By Tiffany S. Conde
Housing and residence life programs rely on student paraprofessionals to deliver peer-to-peer services as they perform a wide range of activities that support the well-being, learning, and success of their student peers. In exchange, housing departments, along with the fiscal compensation they provide these student workers, tout the developmental knowledge and skills provided by these experiences. Recognizing that it is a small percentage of these resident assistants, desk workers, and others who ultimately will choose student affairs for their career path, how can this career readiness be quantified? What does it look like to purposefully construct supervision, training, and development processes with the student’s future employability – regardless of their career goals – in mind? Enter the NACE Career Readiness Competencies, a common language many colleges and employers use to start the conversation.
The National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) defines career readiness as the “foundation from which to demonstrate requisite core competencies that broadly prepare the college-educated for success in the workplace and lifelong career management.” Launched by NACE in 2015, the Career Readiness Initiative featured a task force of career services and recruitment professionals who developed a definition of career readiness and a common set of eight competencies upon which a successful career is launched: career and self-development, communication, critical thinking, equity and inclusion, leadership, professionalism, teamwork, and technology. These competencies have been subject to both internal and external revision, resulting in the addition of specific abilities that further demonstrate skill sets desired by today’s employers. The iterative nature of the development process ensures that the competencies remain attuned to the dynamic, evolving demands of the workforce.
For all the work done to create and refine these competencies, though, NACE reports a concerning contrast between how employers perceive the students entering the workforce and how the students perceive themselves. Employers often rate the proficiency of recent college graduates lower than do the students themselves, suggesting that employers see a skills gap where college students may not. The gap widens when institutions fail to prioritize teaching students career-readiness skills prior to graduation.
Skills can be obtained through coursework, cocurricular engagement, involvement in campus life, and work experience. NACE currently focuses on institution-wide integration of the competencies within the campus environment so that faculty and staff are able to create multiple touchpoints for career readiness throughout a student’s experience within and beyond the classroom. In addition, housing and residence life programs provide a unique and distinct learning lab for career readiness, particularly given their positionality at the intersections of experiential learning, engagement, student leadership, and employment.
In working with RAs and other student staff, housing departments naturally spend a great deal of time on skills and knowledge specific to their roles, such as community building, crisis response, and campus policies. These are generally connected to the list of responsibilities that appear in an RA’s job description. To additionally support students, though, housing programs can align the training and supervision of paraprofessional positions or leadership opportunities with the NACE competencies. To deepen learning, supervisors must engage students in ongoing reflection about perceived skill development and offer performance feedback specifically tied to the competencies. With this approach, the focus begins to shift toward the skills that RAs can expect to develop.
The campus living department at the University at Buffalo provides a thought-provoking example of infusing career readiness into the RA position through the “Here to Career” division-wide initiative. When divisional leadership challenged staff to redefine student employment positions as opportunities that provide real-world skills, the NACE Career Readiness competencies provided a blueprint to align position descriptions with specific skills-centered outcomes.
“We realized quickly that campus living was uniquely positioned and ahead of the curve,” says Mary Gallivan, Buffalo’s campus living senior staff associate. “We were already doing this developmental work with our paraprofessionals through the curricular approach; it just had not yet been formalized in a common language and embedded throughout our processes. The NACE competencies gave us the easy-to-understand language we could use universally with students.”
When divisional leadership challenged staff to redefine student employment positions as opportunities that provide real-world skills, the NACE Career Readiness competencies provided a blueprint to align position descriptions with specific skills-centered outcomes.
Their work began with reviewing the description of each paraprofessional position and mapping the responsibilities as they corresponded to selected NACE competencies. Staff, including entry-level hall directors, thought deeply about what skills students would learn through the tasks, resulting in a list of subsets of associated behaviors. The process started with the question that Gallivan poses: “What are they doing in the job that will help them grow their critical thinking skills? Incident response came up [as an example]. Let’s break that down more, and we realize that incident response helps RAs with critical thinking because they’re problem-solving with limited information, assessing in the moment what referrals are needed, and what professional staff intervention is required based on protocol.” Over time, the department integrated the competencies into standardized staff evaluations, a staff accountability matrix, staff performance-tracking documents, and paraprofessional development plans. Professional staff use these unified documents to engage student staff in conversations about the impact of their work and how it has helped them develop critical skills for future employment.
This approach has been welcomed by both student workers and their professional supervisors. The students see a connection to their work and their professional life after graduation. According to Deloitte’s Center for Integrated Research, continuous learning and development opportunities are important to Generation Z, who desire workplaces that provide avenues for skill-building, career advancement, and personal growth. NASPA’s Student Employment National Research Study findings indicate that institutions should work to ensure that all student employees are provided with opportunities to develop career-readiness competencies. Meanwhile, Buffalo’s standardized position descriptions aligned with NACE competencies have also led to the development of comprehensive performance management tools. Entry-level professional staff have universal standards by which to hold paraprofessional staff accountable and support their development. The tools are purpose-built and encourage entry-level staff to have reflective conversations with paraprofessionals.
Gallivan sees the model as supporting professional staff in better developing their supervision skills. “Consistently holding student staff accountable was a challenge for our entry-level staff. The fear of student staff perceiving accountability as inconsistent or the difficulty of articulating the ‘why’ of accountability was a barrier. Through our work with the competencies, we created a step-by-step supervision guide for our new professionals. Hall directors held staff accountable more consistently and engaged in performance conversations centered on skills: for example, talking with their RA about how building community highlighted effective communication skills or how turning up late to staff meetings impacted the RAs’ professionalism and teamwork. A common language and thoughtful process made the challenges of supervision easier to navigate.”
Similar efforts are in effect on other campuses. In 2009, the University of Iowa launched the Guided Reflection on Work (GROW) initiative, which focuses on student employment as a “high-impact activity” requiring reflection and connection to skill development. The key element of the program is reflection on work that occurs through structured conversations between students and their supervisors using four questions:
According to the Iowa GROW website, “Supervisors are very important assets in helping students make these connections between work and school. Supervisors regularly check in with student employees on workflow, tasks, and assignments. Taking an extra minute or two to periodically check in . . . can be all it takes to help get some connections firing.” The GROW program has since been implemented on more than 150 campuses.
“The best part of using Iowa GROW, from my perspective, is that we’re intentionally taking time to pause the day-to-day operations and check in with the student employees to see how they are making the connections between their role and the classroom," said Becky Wilson, associate director for residence education at Iowa. "The targeted supervision questions have helped students make the connection that they are also learning skills that can help them in their future career, in addition to making connections, working on their time management, and having a job.”
A similar approach is occurring at Mississippi State University (MSU) in Starkville. After the staff determined what competencies they wanted their students to gain, they combined NACE competencies with their residential curriculum programming geared toward personal responsibility, inclusive communities, and global citizenship; MSU Student Learning Outcomes; and the MSU Quality Enhancement Plan.
While the efforts are relatively new, staff have bought into the process and are seeing benefits. As Dei Allard, the executive director of housing and residence life, explains, “We wanted to examine all aspects of student affairs that our students are connected with and look at the overall learning that the students can gain in whatever position that they're working on across campus and in housing and residence life. That could be as an RA. That could be as an information assistant working at our front desk. All these areas have various experiences.” The experience of learning while working can then be transferred to the next job. “We want our students to walk away with a certain skill level that they take with them to that next opportunity. They can advertise the things that they've learned and not just check a box [that says they know] how to do a room inventory form. We wanted to look at the bigger aspects of what students are walking away with from these experiences.”
The department has integrated its competency-based model into all its performance appraisals for professional staff and RAs. Beyond the one-on-one feedback facilitated by this approach, the cumulative results have also been used to shape future training efforts: “We take that feedback, particularly among RAs, where we see a competency that seems to be lacking. We then will apply that to our training for the following summer as well. The competency-based model has benefited us because it was nice to have tangible, real things that came from their performance that we could utilize,” Naz Chaker, the assistant director of residence education at MSU, says, adding that doing so removes the guesswork from setting a training agenda or being overly influenced by the performance of just a few staff members. “If we can see that 30% or 40% of our RAs got a two out of five in a category, we know that it is something that definitely needs to be implemented in the staff training.”
The benefits can extend even beyond the more tangible competencies being considered. Demitrius Brown, interim director for residential education at MSU, emphasizes how the system benefits both sides of the equation when it comes to supervision, a skill set that is traditionally not heavily addressed in student affairs graduate school programs. “Part of this is just inexperience,” Brown says. “They're used to being friends and mentors and all those other things, but they're not used to being a boss, which is quite a different task. I think that is layered in there, too. Not only is it an experience for our community directors here, but it's also for those student workers. For many of them, it's their first opportunity to learn what an employee-supervisor relationship is like, too.”
In many ways, supervisors are the linchpin that determines whether a student employee’s experience is meaningful or menial. In Roger Winston and Don Creamer’s Improving Staffing Practices in Student Affairs (1997), supervision is described as being one of the most complex activities for which entry-level staff are responsible, yet many practitioners have not received formal training in supervision through a graduate preparation curriculum. Housing and residence life programs have long stood in the gap to provide ongoing supervision training and development for entry-level staff. The initiatives discussed here provide a framework for institutions to redefine student employment and continually refine staff supervision practices.
Tiffany S. Conde is a senior manager of customer experience for eRezLife Software. Previously, she was the associate director of residence life and education at the University of Central Florida.
