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Career Advising for College Students: Leveraging Resources and Working with the Community

In addition to working with employers, programs that offer career advising services to college students often work with other sectors to be able to service more students or provide more services. And although members understand the importance of partnering with organizations that can provide services they do not have the capacity to offer, the challenge of creating partnerships that leverage existing community resources persist.

Throughout the research for this project, NCAN identified three sectors with which they commonly work to amplify the career advising services they can offer to their college students. Members worked with alumni, local or national non-profit organizations, and university partners to provide career advising services. Below is a summary of how these partnerships work but more detailed information can be found by reviewing the NCAN Tools listed below. 

Working with Alumni

Several NCAN members we interviewed for this project engage alumni in their career advising work. As near peers, alumni can serve as mentors, coaches, and program advisers to current students. As employers, they can provide internship and other work-based opportunities. And as recent graduates, they can provide valuable insight on the direction a program can take to serve students more effectively. See the tools and resources listed below for more detailed information on this topic.

  • Continued Career Advising Services for Alumni: Some members provide services to their alumni for several years after graduation from college including career/job boards, networking opportunities, continued career advising, and mental health or wellness supports. In some cases, these alumni services are entirely alumni-led and facilitated.
  • Work with Current Postsecondary Students: Other members engage their alumni as resources for the college students to whom they currently provide career advising services. Alumni often participate in career panels or act as mentors or coaches to college students. These opportunities have benefits for both the college students receiving the services as well as to the alumni themselves who are honing their public speaking and professional skills 
  • Involve Alumni at the Organizational Level: Some programs involve program alumni in the general operation of the organization through service on the board of directors, recruiting students or corporate partners, encouraging their employers to offer workplace learning opportunities, or in fundraising activities. 
  • Track Alumni for Program Outcomes: Tracking alumni outcomes such as salary or employment status can provide information about the general success of a program’s overall career advising work. 

Partnerships Between CBOs and Postsecondary Institutions

It seems obvious that two entities serving the same students should work together to coordinate efforts, but that doesn’t always happen. Some students work exclusively with a career adviser from an NCAN member program and don’t make use of the career services offered on campus. Often that’s because campus career services offices aren’t set up to serve students from under-resourced backgrounds like many of those served by NCAN member programs. While it is difficult for community-based college access programs to be familiar with the resources available at every career center at the colleges attended by the students they advise, NCAN member programs can ensure that their students understand how to access those resources and provide supplemental resources and advising where there is a gap.

  • Prepare students by providing training on how to use the career center on campus, build their confidence and soft skills, cultivate networking skills, and understand “traditional” workplace norms in a culturally relevant way. 
  • Prepare and partner with postsecondary institutions to help them understand why first-gen, low-income, and minoritized students might be reluctant to use their services, and provide pointers on how their services can be broader and more inclusive. 
  • Guided Pathways: Guided pathways are a strategy that is primarily used by postsecondary institutions, but community-based organizations are adopting the strategy as part of their advising process. Some members are working with students to map and stay on their chosen course pathways towards learning outcomes aligned with a particular career, and provide support when students seem like they might veer off course. 

Changing Organization Culture Shift and Systems Change

Prioritizing career advising requires changing organizational culture and local systems. That might mean examining and changing how employer, postsecondary, and community-based systems relate and work together – and are accountable to one another for student, organizational, and community outcomes. Systems change work is difficult and resource intensive, but the resulting paradigm shifts can mean both more opportunities for the students our members serve and positive outcomes for the stakeholders involved.


NCAN Report: Scaling Success Services: Strategies for Scaling Postsecondary Success: This NCAN brief describes how 12 NCAN member organizations set out to expand student success services. Although this brief focuses primarily on providing continued support to college students, a big part of being able to expand success services included creating or strengthening partnerships between CBOs and postsecondary institutions. The paper describes effective practices implemented by these partnerships including colleges designating a staff member to serve as a liaison to NCAN program staff and providing introductions to key campus offices such as financial aid, academic advising, and career services.

NCAN Webinar: Engaging Alumni in Your Career Advising Program: On this webinar, NCAN members iMentor, Chicago Scholars, and KIPP Foundation provide an overview of how and why their programs maintain relationships with their alumni.

NCAN Blog Post: How to Engage Your Program Alumni in Career Advising: This blog post is a summary of the points made on the webinar mentioned above.

NCAN Blog Post: Guided Pathways: Part of a Comprehensive Career Advising Strategy: This blog post discussed how non-profit community-based organizations have a role to play in helping students create and navigate guided pathways.

NCAN Blog Post: Career Advising for College Students: Establishing New Norms for Systems Change: This blog post discusses how in order to really make change for the students served by NCAN member organizations, stakeholders and sectors must fundamentally change the way parts of a broader system interrelate.

NCAN Blog Post: Helping Students Make the Most of Campus-Based Career Centers: This blog post provides insights to why some students do not access their campus career centers and thoughts on how these centers can implement small changes to make them more user-friendly to the students our members typically serve. 


Alumni Career Services Network (ACSN): The Alumni Career Services Network (ACSN) is the professional association for individuals who support alumni career services at colleges and universities. The organization offers conferences, webinars, online training, and other professional development opportunities to its members. 


Engaging Alumni for Employability-Good Practices Guide: This 5-part guide provides practical recommendations for various stakeholders who work with and desire to engage alumni in campus goals. *Note: This guide is based out of work being done in Australian universities, however, much of the recommendations can apply to the US system as well.

Best Alumni Management Software with Jobs Board Integration: A list of platforms stakeholders can use to manage alumni engagement and connection.

Alumni Mentor Program Handbook: This handbook from the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater provides alumni mentors with templates to track mentees’ progression, as well as a list of activities they can do, a feedback form, and a timeline.

Engaging Alumni in Student Career Development to Create Two-Way Value: This EAB presentation provides an overview of best practices for increasing alumni engagement on campuses to support student career development.

6 Ways to Use Alumni Outcomes Data: This op-ed offers six ways alumni data can help inform a college's mission. At the end of this short piece, the author links several colleges and universities that are doing great work in this area. 


Better Together: Expanding Access and Opportunity Through Community-Based Organization and College Partnerships: This report from Aspen Institute provides a strong foundation for understanding how and why CBOS are instrumental in supporting postsecondary access and success of historically excluded populations. The report also provides a framework for building partnerships between entities.

Program Pathways Mapper: This is a tool for students to use as they map their courses to help them get to their degree or certificate on time. Although institutions and programs need to subscribe to this tool and is therefore not widely available to students, the website provides a general overview of its use.

Bridging the Gap from Education to Employment: Although primarily geared toward postsecondary institutions, this website provides resources and a playbook that can be used by stakeholders working to make the college-to-career experience more equitable by improving career preparation, talent acquisition, and employer-university collaborations to better serve students from first-generation or low-income backgrounds, or students of color.

The Role of Community-Based Organizations in the College Access and Success Movement: This research and practical brief from the Institute for Higher Education Policy (IHEP) highlights the role that community-based organizations play in the college access and success pipeline. 

Perceptions of Partnership: A study on nonprofit and higher education collaboration: This report from the Campus Compact in Iowa offers findings from a survey on the perspectives of CBO staff on their higher ed partnerships. The key findings include how to create a sustainable partnership and barriers to starting a partnership.

What is Guided Pathways and Why are we Still talking about it?: This is a basic overview of what Guided Pathways are and why it is hard to implement them.

Using Guided Pathways to Build Cross-Sector Pathways Partnerships: This report offers a comprehensive review about guided pathways reform in the community college context. In addition, the report provides an overview of findings from an exploratory study of four colleges that developed cross-sector pathways. The report concludes with a set of 12 innovative cross sector pathways practices. 


College Access Programs as Levers for Systems Change: This (slightly older) paper describes how the Future Scholars Program at Rutgers University worked to make large scale systems change by changing the way K-12, higher education, and communities work together to build pathways to and through post-secondary education for first-generation students and underserved communities.

Changing Community College Systems for Student Success: This website is specific to how community college systems can change the ways they work internally and how they interact with local employers to meet employers’ needs. However, this page also provides resources that are applicable to thinking through generally how parts of a system can interact differently to attain better outcomes for students from low income and first-generation backgrounds.

How to Lead Systems Change for Student Success: Developing 6 Qualities of Effective Cross-Sector Leadership: This brief examines the role leadership played in transforming loose collections of programs in California into high-performing regional systems that resulted in creating smoother transitions from one level to the next to help more young people complete high school on time, attain a postsecondary credential with labor market value, and succeed in the workforce.

Boosting Mobility and Advancing Equity Through Systems Change: This brief from the Urban Institute articulates the importance of systems change, provides examples of how programmatic approaches to boosting mobility from poverty have proved insufficient, and recommends the types of measures that local policymakers can use to track progress on comprehensive systems change. This related article provides some fundamentals on what systems change is, the components of systems change, and how to track progress toward making systems change.

Three Practices for Accelerating Systems Change: This brief published by the Aspen Institute explores three practices to help place-based collaboratives accelerate how they change complex systems designed to serve youth: proactive engagement with local leadership to cultivate champions; consistent promotion to establish the value of collaboratives in solving problems; and aligning goals and strategies, honoring space for diverse perspectives, and giving time for relationships to form serve as a foundation for systems change work.