Speaker: Kathleen I. Powell, Chief Career Officer/Associate Vice President for Advancemen, William & Mary
Please state your full name, title, organization, and the award name.
Kathleen I. Powell: Hello, my name is Kathleen Powell. I serve as a chief, career officer and associate vice president for advancement at William and Mary. We are thrilled to be receiving the 2023 Career Readiness Excellence Award.
Talk briefly about your program and what sparked you to develop it.
Kathleen I. Powell: Professional Development Week was born out of the pandemic in 2020, when our president was keen to engage our alumni and our students and keep them connected to our university. We used the NACE Competencies as our anchor to build out that program. It went from a professional development academy of three days to a career readiness foundations asynchronous course, and it morphed into a week-long Professional Development Week. So the NACE Competencies were alive and well during that time.
What were you trying to achieve? Did you achieve what you expected?
Kathleen I. Powell: The goal of the Professional Development Week was to scale our opportunities for our students and our alumni around the NACE Career Competencies. We did achieve that goal. The inaugural Professional Development Academy had 93 unique registrants. The Professional Development Week had over 800 unique registrants. And again, it is staying anchored to those NACE Competencies. That was a win for us, and the goal is to scale and continue.
Were there any surprises—any results you weren’t expecting?
Kathleen I. Powell: I think one of the biggest wins or surprises for us when we were lifting up the Professional Development Academy during the pandemic, is that we actually had alumni and partners and faculty who wanted to stay engaged and support this initiative. It was so successful, which was a great surprise that it turned into the Career Readiness Foundation, as I said, was an asynchronous course. And we still had volunteers who served and wanted to help the Professional Development Week with the scale and it was a week.
How did you develop this program? What processes did you use?
Kathleen I. Powell: We developed the original program during the pandemic, so we were calling in tools that we had not used before. Panopto, Blackboard, Zoom. And we crowdsourced our participants to ask them which of the eight NACE Career Competencies they were interested in anchoring to, to set up the academy. And once we did that, we were off and running, and we built all the other programs using a strategy of engagement and pulling in partners.
From your perspective, what was the single most important outcome of this program?
Kathleen I. Powell: We believe the most important outcome of this program, Professional Development Week, is how our students and alumni anchored to the NACE Career Competencies. How there is an appetite for our community to be career ready and to embrace the NACE Competencies in their career trajectory. It's important for us to think about scale, to think about how we support our alumni and our students. And there's no better way to do that than to use NACE as the anchor.
If someone wants to replicate your program, what do they need to know up front?
Kathleen I. Powell: To replicate Professional Development Week, it will take a small army, if you will, to get it up and running. Not insurmountable by any means, but just knowing that it will take some heft and lift calling in partners from across the university. So alumni engagement, career development, faculty, different units across the campus to really set up a robust program.
