An Institutional Point of View: Make It a Great Academic Year

For most of our PathwayU schools, summer is coming to a close, students are beginning to arrive on campus, and there is an air of hope that this will be a great fall semester. But the race is long, and there will be many semesters over the next 12 months. The question still lingers; how do we make it our best academic year?  

If you’re an institution that embraced PathwayU you are well prepared for some of the challenges ahead and have many answers to that question well in hand. 

Empowering Your Learner

For our students, financial supporters, or guardians of our students, PathwayU schools can deliver this assurance.  Your learner will not only be getting a tremendous education but also world-class wrap-around student services. You can provide them with self-discovery and use predictive science to help them explore career or vocational pathways after graduation that will be filled with purpose and meaning.  This will empower them to choose their best and most compelling major.  With these insights, students often show better academic performance and higher graduation rates and feel a deep sense of value in their education investment.

What if you are a faculty member, a student service leader, or an administrator at a PathwayU school?  Now is the time for planning and building services to get the most out of your PathwayU investment to make sure you are doing everything you can to super-charge your career readiness programs and you embed PathwayU into all you do.

Career Choices & Major Selection

As a PathwayU school, we want to make sure we are providing our freshmen science-informed guidance around career choice and major selection throughout their first academic year. Summer, fall, and spring orientation is a great time to administer career assessments and provide career coaching through workshops or one-on-one advising.

But consider that while students’ underlying interests and values don't change, their aspirations can. Early successes or failures in the classroom will provide additional input into career choices. A student will still profile for a career in medicine, but that C in freshman chemistry could portend a career as a radiology technician over a journey to medical school. Consider programming opportunities in the first-year experience to re-evaluate assessment results, particularly for students still struggling in the classroom.

For sophomores and juniors, PathwayU schools are stepping up their career readiness training. At the Fogelman College of Business at the University of Memphis, we are redesigning a sophomore/junior business communications class to incorporate job search and life skills. Students revisit their career assessment results and complete a series of assignments building off their reaffirmed or newly-discovered career goals:

• Conducting and reporting informational interviews with professionals in their desired career paths,
• Preparing resumes and cover letters that emphasize their personal interests and values as ‘gifts’ will make them motivated employees,
• Researching local or national employment opportunities through the PathwayU job connector,
• Researching and conducting professional presentations on the training and experience they will need to progress on their chosen career paths.

Student Services for Rising Seniors

For seniors, PathwayU schools are integrating PathwayU into career and job fairs. Student services can download and share aggregate data about their graduating seniors, so employers have a good sense of the numbers of students who fit the jobs they are trying to fill.  Students can be encouraged to review their profiles and their career readiness training to come prepared to talk to recruiters with confidence about their passion for open jobs and why they ‘fit.’

Finally, as graduating seniors transition to alumni, the alumni associations can provide long-term access to the PathwayU platform as a strategy to keep their graduates sticky. PathwayU schools understand that it’s not enough to provide quality education to their students. To survive and thrive, colleges and universities must provide the means for their students to understand where they fit in the world of work, how to get there, and how to stay there.

They understand that by steering students towards their purpose, they can boost student achievement in the classroom, improve retention, raise graduation rates, and connect students to local employers. They understand that an effective career platform that works not only improves the career readiness of its students but the stability and effectiveness of the local workforce.

Learn more about what PathwayU can do to help you transform your student’s academic year ahead and their future career path by scheduling a demo today.