Speaker: Meredith Metsker, Director of Content and Community, uConnect
Meredith Metsker: Hi, my name is Meredith Metzger and I'm the Director of Content and Community at uConnect. And we are the proud winners of this year's Business Affiliate Innovation Award.
Talk briefly about your program and what sparked you to develop it.
Meredith Metsker: So our program is called the Career Everywhere Movement. And it was formally launched by uConnect in January of 2023. The goals of the movement are really to shine a light on all of the important and innovative work taking place in the Career Services field, as well as to share best practices and strategies to help Career Services professionals level up their support of all students, regardless of their background or circumstance. uConnect has advanced the Career Everywhere movement in several different ways, including a popular podcast, a weekly email newsletter, a resources hub on our website full of articles, guest columns and webinars, an in-person conference in Boston last year, a new digital community this year and more.
What were you trying to achieve? Did you achieve what you expected?
Meredith Metsker: When we started the Career Everywhere movement. last year, we really wanted to facilitate conversations with a wide variety of career leaders from all institution types just to highlight their work. Because we know there's incredible things happening in Career Services right now. We see it every day in our work here at uConnect with the career centers that use our virtual career center platform. So we wanted to find a way to share that work at scale in a way that's free, accessible, educational, and also fun. So far, we've seen really enthusiastic response to Career Everywhere, including over 7,500 downloads to the podcast, over 1,500 subscribers to the Career Everywhere newsletter, over 500 members in the new digital Career Everywhere community and more.
Were there any surprises—any results you weren’t expecting?
Meredith Metsker: I think the coolest result for me personally has just been hearing and seeing all of these really cool ideas and initiatives that are going on in career centers all across the country right now. Whether it's, you know, hearing those from guests on the Career Everywhere podcast or in replies to the newsletter or in comments and posts in the community. Career leaders are doing some just incredible work and thinking really creatively about how to get more students engaged, how to help them build meaningful lives and careers, how to engage faculty and staff and parents and alumni and employers that whole ecosystem of the university. And it's just, it's been so inspiring honestly to hear all of these stories and then to feel like we have a role in helping to share those and share that work. It's, it's been really, really fun and rewarding.
How did you develop this program? What processes did you use?
Meredith Metsker: So there's a lot that went into developing the Career Everywhere movement, but what it really comes down to like how we started it and how we scaled it is just talking to people, talking to our customers here at uConnect that use our virtual career center platform and others in the Career Services industry who are all doing amazing, innovative work. We just started hearing their stories and we knew we had to figure out ways to get those stories out into the world. So that's how we came up with the podcast with the newsletter, with the digital community, with the conference last year. We just wanted to find a way to shine a light on the important work that's happening.
From your perspective, what was the single most important outcome of this program?
Meredith Metsker: From my perspective, the most important outcome of the Career Everywhere movement so far is seeing how career centers are taking the strategies that they've heard about through the podcast or the newsletter or in the Career Everywhere community, and then applying those to their work. They're taking ideas from their peers at other institutions and they're proposing them to their teams, they're adapting them from their students. And it's just been really cool to see all of these ideas getting shared and implemented to help more students build more meaningful lives and careers.
If someone wants to replicate your program, what do they need to know upfront (the first steps to take, potential pitfalls to watch for)?
Meredith Metsker: If someone wanted to do something like the Career Everywhere movement, I think the best place to start is just by having conversations with your peers, at other institutions, with faculty and staff and students on your campus and so on and hear their stories, ask smart questions and then figure out what format, what mediums are gonna work best for sharing those stories with the audience that you want to reach.
