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By Joe Boomgaard | Knowledge
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GRAND RAPIDS — If the business world is rapidly changing and colleges and universities are trying to use the same old tools in career services, there’s a high potential for a disconnect that West Michigan can ill afford to have occur.

In essence, that notion underlies the mission of the Grand Rapids Community College Keller Futures Center in their recently completed “Future of Career Services” project, unveiled in late May at Grand Rapids Public Museum, the host location for the 7-week, 42-hour project.

The project had a group of business, K-12 and higher education and community members assembled to discuss how the community might provide a service model to meet the future needs for career services, including placement, retention, identifying candidates and so on, said Tina Hoxie, dean of student affairs at GRCC.

GRCC’s career services department commissioned the center to delve into the topic, with the goal of getting creative ideas about how the community, broadly defined, might develop a “more relevant, integrated, collaborative and sustainable” model for those services.

Bill Fluharty, content developer and program facilitator for the Keller Futures Center, said early context building exercises led to five main focus areas, three of which the project team honed in on to think about potential new innovations. Within each opportunity area, the project team then came up with ideas of how to address those concerns. The participants defined those areas as:

• Whole U, a holistic approach to developing a community-based network of services for students to access through some sort of portal. Ideas ranged from the Big Blue Door — a realigning of GRCC’s counseling services to integrate helping with life issues and not just course selection, as well as connecting students to the right resources — to Map Your Future — an interactive exercise that would take into account a student’s academic history and personal experience and develop a step-by-step plan of action for a student to get into her desired career.
• Get Up and Go, an opportunity for partners to help students develop self-awareness and confidence, whether on their own or through interactions with local businesses and resources. The team suggested the creation of a V-Series — a program to give students a comprehensive analysis of where they are in their knowledge and abilities — and an Employer Dialogue Series — which would maximize networking and internship opportunities to provide students experience in areas of defined need in the workforce.
• Career Simulator, which involved creating a toolkit for students to simulate their career paths using information from and hands-on experiences at local businesses. Ideas included Project Pool — a way for students to gain hands-on experience by completing a project for a business and simultaneously providing a way for the company to get fresh eyes on a project and observe students for potential hiring opportunities — and Better than Farmville — a gaming environment, informed by employers, for students to explore various career paths.

“One of the things that struck us is that students, regardless of age, need a variety of ways to engage with this process (of career development). … All of these really model the ability to customize for the individual based on how they take in information and how they learn,” said Deb Bailey, director of corporate communications at Steelcase Inc., member of the GRCC Foundation board of directors and a participant in the project, referring to the suggestions as a whole.

The business influence can be felt throughout the suggestions, said Kevin Keil, an industrial engineer in electrical assembly at Gentex Corp. and a member of the project team. By focusing on outcomes — a career for the students and a prepared workforce for the businesses ­— both sides of the equation can benefit.

“The end result is experience … before a person steps into the market. To work, all these things have to combine for a different feel for career services,” Keil told Knowledge. Career services need to move away from the traditional model to a system that guides students into careers that fit their interests and experience and at the same time helps business shape its future direction. “That’s how partnerships build — if career services are freed up and become more scalable and the resources they’re using are geared more toward what future things are coming.”

Liz McCormick, director of innovation at GRCC, said the goal of the project, and the Keller Futures Center as a whole, is to find unmet needs and opportunities and work with the community to craft sustainable ways forward.

“This is about people on two levels. How do people engage in new ways … across silos in maybe ways they haven’t engaged before? And it’s about people and their skills and learning,” McCormick said. “If we know that the tools and processes of the last two decades haven’t been giving us the results we want, how do we keep what’s good about that and layer on some new skills, some new tools and new processes? That’s foundationally what the Futures Center is.”

Video Link:
http://youtu.be/KOyKL7lPL5o

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• bill fluharty
• grand rapids
• grand rapids community college
• liz mccormick