Day 2 of the Career Champions Challenge

Welcome to Day 2 of the Career Champions Challenge! Today’s topic is on supporting students as they think about their potential career path.

How can we Support Students when they feel lost?
There’s a lot of stress and anxiety involved when students feel lost about their future career path or major. As we’ve all been there ourselves in different ways, we always want to encourage and normalize these struggles with our students. Yet, it can sometimes be hard to know what to say, so when in doubt, please refer your students to the Office of Career & Professional Development to do a “Career & Major Exploration” appointment with us anytime!

However, if your students seem to be seeking some advice, one of the first questions that typically comes to one’s mind to think through this process may be, “What do you like to do?” While it’s extremely important to know what a student’s work interests are, there are other aspects students can think about when thinking about a potential future career path or choosing a major:

  • Values
  • Personality
  • Skills

Values
The Gen Z students of today have grown up in unprecedented times: information overload literally at their fingertips, a worldwide pandemic, and growing global/political tensions.

With these vastly different experiences than previous generations, the way current college students think about and value careers and work in general may be a bit different. According to Handshake (2022), 70% of Gen Z students say money is the biggest factor or value that affects their employment choices. Not only is financial stability important, according to the Deloitte Global 2022 Gen Z & Millennial survey, a workplace that supports mental health and has societal impact are just as valuable for students (pg. 13). When students work at a job or organization that matches their values, there is a higher chance they will stay at a position for more than five years (Deloitte, 2022, pg. 14). Simply asking your student, “What’s important to you in a future job?” and providing examples can help them start thinking about their values.

Personality
For students to realize what their values may be also requires them to know who they are as a person and their own personality. It can sometimes be hard to be self-aware, but it’s important to help students thoughtfully reflect about what they like and dislike, how they handle different situations, how they work with others, and what kind of work environment they may want to be in.

Skills|
As students start to develop an idea of what they may potentially want to do, the concept of career can often still be abstract for them on how to actually make it happen. As faculty and staff, the best way to make it concrete for them is to encourage them to start and try things out and build up their skills and experiences. Two suggestions could be through informational interviews or through experiential education.

Informational interviews or connecting with someone who has had the same major or is currently in a career of interest may sound intimidating to students. It may help to provide an explanation of the benefits of these career conversations, such as being able to hear firsthand about how others are making a direct impact in society in their own way. You could encourage the student to ask during the interview about what they can do during their four years here to obtain the skills to get into the field. This concrete framework of preparing with them on how to do an informational interview can help ease students’ anxiety of talking to someone new. For today’s resources, we’ve provided an informational interview handout that you and your students can use to understand the etiquette of how to connect with someone, and potential questions students could ask.

Many of the Gen Z students missed pivotal developmental opportunities due to the pandemic, and some of them haven’t been able to regain back what they may have lost. Upperclassmen often come into the Office Career & Professional Development feeling lost on how to even get started in getting involved. They sometimes feel they are too late for everything. Keep encouraging your students that it’s never too late to get involved and to build up different skills for their future. Take the time and show them the different offices on-campus that readily provide different experiential learning opportunities such as Education Abroad for studying abroad, CURCE for research, Community & Public Service Program for volunteering, and/or the Office of Career & Professional Development for internships. The Center for Experiential Education offers specific internships programs, as well as MyInvolvement is another great way to remind students to build skills by getting involved on-campus.

Career Assessment Tools
As we mentioned earlier, there are multiple aspects of thinking about a future career path. The Focus 2 self-assessment program looks at all of these angles, including the assessments of their values, skills, work interests, personality, and potential majors they can pursue. We will demo this tool in today’s video. After a student takes these assessments, they can schedule a “Focus 2 Results Review” appointment with a career advisor to discuss their results and to think about next steps as well. We also provide a homework assignment suggestion that you could use in your class in today’s resources.

Gen Z students today have multi-dimensional concerns and expectations about their future careers. As faculty and staff, we want to be mindful of this. We want to support students by helping them keep discovering new perspectives about careers and majors and providing them hope for what lays ahead in their career development journey.

To answer today’s quiz successfully, please be sure to do the following:

You need to take all 8 quizzes to receive your certificate of completion. Thank you again for participating in the challenge. If you have any questions or comments, please contact us at career@albany.edu.

Today’s Resources

Today’s video

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