USU Career Design Center Receives Award for Innovative Career Education

LOGAN, Utah — The Utah State University Career Design Center received one of five 2023 Career Innovation Awards on Wednesday, April 26. The award, given by the Career Leadership Collective, celebrates unique and impactful career development initiatives.

“We are honored that the Career Leadership Collective selected USU to receive the Career Innovation Award,” said Kevin Schwemmin, executive director of the USU Career Design Center. “I am incredibly proud of the work our team has done as we work to engage all students in the career design process.”

Jillian Morley, USU assistant director of the Career Design Center, was on hand to accept the award. Morley submitted details of the Career Design Center’s newly created Canvas course, which contains modules on a variety of career development topics.

“This award recognizes that we are making great strides and progress towards our center’s mission of empowering all students to design their career path,” Morley said. “It also recognizes that we did not get here alone. Thanks to supportive administration and a shifting culture around embedding career education into the institution, we have been able to be innovative and try new things. There is still a lot of work to do, but we are well on our way!”

As Utah’s land grant university, USU is responsible for students who live across the entirety of the state. However, the Career Design Center currently has a small team of seven career design specialists. While the center enjoys doing one-on-one sessions, specialists felt they were only able to serve about 10% of students at any one time. The center decided it would look for alternatives. One of these alternatives was creating a class on Canvas that could get students started in the right direction.

“This scalable and asynchronous approach has allowed us to serve so many more students,” Morley said.

The class covers several career development topics, such as career exploration, resume and cover letter writing, interviewing skills, networking strategies, job offer negotiation, graduate school application preparation, and more. By creating this class, the Career Design Center was able to provide more accessible career development information to the entire student population and to be able to reach more students at once.

The creation of the Canvas class involved the creation of a committee of career design specialists. Through multiple hours of collaboration, the team was able to learn the ins and outs of Canvas and create an effective curriculum within the platform. After a year of development, the class was launched in Fall 2022. The class was targeted to first year students, especially those who remained undecided on their major, and sought to help them learn about many career development topics.

Career Design also collaborated with USU Advising to help import undecided students into the class and to invite them to participate. Since its inception, the class has grown 20-fold, going from an initial 100 students to now more than 2,000 active students.

“Through collaboration with Exploratory Advising, we have been able to introduce Exploratory students to resources very early to help them explore their major and career options,” Morley said. “This has helped us give Exploratory students more resources in a timely manner so they can feel more confident in making their major decision and plan ahead for career paths.”

In addition to course materials, the course also allows the Career Design Center to deliver relevant and timely information to students. This has allowed the center announcements to reach more students, especially those not located on the main campus.

The center is working on adding even more elements to help engage students even further, such as badging elements as well as additional course materials. These improvements will make an even bigger impact on students and their career development.

For more information on the Career Design Center’s career tutorial Canvas course, visit www.usu.edu/career-design-center/career-tutorials.