Speaker: Lee Schott, Dean for Career Development, Kenyon College
Briefly describe your program, the outcomes, and what others can take away from it.
Lee Schott: Our CDO rewards program assigns points to students for their participation across 26 unique career activities such as doing a mock interview, taking a career assessment, or recording an internship in Handshake. As they earn points, they level up. As they level up, they unlock new benefits like a one-on-one alumni mentor, reimbursement for certification exams, or entry into weekly raffle drawings. Students create usernames to be included in a public leader board that refreshes daily, and they can participate in spontaneously occurring side quests to earn bonus points, like learning about an alum's career path over Homecoming weekend. All of this adds joy to a process that many students can find stressful, but all of it centers around career education. CDO rewards resulted in an increase in engagement across our entire suite of resources this year at Kenyon. Gamification is almost expected now among college students, as one of them said, "This is exactly what they want." What I suggest is take time to learn tools that help you aggregate the engagement data you already collect in your platforms. We use Power BI for this purpose, but once you do this, a rewards program is a comparatively simple extension. By leveraging your engagement data, you can find new creative ways to incentivize the amazing resources you already offer. Thank you to NACE for this recognition. We're so honored and grateful for the award, and we're happy to be a resource to schools who are interested in building something similar.
