In his Mentor article titled “Figure Out What You Love and the Rest Will Follow,” Frank (1999) explains that the hardest part about choosing a career is figuring out what you love. He goes on to say that, “If the path dead-ends, choose another one. If it goes somewhere, you may 'arrive' only to discover you'd rather be somewhere else. Interests change. That's fine. Live several lives if you can, instead of just one” (para. 10).
It is a wonderful thought, this one of exploring an alternate path, creating another life whenever we hit a dead end. But I know from personal experience that, the more dead ends one hits, the more confusing, discouraging, and futile the journey feels. Frequently we realize that there must be something more out there, but we have no idea what that something might be. In this article, we will explore the career dead ends that graduates might face and then investigate how institutions might proactively work to meet the career advising needs of their graduates.
Hitting the Dead Ends
Stop for a moment and think about the many students with whom you have worked during your career. How many of those students really knew enough about themselves and their passions at the ages of eighteen, twenty, or twenty-two years to decide on a career that would keep them fulfilled and interested for the next two, five, or even ten years, not to mention a lifetime?
For myself, a twenty-eight-year-old professional, I can already see how little I knew about myself when I selected a major for the first time, and the second, and the third. And even still I often wonder about what other options and possibilities await me. Though I was a successful undergraduate student, it was not until after I graduated from college that I became aware of what the best vocation or calling might be for me. Despite the efforts of my undergraduate academic advisers, I did not have the life experiences I needed in order to fully understand my career goals or myself. This indecision and the constant process of reinventing ourselves do not always end after graduation or after we have accepted our first “real” job.
Anecdotal evidence tells me that this dissatisfaction with one's chosen field is not at all uncommon, and research further supports this notion that people are, indeed, living “several lives,” as Frank puts it. Regardless of the reason, people are changing careers approximately three to six times in a lifetime, according to Bolles (1999, as cited in McCalla-Wriggins, 2000) and do so most often in the first ten years of their work experiences (Topel & Ward, 1992). While the changing economy is driving increasing numbers of people into alternate lines of work, many workers are merely searching for meaning, happiness, and the chance to make a difference (Imel, 2002).
Donald Super, a theorist in the field of career development, explains that this process spans a lifetime, due to both an individual's ongoing self-reflection and maturation and changes in his or her life circumstances and environment (Super, 1990). Additionally, theoretical perspectives on developmental psychology now recognize that people do make significant changes in personality across the life span rather than in only the first eighteen to twenty-five years of their lives.
Creating an Alternative Path for Alumni
It is clear that, even if advisers do their best to help individual students devise a career plan, students will continue to graduate and find that their chosen careers—if identified at all—are not working out. The question then becomes, What could/should institutions of higher education do to meet the advising and career services needs of their graduates? I would advocate for colleges to offer a developed, comprehensive alumni career-counseling service, which will benefit not only the graduates but also the institution itself.
One obvious concern about implementing such a program would be the tight fiscal environment that currently exists for most institutions of higher education. However, this kind of program might actually increase private gifts to a college or university. Sarah Shilling Ross, director of alumni relations in the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, asserts that alumni do impact an institution's financial stability and that “in order to sustain the educational quality at public universities, private support by individuals and corporations has become indispensable” (Ross, 1999, para. 7).
A Duke University study (Clotfelter, 2001) cites numerous reasons why alumni donors support their alma maters: the school has personal significance in their lives, they had a strong personal connection to at least one person at the institution, and they feel satisfied with the university as well as their current overall quality of life. When universities provide comprehensive counseling and resource services to alumni, they positively impact all three factors. And if, indeed, alumni are more likely to give when feeling satisfied with their lives, then universities would be wise to do whatever they can to help their graduates find vocational bliss. A study conducted by the Career Education Corporation (Dolliver, 1999, as cited in Brown, 2000) indicates that happiness was listed as a close second to money when working adults were polled regarding their impetus for changing jobs.
Additionally, this type of service could serve as an important mechanism for informing alumni of educational programs available for them to retool their skill sets through professional development opportunities available at their alma mater. With the rapid pace of change, particularly in the technology sector, even alumni who are satisfied with their current jobs can benefit from fee-based skill-building workshops to keep them up-to-date.
Finding a Vocational Home
Go so far as to ask alumni at your university about what is important to them. You just may find that your graduates are like the University of Virginia alumni, whose positive response to the development of an alumni career services center was “off the scales,” according to Kendra Nelsen, director of Alumni Career Services (personal communication, November 18, 2003). Since the University of Virginia's Alumni Career Services Center (ACSC) opened in 1999, Nelsen has helped alumni to explore career change, improve their business skills, and find work in a tight job market. “If, in fact, universities are committed to lifelong learning, and are not just about this class or that degree, then that needs to be paralleled with lifelong opportunity to continue learning,” asserts Nelsen.
Virginia's ACSC promotes and develops these lifelong learning opportunities by offering both free and fee-based services: an 18,000-person volunteer base of alumni for networking and informational interviewing, individual career consultation appointments, online job search tools and resources, and online personal inventories to help identify potential job matches. Either over the phone or in person, Nelsen is available to help alumni explore how to achieve their full potential.
Data that Nelsen's office has collected indicate that graduates are looking to the university for career support. Nelsen meets annually with 250 to 300 alumni for private consultations and offers basic counseling and resources to about 800 others via e-mail. Far greater is the number of hits to the ACSC website, which receives 12,000 to 14,000 hits per year, coupled with an additional 17,000 to 18,000 hits per year to the alumni networking database.
Although the University of Virginia has not studied a possible link between these services and increased donations, surveys have consistently revealed that their alumni value the opportunity to work with someone on the “intangible career coaching aspects,” as Nelsen puts it. Additionally, she notes that these services have provided an opportunity to develop an “ongoing relationship” with alumni and are a “good engagement tool other than asking them for money.” These factors link to Clotfelter's research (2001) on alumni giving and suggest that these programs will make a difference in alumni giving—if not immediately, then in the future when these clients are more settled and successful in their new jobs and careers.
Though Virginia's ACSC offers dedicated services to alumni and is funded primarily through the Alumni Association, other institutions, like the University of Baltimore, support their programs via state funding which allows them to offer the same services to both current students and graduates. Leslie Williams, director of Baltimore's Career Center, reports that despite the shared resources, she receives a great deal of positive feedback from alumni regarding their job search groups, résumé critiques, individual consultations, and networking opportunities (personal communication, November 12, 2003).
Alumni already enjoying these programs seem to be thankful for whatever assistance their alma maters can offer, and it stands to reason that your university's alumni would feel the same. The increase in job mobility is a trend not likely to change any time soon. By offering comprehensive career services to alumni, universities have the opportunity to proactively help alumni to reach their full potential and to help graduates to replace the dead ends with new beginnings.