Spotlight for Career Services Professionals

What do you call your career center? NACE career services members recently had a discussion in the NACE Community about renaming the school’s career center to “align our name with substantial shifts in our service model and strategic plan.”

Participants said that the name should reflect the services the department offers to students while also helping students identify the office as a career development and job-search resource.

According to NACE’s 2018 Career Services Benchmark Survey report, “career services” continues to be the most popular title—reported by nearly 45 percent of respondents, followed by “career center” (26 percent), and “career development” (27 percent). The “other” category (24 percent) was comprised of “professional development,” “advising,” “career education,” and “career management,” suggesting an effort to describe the actual services students and other clients may use: development, advising, education, and management.

Among the new names noted by career services practitioners were:

• The Career Development Office is now the Career Hub, although the formal name is the Career Education and Professional Advancement.
• The Career Center became the Life Design Lab.
• Career Development became Career Coaching, Employer Connections.
• Career Services is now the Internship & Career Planning Office (“Our university has a large push for internships, so it was important to us for that to be incorporated in the name.”)

The process of name changes, commenters said, includes several considerations including:

• Determining the service model and if services would change;
• Examining Google searches to see what people are looking for;
• Surveying naming ideas among staff and the student body; and
• Asking a consultant to offer best practices and survey stakeholders.

What is your career center called? If your department is considering a name change, join the discussion in the NACE Community.