Career Readiness in Communication Podcast and Transcript

Jeff Child:

Welcome to the Communication Corner, a McGraw-Hill podcast for the communication discipline. I'm your moderator for the session, Jeff Child. Today I brought together four fantastic guests to discuss the focus of our podcast today, which is Career Readiness and Communication. In 2024, the Pew Research Center released a report about the worth of college in the eyes of the American public. The report details several trends, but one interesting finding is that the value of a college degree across time continues to decline in the eyes of the public. Currently, only one in four US adults now feel that it's either extremely or very important to have a four-year college degree. Furthermore, a 2024 Newsweek article cites research by Intelligent, which is a college preparation company who find that more and more companies are moving away from requiring a college degree, particularly for entry and mid-level career postings. What are some of the reasons cited by this research for the decline in confidence in higher education? Both reports note concerns about the rising cost of a college degree relative to its worth in terms of discernible skills and the development of career readiness upon graduation for the workforce.

Additionally, more businesses are seeing more value in on the job training or practical workplace relevant skills not necessarily being stressed by institutions of higher education, which can sometimes exclusively privilege knowledge and theory over the integration of knowledge and theory, in addition to skill and practice. All of my guests today have extensive experience working in communication departments, strengthening the connections between what students are learning in the university classroom and how those experience translate into enhanced workplace readiness skills and competencies. We'll explore a range of perspectives on this topic from when to start such programming, how to leverage university resources, industry partnerships and organizational connections to make an impact. And finally, how to consider curriculum and assessment practices in order to demonstrate a department's return on the investment of putting more career readiness programming in place.

Before turning to these questions, I'd like the other panelists to introduce themselves. My name is Jeff Child. I'm a full professor and chair of the communication department at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. Our communication studies faculty have been in the trenches the past two years, adapting curriculum to be more relevant to skill building and workforce readiness. We're currently rebuilding and rebranding our MA degree in communication as an entirely workforce readiness and professionally oriented graduate degree program. I'm excited to join this conversation and serve as your moderator for the panel today. The next panelist I'd like to have introduce herself to you as Tiffany Wang.

Tiffany Wang:

My name is Tiffany Wang and I am a full professor and communication studies program coordinator in the department of communication at the University of Montevallo. I also serve as the director of my university's progression to profession quality enhancement plan. I'm currently leading a five-year initiative to promote career and professional development in advising and teaching across campus.

Jeff Child:

Fantastic. Thank you for joining us today. We also have Scott Myers with us. Scott, do you want to introduce yourself?

Scott Myers:

Hi everyone. My name is Scott Myers. I am a full professor and director of undergraduate studies in the Department of Communication Studies at West Virginia University.

Jeff Child:

Fantastic. Our third guest today is Joy Daggs. Joy, do you want to tell us a little bit about yourself?

Dr. Joy Daggs:

Absolutely. Hi. I'm Dr. Joy Daggs. I teach at Northwest Missouri State University where I'm an associate professor, hopefully soon to be full professor and I teach public relations courses and have been there for 13 years.

Jeff Child:

Wonderful. Welcome to the podcast today. Our final guest is Michael Burns. Michael, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and then introduce your discussion question for us dealing with when we should start thinking about career readiness programming and some thoughts on that question.

Dr. Michael Burns:

Hi everybody. My name is Dr. Michael Burns, and I am an assistant teaching professor at the University of Colorado Boulder where I also direct the TEDxCU program and have been spending a lot of time thinking about how we can reshape our undergraduate program to better prepare people for what's next post-graduation in terms of career readiness. And prior to that I spent 10 years at Texas State University in their department of communication as their director of career readiness, where I researched a lot of these questions Jeff was referring to at the introduction of this podcast. But I also spend time in industry doing trainings and coaching on soft skills, but also spending time with NBC at the Olympics, working in logistics and research and production management to get a sense of what's needed out there. So a lot of this conversation is also based on my experience in industry.

One of the things that I've realized is we probably should be having these conversations sooner. So my question that I'm posing today and exploring is why is it important to start career readiness conversations with students before they are juniors and seniors? And this is I think something we don't often think about because we think their junior year is when they'll get an internship, their senior year is when they're going to think about applying for jobs and what they're going to do post graduation. But what's interesting is throughout my time working and researching this, what I've noticed is we need people to start having these conversations their sophomore year at least. Because if we can start having the conversation sophomore year, what is possible? What does the industry look like? What are the skills people need? They look at their curriculum different. They go through the courses within the communication program or really probably any program differently.

And if we train them from the start on how these skills ... Why they matter, how they're transferable, but how they can be used to make them more trainable no matter the job they get ... How they can find those really important nuggets in each of their classes, no matter the topic ... If it's a topic that's very applied like organizational communication or a course that they don't see as applied, like family communication, there are still nuggets of information and theories and projects and things you're learning in those classes that help you practice these skills that make you trainable. And so my approach has always been from the beginning, show them this. Talk to them about how the courses can connect, how the skills build off one another and then help them understand why those skills, theory knowledge will make them a well-informed employee. But the key to this is making sure that they spend time also really identifying their interests, things that they think they would like to spend time doing, jobs or internships that are they're curious about, or even things like organizations that do interesting work. Having them dive in and research about that and what those organizations do and think about how do these communication skills actually benefit those organizations?

And what happens in that moment is they start to get a confidence about the degree plan and about what's possible and about the jobs that are available and they start to research it, approach it differently and then we practice this idea of pivoting where they are seeking out alumni, seeking out people on LinkedIn, seeking out organizations on campus, part-time jobs that will inform them and help them practice that. And then they're able to do these slight pivots, pivots, pivots, until they're getting a clearer and clearer direction. So when it does come time to their junior year, they're able to identify internships more clearly. Again, they learn, maybe they get to the internship, they love it, maybe they hate it, maybe they learn things. I really like this aspect of it. They pivot again and they're able to continue to tailor that. That lifelong learning idea. They graduate, they look for jobs. Same thing. What job descriptions are identifying those things that I liked and I'm interested in? This is how my degree plan fits that. The skills, how that lines up.

And they're also able to articulate then much better in the interview, this is what I can do with a communication degree. And so starting early, starting sophomore year has been the magic moment for us in terms of what prepares them to be successful post graduation. So that's my argument in terms of we got to start earlier and it's much more than just resumes in interview prep.

Jeff Child:

Great point. What do others of you think?

Tiffany Wang:

I have found that advising is a great starting point for talking to students before they're juniors and seniors. I talk a lot with students about how their documents like a cover letter or a resume are built from experiences gained throughout their college experience. So one thing I do when I get a new advisee assigned to me as a faculty advisor is to talk about their interests, their dreams, what kinds of aspirations they see early on. And they can be very unclear early on or very broad. And then we gradually work to focus them on leadership experiences and volunteer experiences, which can create good building blocks for them as they seek out internships or we even look at existing jobs they might have and ways they can develop skill sets that might be essential for jobs or internships they plan to apply for in the future.

So we really encourage students to work backwards. Take a look at what you might be interested in or companies you might be wanting to work for, and then identifying skill sets or years of experience that they might want to gain along the way. And I think that really keeps students focused because communication studies can be really broad based. And so we really try and encourage students to customize their degree plan. I call it a couture degree. Customize it for what you and your interests are. And I think that's a real strength for our students being able to see how the versatility can really work for them as they're narrowing down to what they want to do in the future.

Jeff Child:

Yeah. I completely agree Tiffany. Communication is one of those areas that you can do everything and anything. So helping our students target within that, what are they most curious and excited about and build a plan. Certainly advisors are an important part of that. Other reflections on this question?

Dr. Joy Daggs:

We have a very comprehensive and focus on a comprehensive student experience at Northwest. And we have a lot of students who are involved in a lot of student organizations from fraternity and sorority life to like St. Jude. It's now called St. Jude for Bearcats. I also encourage not only skill building through the coursework, but taking leadership roles in some of those kinds of organizations can be great ways they can find out, hey, are they the social media manager for them? Did they love that? Do we want to pursue that? Did they do the event? And get some more of that experience in some of those less lower risk areas too to help build up those skills and not just couture their degree, but entire student experience.

Jeff Child:

Great point, Joy. Yeah. I think that's a great transition to your focus, Joy. You'll help us think a little bit more about how we can harness university resources and connections to enhance career readiness programming. Do you want to present your question and some of your thoughts about it?

Dr. Joy Daggs:

Sure. Well, my question is how can you use campus resources and partnerships at the university to help students with career readiness? And I would just like to say what I have noticed over the last ... Let me back up a little bit. That about 10 years ago, we went to a career profession based learning model. So we were very much encouraged across the university to focus on career readiness. And in fact, we had billboards that said career ready day one. And I teach public relations courses, so it's very easy in that particular context to create assignments that are focused on career readiness and applied skills like writing and speaking, et cetera. So that part wasn't difficult. But what I was noticing is that some of the stuff when it came to the job search, they were coming to my office like, "Oh my God, I have no idea what to do." And there was that.

And we are conveniently located between Kansas City and Omaha, so about an hour and a half both directions. Maybe a little further to Omaha. So even though we're in a little more rural setting, we are fairly close to larger cities that have PRSA chapters and IABC, International Association of Business Communicators. And those organizations would have summits or conferences that would be accessible for students or even for students. And before the pandemic, I noticed no problem. I'd say, "Hey, PRSA Conference in Kansas City." And before I had barely finished a sentence, they had carpools, they had lodging all figured out where they were going to stay with each other. It was all taken care of and there'd be a group of 10 of them going. No problem. I couldn't have probably dragged them onto the bus after COVID. And I was like, "What can I do to get them to take advantage of not only things like that but some of the resources that our campus has?" Because we do have a pretty robust career services office that does a big career fair. They do mock interview days. At the time, they were doing speed networking events. Just getting anything like, "Are you going to go to this?" And I'd say, "Did anybody go?" No. So I'm like, "Well, I'm going to have to make this worth points or something."

So I really started working with career services and said, what can we do? And we also had some change in services, change in leadership, and they got rid of their speed networking and they decided to also make mock interview day discipline specific. So I just started making assignments for participating in mock interview day. Then they get that experience low risk. If it was great, then that may jump to possibly an internship, et cetera. We have also a Meet the Pros Panel, which we're doing in a couple of weeks. Where we are doing a Zoom call and we'll have a panel of professionals for both our communication and mass media sides of our school. And the professionals will talk for probably about an hour. And then we are going to do Zoom breakout rooms. Please edit out the first part there. So that they can then meet in smaller groups where they're more likely to ask some of those questions they may have about career readiness to those professionals.

So getting them involved in the networking part, which can be pretty intimidating when it's really important. And I know this will hopefully segue to the next person too, but doing the public relations courses, I have a lot of profession-based assignments like working with real world clients to create PR plans and PR campaigns. So that has been particularly helpful so they can network in those ways. So those were the ways I have integrated those profession-based experiences.

Jeff Child:

Wonderful. You detail lots of great ways that we can work within the resources that we already have. I love how you talk about using your syllabus and assignments to reinforce things that are good for students that they don't always necessarily take advantage of on their own. Other people's thoughts about ways that you've strategically worked within your university.

Tiffany Wang:

We have really tried to partner with our honors program. So our honors program does small stipends toward professional travel. We were getting feedback that there were other places students could go to present a paper or do undergraduate research, but particularly in fields maybe where students were more professionally inclined wanting to go directly into the workforce, there was an area where students needed support there as well. So we have worked with our honors program and then I'm very fortunate in my department we have a travel fund that promotes student travel within our department. So we've been encouraging students to be engaged with disciplinary associations, whether that's at the state or regional or national level. And so we recently took some students to New Orleans for the National Communication Association Conference and encourage students to really network with other undergraduate students and graduate students and faculty members there, whether or not they were looking to do graduate school. And so we felt like that was a great opportunity to have our students take the train in a way that was a little bit affordable. And I think for sure next year with our regional association hosting a conference in Birmingham, we're going to be putting together panels with creative work so students can share the great work we're doing on campus and find others who might be like-minded and have interests as well at the local level.

Jeff Child:

Wonderful. Yeah. Michael.

Dr. Michael Burns:

One thing I want to add in is take advantage of your alumni office and get connected with alumni because a lot of times students, they need a network. They don't have one yet. Especially if they're first-generation college students and they don't know what that means to network or how to build a network. And so I think there's a big responsibility on universities now to help the students build their network. And alumni are a great resource for that. They also can come in and explain what's really happening in that moment. They remember what it feels like to be in those positions. And it's a great way for the faculty to learn as well, to stay updated on what their alumni are doing. But I think there is a responsibility to help build the network of the students so they're leaving with more than just a piece of paper. They're also leaving with a network of humans that they can reach out to and continue to learn from.

Jeff Child:

Wonderful point, Michael. Yeah, Scott.

Scott Myers:

Well, I'll just build on that. I'm actually currently in the process of developing an alumni mentor program with the alums of our bachelor's, master's, and PhD programs for our undergraduates. And so I'm actually working with a group of students in developing ... They're going to interview the alumni and they're going to create some social media platform to advertise our alumni. So the idea ... I think Michael pointed out is just connecting our alums with our current students because they're probably one of the better sources of information in terms of career readiness if you go along those angles. And so far, our alums have been pretty receptive. I did a version of this last year with an organizational communication class, and we had a really good response rate from the alums and our students learned quite a bit. And so I think sometimes can be overlooked, especially if your department or your unit doesn't have a formalized process or program for gathering their input. Some departments are great at that. Other departments like my own are not. And so that's something we realized after talking with our students too, that that's something that they desired.

Jeff Child:

That's a great point, Scott. Yeah, so we can see that really as we help students put more into the university resources, the alumni connections and things that are available, they'll get more out of it. Don't need to go much further, which is a great transition to Scott's question, which really helps us think a little bit more connecting with those outside of the university. So Scott, do you want to present your question and some of your thoughts about it?

Scott Myers:

Sure. And actually my question ties in nicely with what Joy was discussing. So my question is, how might we create partnerships with local and community organizations to provide our students with organizational experiences? And our students ... I've been here at WVU for 25 years now, and so I've pretty much have seen it all in terms of just different student cohorts, working with different people over the years and just how our department has evolved or in some cases transformed. Whatever term you want to use. But in any case, one thing that's really been more I think on our radar the last couple of years is our students are requesting some sort of ways to get experiences with organizations beyond their internship. So like probably many common departments, our students are required to complete an internship. Typically, our students do it during their senior year.

Our situation is a little odd because we don't help them find the internship. They have to find it on their own. It has to be communication based. It has to be approved. We have an internship coordinator who works with the students on that. So aside from that though, we've had students ask us, "What can I do? How can I get involved?" And so several years ago we were revamping our small group communication course, which is a first year student course, COMM 112 100 level. And we wanted a way ... Because as those of you who taught small group, you know that sometimes one of the problems with teaching group is coming up with assignments that are authentic and don't have a correct answer per se. And so our students in small group class were not liking our assignments because they were just too juvenile, I think is the way they were ... That's one way in which they phrased it.

So we decided to revamp the course by putting them in groups and having them work in our community. Now we're fortunate enough to have a center for community engagement that probably a lot of larger schools may have. Actually many schools may have these. And so we're able to partner with them because they have a network of non-profit organizations in our community, and they were more than willing to work with us. We were actually one of the first departments to start working with them. And so what we did in this first year course ... And it tracks primarily freshmen. You'll have all students from all four years, but primarily we get the first year students as they arrive on campus. They work in groups of five. They pick an organization. So the Center for community engagement comes in with a list places, and then we place the groups based on the students' ... Usually their interests, but sometimes their schedules because they're put in groups. And they're told ahead of time they have to work outside of class on this and we've got no complaints surprisingly.

And then they devote 10 hours to working on some group project on behalf of the community partner. The partner chooses everything for them to do. Some of them are given a pretty hefty task like plan some fundraising event, others maybe some more mundane. But the point is they get their foot in with a local organization. Our organizations are located either within Morgantown or within our downtown campus. So accessibility travel is not an issue. They can get there. We do make sure they work as a group though, so one person can't go and the other four show up later. They have to work as a group or the hours do not count. Again, they're fully aware of this.

But the nice thing about this though is that they get their foot in the door. They also start to understand the role that communication plays within the organization. And then for a lot of them this is the starting point for future organizational work, internships, or I think Tiffany, you mentioned volunteer hours. Because we have a fair number of students who like to volunteer and they can work toward something along those lines as well. And so it's just a great way if you have that type of situation to capitalize on what the community offers and what the university offers.

I do volunteer work as well, so I'm familiar with quite a few of the organizations. I talk to people all the time that say, "Oh, we loved having your students and we love the fact that they were willing to work." And then more importantly, bring what they know about communication to their organization, which can be helpful for both parties.

And this as a side note. I pulled up some statistics. So in fall of 2023 ... Because they track these. We had 184 students in the fall semester that worked across 24 organizations, contributed 1500 hours of volunteer time that is estimated to have a $40,000 impact on the community. So not only does it help the partner, but more importantly, I think it helps our students. Like I said, the big thing here is getting the kids in the door with a local organization. We know most of our kids are not staying here after graduation, and that's fine, but this way it allows them to find a way to get in that they ordinarily might not be able to do.

Jeff Child:

I think that's great, Scott. I think you've talked through some really creative ways that people might partner with community engagement, different kinds of organization service endeavors to give those kinds of practical, relevant experiences to talk about upon graduation. Other thoughts from others of you about how you've tried to work with partnerships outside of the university successfully?

Dr. Joy Daggs:

Like I said, I do that in my classes and my one did actually, they did a PR plan for their little part-time job they do back at home. And then that parlayed into a full line internship for the next semester doing the more communication focused thing. But something else I wanted to mention, because even if they're not going to stay in Morgantown, these experiences also give them things to pull out in an interview for those behavior-based interviews. Tell me about a time you dealt with group conflict. Tell me about a time you had to meet a challenge. And so I think that's another key component that what we're doing can also really help these students in an interview situation to get that job.

Jeff Child:

Absolutely. For sure. Yeah. I know in my former institution, we would often encourage and create those kinds of partnerships and they would turn into jobs for people because sometimes employers don't know the breadth of ways that a degree in communication can help them with practical problem solving and issues that they're struggling with. And so getting a foot in the door and being able to show some of their learning in that context can result in a first start for a career. Great. Other thoughts about this?

Tiffany Wang:

Yeah. I think something that has been really exciting within my program has been a recent public liberation and civic engagement program. And we love alliterative titles, so we call it Falcon Facilitators. So a couple of my colleagues in the communication studies program, they're actually working on public forums that they organize with students and community members through our David Matthew Center for Civic Life, which is just up the road. So like Joy, I'm in a rural area that is fairly close to a larger metropolitan area. But sometimes that can be challenging with that town gown relationship with being in a small college town. And so they have been leading forums both on campus and within the community at the local high schools, at local libraries about issues of shared concern. And so this semester they're talking about housing within the community. What does that look like on campus? What does that look like in the community?

And what's really exciting is that the students are really able to get experiential learning opportunities related to both public deliberation and civic engagement with civic, academic, and municipal partners. And so students can serve in multiple capacities, and then it's part of a grant where the students are getting paid to lead the forums. To take notes, to train other students. And so I'm really excited about where that's going to go in the future.

So they're talking about a lot of hot button topics like poverty, dropout rates, elections, misinformation and disinformation. So a lot of students enjoy being able to see what they're seeing in the news, but seeing what it looks like at the local level and how they can be part of creating and positive change within the community. So I think that's really exciting and we're already starting to see students getting great job opportunities and internship opportunities with the skills they're developing in this program.

Jeff Child:

Wonderful. I want to turn our attention and focus now to a little bit related to how instructors and departments can think more strategically about course assignments and curriculum when developing career readiness programming. And I'll say I've been in the weeds as chair of the department here with my faculty thinking about that in our graduate program redesign. What we've discovered, it's not enough just to have this orientation and to connect with some organizations, but you can also think strategically and holistically about your curriculum and what you're doing and how efforts in one class connect to efforts in another class. And they are related to skill development in an introductory, a of mid-level or an advanced way. One of the trends at our university is also the creation of micro-credentials to work with the industry professionals who need to come and top off or freshen their understanding of skills. And so advancing these can provide an opportunity to not only frame how you can think about the development of these skills within your classes, but also to bring industry people who are working and want an opportunity to talk about some of the problems they encounter and how our curriculum can map onto that and those co-conversations can be really beneficial.

But I'll tell you, it's been a change to have faculty more collectively talking about, "What do I do in my class? What do you do in yours? How do they connect?" In relation to that is also consideration of assignments. Traditionally focused programs often do a lot of midterm final exam and writing of papers. When we are in this era of AI, writing competency surely is important, but there are a range of other skills and the function of that is going to change in higher education.

So thinking about moving away from midterms, final exams and papers, long papers. I've got news for you as we've been engaging and talking with business partnerships, they don't have people doing a whole lot of 10 to 15 page lit reviews. These are not the kinds of practical assignments and things that they're going to do on the job. So we've been talking more about doing things like role plays, simulation, case study analyses, things that give an opportunity to practice competency and skill development in situations that are career-related scenarios and then thinking about that. It's resulted in us coming up with some micro-credentials that we're considering about leadership and collaboration, argumentation and advocacy, relationship building and networking, and that we can put these areas that are disciplined, has a lot of expertise and really are in demand as we come out of a post-COVID area where people struggle to connect and understand one another. So there is benefit sometimes when putting what you're doing onto the side and thinking from the beginning about what are the most important competencies? How can we target these in different ways, and what do engagements when the class look like that can help people have things that they can build upon from one course to the next?

Then the thing that we're also doing connects to some of what Michael said is flagging that early on for students so they can be more strategic in their selections throughout their electives, in their degree. Most comm programs, ours at the undergraduate level has 15 electives. You can choose your own adventure to have more thoughtfulness in picking up a couple micro-credentials along the way with your electives. Other thoughts that people have about how you've integrated things into assignments. Yeah, Scott.

Scott Myers:

I think you bring up a good point, and I think this is something we have to think as comm faculty moving forward is ... And this is something you'd mentioned in the introduction about how one of the issues people have with higher education is valuing or privileging knowledge and theory over skill and practice. And as comm people, I think not only do we have to start thinking about this, but I think we're in a good position to do so where we really have to adapt our mindset in terms of realizing that practical is good.

I work in a PhD program, and so I think we have a tendency to want to teach all of our undergraduate classes from a theory perspective more so than anything else. And yes, theory should not be divorced from practicality or from skill, but the reality is that that's not what business wants. And we can certainly teach them how theory can inform what they do. So moving forward, even just thinking about how we can make our course assignments ... Like you said, I was just reading a book on AI earlier and the author points out that no one in industry writes a 15-page paper, but yet we have all these lit reviews in our 300, 400 level classes. And so we really do need to think about smaller things that are applicable based in comm, but recognize that there is this shift going on and we need to go with it or get left behind.

Jeff Child:

Absolutely. Great point, Scott.

Dr. Joy Daggs:

I would like to piggyback on what Scott said. Yes. And we want to definitely keep that practicality because I've always thought I was designing assignments, where will they do this a job? Would they do this at a job? And sometimes with a more practical approach, sometimes students don't think things like research are important at all. And so I have to really focus on, okay ... Because we do a lot of recommendations for social media, for example. And the students and everyone, everybody uses Instagram. Okay. First of all, that's not true. And second of all, if you're trying to convince an organization they need to be on Instagram you need to have some research showing them that their audience is there. And so I think maybe shifting our focus a little bit about how we utilize research and the importance of it so we get away from the 15-page papers, but we're also showing them, yes, this research that you're doing, you may think it's not useful, but it really is and there's a reason you need to know how to do it properly and ethically.

Jeff Child:

That's a great point Joy. In our department, we've had a lot of discussion about industry-based research, and we've also looked at some evidence that suggests that teaching our students how to do research in SPSS or these specialized programs that they will not have access to on the job is useless. We need to do more of teaching people how to do research in Excel and use the tools that most organizations will have available to them. To round out this discussion let's turn to Tiffany to talk a little bit about departmental efforts related to assessment.

Tiffany Wang:

I guess that's everyone's favorite word sometimes. So my question is how do we measure and assess career readiness outcomes in order to demonstrate a return on investment in career readiness programming? And that has been a interesting question for us to consider, especially working on a campus-wide initiative. What does that look like in different programs? What does that look like in communication, versus theater, versus social work, versus nursing? And so one of the things that we have been working toward has been to track our data longitudinally. So doing a couple small assignments that are common across the curriculum in different majors that we can use.

So we have put together a career preparedness essay. This is disseminated within our introductory course, which is required for every student on our campus, so typically taken by freshmen or first year students and sophomores. This same career preparedness essay is given out at the junior and senior level in the capstone course.

So my university requires a capstone in every single major, and then we've been scoring them by members of an implementation team. So this is comprised of individuals across the university. We do training to ensure that how we are scoring is similar, and then we work with our institutional research office to make sure that we are able to see how we're doing and measure how we're doing at a baseline level. And then hopefully after students have received different assignments and career preparedness opportunities along the way, showing that we're really seeing growth in that. So we hope students are more prepared at the senior year versus their first year.

We also, along with that, do a career plan assignment. This is done at the sophomore level or junior level, and then again at the senior level. So this can be done within courses or within advising. We give our colleagues on campus the choice at the program level where it makes sense. So in my department we do it in a career and professional development capstone at the sophomore level. That just makes sense. And then that, again is scored by members of the implementation team across campus. And then we also wanted to look at artifacts in the senior year in the capstone courses. And so we have about eight choices, and then individual programs select what makes the most sense. They're asked to select three that are implemented in the capstone course. And then because obviously I don't have the proficiency to know what makes a good artifact in a different field, those are scored by the course instructor specifically using a common rubric. Then they give us a sense of where their students are.

And so I guess fortunately or unfortunately, currently teach our senior capstone course. So that gives me the opportunity to take a look at where we measure. Are they exceeding expectations for what we are looking for? So in my department, we do a resume cover letter and portfolio. And then I score each of our students, and then I provide aggregate data to myself as director. But we collect that from across campus. So those are just great ways that we can have data that we can use to demonstrate that our students are successful.

And then we also like to look at where can we grow? Where do we need to be adding additional resources? Where do we need to be shoring up our efforts across campus? And so that's been a great opportunity to look at things from a bird's eye view, but also be able to drill down to the department, to the program level.

Jeff Child:

Wonderful. You present a lot of really great ideas, Tiffany. I know assessment can be a bear. It can be a lot to unpack. You've provided some great ideas for how we can do it. I would just add to that we can also get some great utility out of self-evaluation based assessments. Some of what we do in our predominantly speaking related courses is to have people either at the beginning and then at the end or at the end, think about where they thought their skills were in relation to what was targeted in that course at the beginning and where they're at at the end.

And it's interesting to show a growth gap. You can see where they started, where they end. And I think that is a different meaningful data in addition to the kind of behavioral based coding of artifacts, things like that that can be time-consuming. So there's a range of ways you can do things in a multifaceted way that some that might be a little more easier to pull data from and others that might take a little bit of evaluation and time to do. Other people's thoughts on this question of measurement and assessment. Yeah, Michael.

Dr. Michael Burns:

One thing I will point out here is this assessment and this type of data is very important because we know, and I'm sure the people listening to this podcast know higher education is being questioned all the time. And so when you have this data, you're able to show that it does matter. We know it does, and there's Gallup polls and there's all kinds of things out there that still show it does. But using this data particular to your department, your program, your university shows, the folks you're trying to recruit what you're doing, that you're thinking about it, there's a plan, and our people are successful. And also, unfortunately, who knows where we'll be at in the future, where if resources get scarce, the folks that can prove that they've been hitting benchmarks and they've been having continuous improvement and whatnot, are going to have a stronger argument of why those resources should go to them.

And so even if you're listening and you have no career readiness assessment started, and you're building that up and you're building that up. And the more you get, the longer it goes. Longitudinal data points are great, but you got to start somewhere. So I encourage everyone to get started on that. That's probably a big key takeaway just from this whole conversation to think long-term. I always say it's better to have it just in case.

Jeff Child:

I absolutely fantastic. Yes. Assessment is important. And I also think that as we develop these kinds of initiatives like we're talking about today, you're not going to get everything right the first time. But having periods of change and experimentation and then stability and assessment and evaluation and taking risks and trying different things is the way that you continually improve. You're not going to get it all right at once. But being able to demonstrate you have a thoughtful approach and that you're being mindful of how you're growing and what you're doing will certainly help you.

Well, I appreciate all of my podcast guests today and most of all, each one of you for tuning into our discussion about career readiness and communication. It's our hope that the information we've shared today has sparked your curiosity and interest in thinking more about how can you be a part of strengthening your program's focus on career readiness and communication. I'm confident that each one of our podcast guests today would be more than willing to continue the conversation with you offline about the ways that they are working to shorten the gap between business and industry partner needs from college graduates and our students' capabilities to talk about and demonstrate career readiness skills in communication. Thank you for listening in and for the next episode of The Communication Corner Podcast.