Join/Renew
It’s a tumultuous time to be a recent grad or a career development professional. The job market is tightening as the economy wavers from tariffs and geopolitical insecurity. Even before AI, many entry-level jobs were facing extinction with 35% of employers posting jobs on LinkedIn requiring three years of experience for them.1 AI has reduced the gap between workers with and without degrees to the smallest has been in 30 years.2 The World Economic Forum estimates that 44% of the skills that employees rely on today will be disrupted within the next five years.3 While 85% of graduates get a job or continue their education within six months of graduating, 52% of students are underemployed.4,5
The traditional approach that separates academic, personal, and career development isn’t working. Colleges and universities must break down silos so they can align the curriculum to employer needs, include projects that build skills and relationships in all their courses, and integrate career development into everything they do. Here are nine ways to inform and inspire how you can collaborate to help students succeed.
1. Break down silos to build belonging. Too often, coursework, co-curriculars, and career development are seen as separate pursuits. When institutions are divided, students pay the price—a hefty one because a career path not only provides a sense of direction, it provides a sense of purpose and belonging. This comes at a time when only 65% of college students feel a sense of belonging and 58% of young adults lack a sense of meaning or purpose in their life. 6,7
2. Integrate career development into the student journey. The old way of thinking about careers was "something extra students do in spare time they don't have." Most students today don't have the luxury of time, and career services shouldn't be a privilege only for those who can afford the extra time to seek them out. The Carlson Business School embeds career readiness directly into the curriculum in a required “design your career” course that increases access and builds skills simultaneously.8 In it, students learn self-assessment reflection, goal setting, and ways to explore and test career paths through networking, interviewing, and coaching while leveraging AI. As a result, 100% of students engage with the career center—not only in a large classroom setting but also through required one-on-one coaching. This ensures every student experiences direct support and learns how to best use career services.
3. Create personal career plans: Students need a plan to follow as they explore and progress along career paths. UC San Diego's Rady School of Management "career schematic" process creates personalized career plans that guide future coaching. This is rooted in Rady's "business is a science" philosophy that encourages students to treat career planning like a business hypothesis to be tested. In the first month full-time M.B.A. students receive 20 hours of embedded career content. Every student gets access to a rigorous career development experience, turning coaches into program managers using data to facilitate student growth. They’ve seen placement rise steadily and so has the strength of students’ networks: 83.3% of full-time job acceptances in 2024 originated by students’ personal contacts and graduate-initiated internships.9
4. Incorporate projects for companies into courses: Arizona State University is providing students with multiple work-integrated learning experiences. These enable students to learn valuable hands-on experience without the time commitment of a traditional job or internship. This approach has already created millions of hours of experiential learning across more than 150 courses using technology platforms to connect faculty members and employers around specific problems. ASU is leading the Work-Integrated Learning Accelerator to bring together other institutions and tech partners to build a model for the entire sector.
5. Combine career and academic advising: St. John Fisher University’s Center for Career and Academic Planning capitalizes on an integrated approach to help students succeed. Advisors combine conversations about skills, interests, ambitions, coursework, and career aspirations. They provide guidance on academic plans, career exploration, and experiential learning activities like research opportunities and internships. They can also refer students to academic support services like tutoring. Beyond this organizational integration, the university also located these services in the library to increase their visibility and the ease of connecting students to other services and programs within the library; advising appointments increased 234% from 2019 to 2024.
6. Create your curriculum with employers: San Francisco Bay University (SFBU) created its general education curriculum with input from 47 leading Bay Area companies. From this engagement, they created 10 courses designed to deliver "durable skills" employers want like critical thinking, empathy, and problem-solving. Smart move considering that the top eight durable skills appear in job postings 4.7 times more often than the top eight hard skills in a study by the Center for Financial Training and Education Alliance .10 Each course is framed as a “how-to” that explicitly addresses key competences such as “How to Tell Your Story” and “How to Communicate in a Global Context.” Together, they help students develop five core competencies and be a tenacious leader, interpersonally gifted, global navigator, tech trendsetter, and enlightened thinker. SFBU attributes much of their success in achieving a 92% retention rate – 81% among first-gen and low income students – to their curriculum design focusing on career readiness and measurable competencies.
7. Combine alumni relations and career development: Alumni can be mentors, serve as clients for class projects, and recruit students as employers. Likewise, students want to explore career paths, work on experiential learning projects, and build their networks. Yet, alumni relations and career development are often separate functions. UC San Diego’s “Tritons Connect” platform links students and alumni—and often goes one step further with mentoring, pairing recent grads with execs on alumni boards. The career centers at University and William & Mary support both students and alumni—and connect the two. At the Carlson School of Management, alumni are an integral part of preparing students for networking and building industry expertise; for example, the career center partners with alumni relations and institutional advancement to organize “treks” to major metro areas for networking events, case discussions, and more that engage students and alumni alike.
8. Leverage advancement for career placement: Amidst the pandemic, Colby College's President David A. Greene made an institutional commitment to provide every graduate with a job or career opportunity. The initiative galvanized the college's entire community—particularly front-line fundraisers in advancement—to connect students with alumni, companies, or other relationships. Catalyzed by this effort, Colby is redefining career development for the liberal arts by leveraging the alumni network, aligning staff from across departments to serve as mentors and career advisors, and integrating career exploration and skill-building. Colby’s “Pay It Forward” initiative rallied alumni to generate more than 700 opportunities for the Class of 2020 and resulted in a 90% job placement in spite of economic headwinds.11 The momentum has continued with 98% of 2024 grads garnering jobs or graduate studies within a year of graduation.
9. End the info session to engage students and employers: The University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management engagement model leverages recruiting activities that foster genuine interaction between students, faculty, and employers alike. Rather than traditional, one-way info sessions that students don’t want to sit through and employers don’t want to present, Carlson has moved to engaging activities like hack-a-thons, case competitions, and training sessions where potential employers teach students like data visualization. As a result, they have seen dramatic 40% annual increases in student attendance at these employer programs, along with deeper employer partnerships and stronger student employment outcomes. Students increasingly cite these exploratory engagements as pivotal in shaping their career choices—whether discovering that accounting can be surprisingly interesting or that human resources aligns perfectly with a psychology minor. One recent alum shared, “I’m in my dream job in public accounting only because I went to one of these extra-credit events required by an accounting instructor. Without it, I never would have imagined I’d enjoy this field."
Putting It Into Practice
The challenge facing colleges and universities isn’t just preparing students for their first job; it’s about equipping them to navigate their career over a lifetime.
Institutions must intentionally weave career development into every facet of the student experience, with faculty, staff, alumni and employers working together to do so. With the ROI of higher education in doubt, improving post-graduation outcomes is imperative. But it’s more than that: It’s a way to restore a sense of purpose and belonging for a generation in crisis and prove the value of a degree in the 21st century.
Endnotes
1 Anders, George. "Hiring’s New Red Line: Why Newcomers Can’t Land 35% of Jobs." LinkedIn, August 1, 2025. Retrieved from www.linkedin.com/pulse/hirings-new-red-line-why-newcomers-cant-land-35-jobs-george-anders/.
2 The Burning Glass Institute. “No Country for Young Grads.” Burning Glass Institute, March 23, 2023. Retrieved from www.burningglassinstitute.org/research/no-country-for-young-grads.
3 World Economic Forum. The Future of Jobs Report 2023. Geneva: World Economic Forum, 2023. Retrieved from https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Future_of_Jobs_2023.pdf.
4 National Association of Colleges and Employers. "Class of 2023: Nearly 85% of Bachelor’s Grads Employed or Continuing Education Within Six Months of Graduation." NACE, 2024.
5 The Burning Glass Institute. "The Underemployment Crisis." Burning Glass Institute, March 23, 2023. Retrieved from www.burningglassinstitute.org/research/underemployment.
6 American College Health Association. National College Health Assessment III: Fall 2022 Reference Group Executive Summary. Hanover, MD: American College Health Association, 2023. Retrieved from www.acha.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/NCHA-III_FALL_2022_REFERENCE_GROUP_EXECUTIVE_SUMMARY.pdf.
7 Harvard Graduate School of Education. On the Edge: A Report on the Experiences of Low-Income and First-Generation Students. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Graduate School of Education, 2023. Retrieved from https://mcc.gse.harvard.edu/reports/on-edge.
8 Carlson School of Management. "B.A. 2021 Provides Toolset Beyond Foundational Career Skills." University of Minnesota, September 10, 2021. Retrieved from https://carlsonschool.umn.edu/news/ba-2021-provides-toolset-beyond-foundational-career-skills.
9 UC San Diego. "2024 Employment Report." Rady School of Management, 2024. Retrieved from https://cdn.uconnectlabs.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/176/2025/05/Rady-2024-Employment-Report.pdf.
10 Center for Financial Training and Education Alliance, "93% of Employers Want Durable 'Soft' Skill Development," CFTEA (blog). Retrieved from https://cftea.org/93-of-employers-want-durable-soft-skill-development.
11 Christensen Institute, "Networks Versus Net Worth: Expanding Possibilities for Alumni Engagement," Christensen Institute (blog), April 8, 2021. Retrieved from www.christenseninstitute.org/blog/networks-versus-net-worth-expanding-possibilities-for-alumni-engagement.
