from the Scheidel Foundation.
Define the “Why” For Starting This Work
It’s the Right Thing to Do: If your students are not landing an interview or getting a first job that fully utilizes their postsecondary credential and training, it might be helpful to offer career advising services. For some organizations,
adding career advising is the right thing to do given their commitment to students and equity.
Students Would Benefit from Additional Services: KIPP Forward received feedback from their students who resoundingly said they could benefit from career services while in high school and beyond. For KIPP, adding career advising was both about
doing the “right thing” and about responding to the expressed needs of their students. Their “why” was to help students cultivate the knowledge, skills, mindsets and habits necessary to be successful in upwardly mobile careers.
Map Out What This Work Will Entail
Create a Theory of Change or Logic Model: Defining the rationale and process will help your organization think through the advising activities, the inputs and outputs, and the result of the career advising work.
Do a Stakeholder Analysis: (see Cultivate Partnerships section below) Interview as many parties as you can:
Students to understand what kind of career advising they think would be helpful,
staff about the services they’d like to be able to provide to their students,
postsecondary partners to understand what services they already provide on campus,
partners to understand what career advising services they already offer, and
business partners to understand what they are looking for in the workforce of the future.
The results can provide input as you design a career advising program.
Create a Plan and Decide What Services to Offer: Some potential services you may offer include the following (please keep in mind that this is NOT an exhaustive list of career advising services your program could offer):
career interest exploration and planning,
connecting students to internships or other workplace learning opportunities,
cultivating interviewing, resume writing, and/or networking skills, or
understanding traditional workplace norms and behaviors.
Identify the Resources: Create a plan for how the work will be resourced adequately to provide high quality services to students. This could mean:
identifying new streams of funding, or reallocating current streams, or
identifying new partnerships or redefining existing ones.
Set Benchmarks: Determine what advising services you will provide or milestones students should achieve. This will establish training goals for advisors and help them understand what data to collect on student experiences/outcomes. A word
of caution: too many milestones might get confusing and overwhelming to track, so finding the “just right” number is something your organization will have to determine given your data culture and resources.
Collect, Analyze, and Use Data to Make Program Adjustments: Bottom Line uses a database to track milestones in the areas of career exploration, career relevant experience, building networks, and whether students have the tools they need to
manage the job search process. They then analyze the data collected to enhance and modify services.
Make Necessary Organizational Shifts
Garner Board Support: Have the board vote on adding this work to the mission. Your organization might find that garnering board support is a “no brainer” given the role of these services in helping students succeed beyond postsecondary completion.
Modify the Mission/Vision: Work with external consultants to flesh out a vision for the work and to ensure it aligns with the overall strategy of the organization. It’s critical that this work fits into your overall organizational mission.
Start With a Pilot Program: Start small and see how it goes. Bottom Line hired a career advisor to work with 100 college students to provide them with robust programming. That individual helped build out the work, provided training for existing
staff, and created student facing materials. Once they saw some promising results, they expanded their services.
Adjust Staffing Structure
Modify Advisor Staffing to Meet Evolving Needs: As this works grows, it might be necessary to change the staff structure. Success coaches might not be able to simply add career advising to their existing advising curriculum – it might be
necessary to hire new staff with specialized skills. Or if advisors are adding career programming to their existing responsibilities, you might need more advisors on staff.
Specialization of Roles: Depending on the type of career advising work you plan to do, an organization might find the need for specialists on staff, e.g., individuals with deep expertise in career advising, or with developing partnerships
with employers, etc.
Cultivate Partnerships
Business: Businesses can provide internship or other workplace learning opportunities, mentors, speakers/panelists, or volunteers.
Non-Profit Partners: Partnering with organizations that specialize in career advising is, in some cases, an effective way to leverage resources already available in the community that will provide services to students without dramatically
changing your organizational structure. Braven, YouScience, Basta, and Avenica and similar organizations may be able to play a role in career advising for your students.
Volunteers: Volunteers who have specific experience or expertise that advisors may lack can offer training to advisors and students and can share industry-specific and first-hand insight into the inner workings of their career.
Have a Continuous Improvement Mindset
One of the most important points made during this webinar by both presenters is that career advising for college students is an emerging area of work for their organizations. This means that while students are currently receiving these services, both
Bottom Line and KIPP Through College are consistently looking for way to adapt and refine their work to serve them more effectively.
To watch the entire webinar, Getting Started with Career Advising for College Students, click
here.
This blog is part of NCAN’s Career Advising for College Students series, funded by the Scheidel Foundation.
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