NACE Journal / Spring 2024
The UC San Diego Student Employment Program employs more than 6,000 students who work in more than 170 departments across campus; it provides opportunities for students to work part time to further their professional development and post-graduate success.
See “Reimagining Student Employment” for a full discussion.
The aspirational philosophy of the program is to provide work experiences that will help to prepare students for successful and meaningful careers. The primary benefits of the program to students include:
- Earning money to assist with educational and personal expenses;
- Gaining valuable work experience to help build a career portfolio;
- Improving core competencies and transferable skills;
- Building relationships and expanding professional networks; and
- Engaging in professional development opportunities.
Embedded into the program is UC San Diego’s competencies framework, which includes NACE’s eight career readiness competencies plus an additional four that reflect the university’s vision, mission, and values—civic engagement and social responsibility, innovation and entrepreneurial thinking, self-reflection, and research ability. All job descriptions are required to include a minimum of three core competencies, although most have more. On top of this, we added skills that we derived from the World Economic Forum’s “Future of Jobs 2023” report—resilience, learning agility, adaptability, and initiative.1
Student employee experiences are incorporated into the university’s co-curricular record (CCR), which highlights student involvement and achievements in opportunities outside of the classroom. At the end of the academic year, student employees have their CCR validated to capture their student job on this additional transcript of experiences.
Endnotes
1 World Economic Forum (2023, May). Future of Jobs 2023. Retrieved from www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Future_of_Jobs_2023.pdf.
Hassan Akmal is the executive director of Career and Professional Development at University of California San Diego and host of the UC San Diego Career Podcast 
Tod Oliviere is the director of student employment and career development at University of California San Diego. He has worked in higher education for more than 20 years developing innovative recruitment, student employment, internship,
and career and professional development programs that impact the student experience. His work has been focused on creating experiential learning opportunities for students that deepen their connections to the university, faculty, staff, and employers
to help them launch their careers. Oliviere joined the UC San Diego Career Center in July 2022 after working in the community college system developing education and training programs in cybersecurity and environmental technology for underrepresented
communities in Massachusetts. He holds a bachelor's degree in business administration from Stonehill College and an MBA from Fitchburg State University.
