Andrew Hibel, HigherEdJobs: Mr. Ceperley, please explain some of the major responsibilities you have in your career services role at the University of California, San Diego.
Andrew Ceperley, UC San Diego: I provide leadership for a team of over 100 professionals in a Student Affairs Cluster charged with providing experiences that foster student self-discovery and delivering programs that help students develop the personal, academic, and professional skills and relationships needed for successful transition into diverse and global communities. The Experiential Learning Cluster is comprised of Academic Enrichment Programs, the Office of Academic Support and Instructional Services, the International Center, and my home organization, the Career Services Center.
Hibel: In addition to your position at UC San Diego, you are the president for NACE, the National Association of Colleges and Employers1. What do you feel is the most vital part of the NACE’s mission?
Ceperley: NACE leads a community of professionals focused on the employment of the college educated by providing access to relevant knowledge, resources, insight, and relationships. Each component is so very vital to our members. More and more, employer and college members alike are looking for career development and recruiting solutions that are grounded in evidence. The NACE research department represents a critical area of interest and growth around benchmarking, trend analysis, and customized survey reporting. As well, members are always interested in the latest resources that will help them better serve their constituencies. And, with steady turnover in the profession, members are eager to find ways to connect with one another to share best practices and common challenges. Whether through our LinkedIn community, the annual conference, the NACE webinar offerings, or other engagement platforms, we try to make it as easy as possible for our increasingly global membership to establish connections
Hibel: A recent NACE press release said that employers project a 13 percent increase in hiring new 2013 college grads compared to last year.2 How does this news affect college career service offices and the students they assist?
Ceperley: Well, it definitely implies more traffic through our online jobs portals, our campus job fairs, and our on-campus interview programs. With a somewhat healthier job market in certain industries, we still need to make very sure our students are aware of the opportunities when they become available and are prepared and motivated to pursue these opportunities, often just in time.
Hibel: Although there are hiring increases across many areas, there are “high demand” areas such as engineering, finance and computer science. What do you think are the trends that we may see in these areas in the future?
Ceperley: We are definitely seeing a number of trends in this area. One is the stronger cross-campus relationships with industries that increasingly recruit across traditional academic disciplines as opposed to simply within discrete majors. A campus-wide career services office is typically best equipped to provide an introduction between an employer with substantial hiring needs and the various campus stakeholders who together are able to assist with talent sourcing. In the future – actually even today – employers in STEM and other areas are developing their pipelines in the K-12 setting by supporting schools, coordinating science festivals for kids, and establishing pre-college internship programs.
Hibel: During this election year, there has been a lot of campaigning about how small businesses are a big part of the driver of new jobs. How are career services centers working with some of the smaller business to get those jobs into the hands of graduates?
Ceperley: Two words: “easy access.” Smaller, typically more local employers represent terrific partners in offering students internships, special projects (often team projects), and permanent jobs at graduation. Career centers need to scale their employer-facing services to demonstrate added value to these organizations. Flagship job fairs, well-attended information sessions, and filled on-campus-interview schedules may easily overwhelm smaller employers whose talent needs may be few and whose hiring cycle may be just in time (as in next week!). Providing these employers with free online job postings, special boutique events on campus, and other customized programs can connect them to the campus and at the same time educate students that employment opportunities are not exclusive to big brands.
Hibel: If you were presenting to a team of colleagues, what are some best practices related to the area of career development that you would share?
Ceperley: Like many traditional campus departments, career centers need to remain relevant by demonstrating the positive impacts their services and programs have on students and employers. We need to be dynamic, lively campus spaces with complementary online spaces – both website and social media platforms – that inform our students, inspire them, and facilitate some of the essential connections they need to land that first post-graduate job opportunity. In my view, the most high impact career centers have rich industry and alumni partnerships, exceptional campus-wide relationships, and innovative high-visibility programming.
Hibel: Referencing another NACE press release, it said, “60 Percent of Paid Interns Get Job Offers.”3 This is an encouraging statistic. What can career service offices do to help their students increase the chance of obtaining an internship?
Ceperley: Educating students on the strategy and process behind the internship search is an excellent way to prepare them for the higher stakes job search a year or two down the road. All the teaching ingredients are present: the importance of search strategy, industry research, networking, and impeccable communications (resume, cover letter, interview, and follow-up). Career services offices need to ensure that students are aware that related work experience (aka internship) is no longer a luxury. It represents an important component of a successful candidacy for a permanent position.
Hibel: What are your thoughts on the responsibility of the career services office versus the student in the job search process?
Ceperley: The job search is largely the responsibility of the student, as unpopular as some may find that sentiment. Gone are the days when career centers were called “placement offices.” We view ourselves as educators providing resources, connections, and insight to help our students determine and pursue their professional aspirations. Many of us are applying a coaching methodology to our once counseling-focused individual consultations to ensure that our students are clearly in the driver’s seat in navigating their futures.
Hibel: Career Services offices are often required to submit placement statistics within their institution for marketing purposes as well as to outside accrediting agencies. Since there is a lot pressure for high numbers and often times “judgment” that goes along with these statistics, inflation can occur. How do you think these statistics correlate with how a school is doing in educating their students?
Ceperley: You’ve touched on a very hot topic in higher education. The NACE advocacy committee has taken this on and has developed a workgroup to look at national trends around destinations surveys. Currently, at the undergraduate level there are few if any standards around survey protocol, so our outcomes data is very apples to oranges at this point. When we look at placement data from graduate business schools and law schools, we see more consistency in the reporting and adherence to standards. Of concern is the reliance on salary data to justify educational success. Success is highly subjective, and the real metric for a high impact campus will rarely become apparent in the first generation survey but in surveys that graduates complete one, two, and five years after graduation. Graduates at those points are better able to respond to more significant questions about the value of the school’s academic and non-academic preparation for career and for life.
Hibel: How do you think institutions of higher education are doing in educating students on how to be effective managers of their own careers? And how do you think career services offices can help further that goal?
Ceperley: This is an interesting question. On the one hand, most career services practitioners consider themselves to be educators, delivering programs designed to empower students, to connect them with bona fide opportunities, and to inspire with an awareness of the multitude of options they might pursue with their degrees. On the other hand, the college market has become increasingly consumer driven in recent decades, and we have bolstered our programs with considerable assessment around convenience, satisfaction, and post-graduate job destination. Though most in our profession have transformed our missions from “student placement” to “career education,” we still navigate expectations from parents, students, and even campus colleagues that our career services units can guarantee placement upon graduation. We are at our best when we leverage assessment to demonstrate that our resources, programs, and services have a positive impact on students’ abilities to determine, pursue, and achieve their career dreams.
Hibel: In the area of career services, career counseling to students and alumni with varied backgrounds is common. How does your team approach guiding, for example, an inexperienced undergraduate compared to a seasoned professional who may be seeking a career change?
Ceperley: It’s always important to identify a student’s readiness for personal career development. Often defining moments in a student’s life will trigger proactive behaviors that boost career-readiness, such as writing a resume, conducting self-assessment, or attending a career workshop or event. These trigger moments include parental influence, peer pressure, happenstance opportunities, and often the realization that graduation is not far off (panic!). It’s true that one size does not fit all in delivering counseling and programmatic services to students. Our menu of services does not categorize activities by year in school but by over-arching needs – such as finding an internship, preparing for an interviewing, considering the connection between major and career, etc. Professionals who are mid-career are typically in a very different space, and we recognize that our primary program offerings best serve students from their first term on campus as freshman through their first few years after graduation.
Hibel: You lead a large staff at UC San Diego and worked at several other universities prior. What have you learned over the years in order to become an effective leader?
Ceperley: Talk less. Listen more. Never underestimate the importance of telling the story of your career office. Go beyond the traditional annual report, and develop an annual year-in-the-life brochure pointing to trends, outcomes, and new initiatives. Most students are not lacking for campus services to pursue. It is up to us to convince them that their personal career development is worth their time and attention. It’s important to build an eclectic staff of student peers, graduate interns, and professional staffs who come at career services from different areas of expertise – we need communicators, educators, connectors, social media gurus, and plenty of evangelists – people who take pride in having a tremendous impact on the college experience.
Hibel: In your biography page, you have some words of wisdom for students. “Plan. Set professional goals. Make your future happen. But be open to the inevitable happenstance along the way.” What inspired these words and would you share any different words with your colleagues throughout your school?4
Ceperley: The words hold water for any audience. For years we became so focused on the notion of career planning – encouraging students to develop plans, to set goals, and to track their progress. That’s sage advice then and now with the caveat that our personal and professional lives often steer us away from the “Plan.” Goal-driven students need to have their eyes up and their ears open to opportunities that sometimes just happen. And when they do, they need to be open to at least considering them. As Thomas Jefferson once said, “I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.” Enough said.
Hibel: For someone wanting to start a career path in the area of career services, what are some tips you could share on what to expect from this field as well as the biggest rewards?
Ceperley: The rewards are many. There is really no occupational area on a college campus that I can think of that serves as such a rich liaison for students, transporting them from life on campus to what comes next. With the rising cost of college education nation-wide, parents and families are looking for evidence of return on the college investment. Well run, innovative career centers not only symbolize but also demonstrate this return. For those interested in what has now comprised 25 years of my professional life, I strongly encourage visiting with career centers staff, even for an informational interview. Check out their websites. Take a look at NACEweb.org. Understand that sometimes the best way to break in is to volunteer, as I did when I was in graduate school. I would not be here today if I didn’t say, “Sure I’d love to spend 10 hours a week in your career office learning the ropes.” I’m very glad I did.