[Wsssc] FW: career services follow up

[Claire Peinado]

Sharing the career services message to Dave Paul (legislative rep) I referenced earlier today.

Claire

From: Claire Peinado
Sent: Friday, January 20, 2023 1:49 PM
To: Dave Paul <Dave.Paul at skagit.edu>
Cc: DISTRICT Cabinet 365 <DISTRICTCabinet365 at skagit.edu>
Subject: career services follow up

Hi Dave,

It was great chatting with you last week.  I wanted to follow up on our conversation regarding career services and how this might fit into the SBCTC, legislative, and broader college system agendas.  You asked me to send you a few notes regarding my “dream” scenario, and as I got started, it turned into more of a white paper than bullets . . . oops 😊.  But here are a few ideas I hope we can continue to discuss and move forward:

Background:

Historically, career services has been designated as a Student Services function under the Career & Employment Services Council (CESC) in our CTC system.  Over the years, most colleges have cut budgets and these areas have dwindled in form and function across the system.  Where career activities do exist, they happen in various ways and in various areas.  For instance, some career discernment occurs through advising practices or onboarding activities, whereas other career exploration happens through co-op placements in Instruction, while still others conduct career inventories such as WOIS.  And in some select instances, there are functional areas supporting career readiness and placement activities, similar to traditional “career services” models, which may live in Student Services (though they are few and far between).  There is a breadth in scope across the areas above, but very few, if any, of the colleges are doing all of these activities.  And truthfully, I believe most of the colleges are limping along with very few of these activities deployed systematically for students.

And yet, “career readiness” is a core element of Guided Pathways, which is built on solid theory.  Although our colleges have received Guided Pathways funding (for which we are grateful! 😊), the “leaky pipe” of each biennium in effect just backfills for existing positions at best, without truly addressing the new costs associated with launching new Guided Pathways activities and functions.  Therefore, career services continues to be on the “aspirational” list of to do items without being adequately resourced or funded.

Furthermore, career readiness support may perhaps be the most critical return on investment that higher education can offer.  While some of these career connections naturally occur in professional/technical programs and training, our BEdA and Transfer populations are continually sidelined from any truly integrated or comprehensive career readiness support.  Yet BEdA and Transfer are critical areas in which we find traditionally marginalized populations including first gen and students of color who aspire to four year programs and degrees.  And the Career Connect Washington models that I’ve seen to date continue to target funding toward Prof/Tech pathways, underscoring the gaps in career development support for our other two major community college populations of Transfer and BEdA.


Proposal:

Ideally, we would connect service-learning and community engaged partnerships through experiential learning models, which serve as the scaffolding for career development activities (especially for Transfer and BEdA populations who may not have an obvious college-to-career pathway).  From a mission and values standpoint, there is deep alignment in connecting community college students with local partners and organizations that already sit within their community.  Not only is it relevant and even familiar for students to work with local community agencies, community engaged learning models support generational investments in the long-term socioeconomic health and well-being of the community.  The opportunity for local community agencies and organizations to work with students in this way also creates recruitment and training pathways for those organizations, which is a win-win for both students and employers.  The Carnegie Classification for Community Engaged Institutions best illuminates these benefits.

Implications for Guided Pathways:

It has become clear after many years that housing career services as a Council within the Student Services Commission (WSSSC) is neither comprehensive enough, nor an effective strategy to move our CTC system’s Guided Pathways agenda forward.  Instead, I am suggesting that career services and activities live among a variety of areas across our system (Instruction, Student Services, Equity & Inclusion, Budgets) and should be treated as such.  If we are serious about our racial justice commitments as outlined in the SBCTC mission statement, we should be connecting and funding functions such as career development/placement that can actively support socioeconomic mobility and guided pathways intentions.  Career development scaffolding is the bridge between learning opportunities and socioeconomic justice.  When done well, we strengthen0 our overall democracy in local and national settings.  It must be tightly connected to curriculum and instruction, but unquestionably needs staffing support to truly build out what is required to achieve the vision described here.

A few key elements of a successful career services model could/should include:


  *   Partner identification, management, and cultivation, ideally in tandem with (or led by) Equity & Inclusion outreach and community partnerships.  We should treat these relationships as carefully as we do our Foundation donors.
  *   Job board management support
  *   Student advising support to identify, encourage, reflect, and assess learning experiences as students complete them.
  *   Administrative staffing support to set up courses and placement needs
  *   Resume building and “elevator pitch” staffing support for students
  *   Research capacity for assessment and continued improvement.
  *   Staffing support to administer career identification tools that inform faculty/instructor course designs

And I’m sure there are additional ideas. . .

I’m passionate about this, Dave, and believe our system is missing the mark when it comes to implementing Guided Pathways, because we continue to underfund these career efforts specifically, and have not explicitly connected the dots between the racial justice agenda and the ROI of this kind of work.  I hope we can continue discussing ways to amplify this conversation as a legislative priority in alignment with so many current bipartisan interests, particularly economic vitality of our communities.

Please let me know how I can help!

All Best,
Claire

Claire E. Peinado, PhD
Vice President for Student Services
Skagit Valley College
p: (360) 416-7961
appt: (360) 416-2564
pronouns: she, her

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ctc.edu/pipermail/wsssc_lists.ctc.edu/attachments/20230202/cfa38187/attachment-0001.html>