Day 1 of the Career Champions Challenge
Welcome to the first day of our 8-Day Career Champions challenge!
Helping our students be successful after graduation
The University at Albany has been named an engine of opportunity. Most of our students look at their time at UAlbany as a path to a career and a good paying job. This is especially true for our First-Generation students. Unfortunately, we also know that getting a degree is not enough. Students need experiential education to develop skills, explore options, and learn about the world of work. Students also need to be able to talk about their skills and competencies to potential employers. They need to be able to help an employer see how the skills and knowledge they learn in the classroom benefit the companies and organizations that hire them.
The university has a variety of resources to assist students in figuring out what careers they want and then to prepare and search for both internships and jobs. Many students are not aware of these services, and some are not comfortable discussing career issues with people they do not know. This is where you can help. Students are already coming to you with career questions. Sometimes it is an opportunity to help them understand where their major could take them. Other times they are looking for resume advice or ideas for finding internships.
During the challenge, we will discuss the key areas of career development our students struggle with such as resume building, internship searching, interviewing, salary negotiation, and graduate school. We will identify some of the specific struggles we have seen when working with students and provide advice on how to address them. We will show you resources you can use to help students, and we will also provide demos of various tools that you can use when helping students.
In this version of the Challenge, we are also introducing information on how students can effectively use AI for various career development activities. We know our students are using AI, but they often use it in ways that hurt their chances of getting a job or internship. Some things to remember when talking to students about AI are:
- Students may be reluctant to ask about AI since they don’t know if they are allowed to discuss it.
- Students might not be aware that AI results are not always accurate. It can invent experiences on a resume if you ask it to write one for you.
- AI is best used to compare things, create drafts, and offer suggestions. It is not ideal to use it to create a finished product. Finished products are often bland, vague and cookie cutter.
During each day of this challenge, we will provide examples of appropriate use of AI for each aspect of career development.
If you teach classes, you can also help students by including career information within your course. To assist you with including career content, we have created a new curriculum that explains the NACE Career Readiness competencies and a basic career development process. We will discuss Career Competencies in more detail on Day 3 of this challenge. This curriculum was developed for the First Year Experience instructors and is focused on activities that First-year students should do. However, much of it is applicable to all students.
The career curriculum covers two (2) areas that you can include in your classes. The first is a circular career development process with four (4) specific steps that our students work through while they are here at UAlbany. They repeat the process multiple times while they are students and continue to cycle through after graduation. The second is the idea of Career Readiness as defined by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE). Within these two topics, there are many options for including material within a class. It is not expected that you will include all the content.
We have created a document that provides an overview of both the Career Development process and Career Readiness. We suggest you start there to help you understand the process as well as the elements of Career Readiness. Regardless of which specific step or steps in the process you choose to include, we would like you to present the full process to the students to show how various activities fit in the overall career development cycle. Specifically, we would like you to introduce the entire process before you present a specific step.
There are also documents that explain each of the various steps in the Career Development Process. Each document explains one specific step and includes relevant discussion topics, in-class exercises, assignments, and student-facing resources. The documents all have live links to those materials which reside on the Career and Professional Development website. The exercises and assignments in the overview document are appropriate to include at the beginning of the semester. Each topic has several ideas for in-class activities and assignments. You do not need to do all the material in each step. Choose whatever you feel is appropriate for your class.
Today’s video will introduce you to our website and the many resources available to you there. We will show you where to find the curriculum and the specific exercises and assignments.
We do not expect that after this challenge you will be able to address all your students’ career concerns. We still want you to refer students to our Office of Career & Professional Development! Our hope is to broaden the career conversation so students can start to see that career development is a part of the many things they do on campus. We want them to see that helping them succeed after graduation is a team effort. We also hope that the messages we all give to students on career topics will be more consistent, too. Thank you for joining our team and taking the time to become a Career Champion. We look forward to collaborating with you! If you have any questions or comments, please contact us at career@albany.edu. Don’t forget to take today’s first quiz. You need to take all eight (8) quizzes to receive your certificate of completion.
Learn more: Rethinking the Faculty Role in Students’ Career Readiness
