How to Make Career Services a Requirement by Embedding It Into Curriculum (feat. Gene Rhee and Jessica Best)

In an effort to engage more students with career services (and earlier in their college careers), the University of Oregon Lundquist College of Business career center partners with faculty to add career-related assignments to three core business classes. The assignments, all asynchronous and requiring no live class time, are sprinkled throughout: BA 101: Introduction to Business (a freshmen-level class)BA 240: Spreadsheet Analysis and Visualization (a sophomore-level class)Marketing 311: Marketing Management (an upper-division class)That way, by the time business students reach their senior year, they’ve already been exposed to career multiple times. And because the assignments are part of their grade in three required classes, every student gets the opportunity to learn more about the career center and what resources are available.“It's a way for us to signal as a college that we feel this is so essential to your education that we are embedding it into these core classes and assigning points to it. We're using the incentive that we have trained them to cue into, which is points in a class,” says Jessica Best, Director of Career Strategy for Mohr Career Services. “We can ensure everybody at least has equal access to it and then they can make the choice whether they want to engage or not.”Best says about 90% of students engage with the career assignments, and her team frequently surveys the students to get their feedback on the program and track their progress.In this episode, Best and her colleague Gene Rhee, Director of Mohr Career Services, share what the assignments look like, how (and why) they built the program, how they got buy-in from faculty and senior leadership, how they handle grading, and more.Resources from the episode:Gene’s LinkedIn profileJessica’s LinkedIn profileMohr Career Services virtual career centerJessica’s email: [email protected] Gene’s email: [email protected]  Continue the conversation in the Career Everywhere Community! Join 2,000 other higher ed career services leaders today: careereverywhere.com/community