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Having successful career outcomes is important for colleges and also for students, but getting students to engage in career services can feel like an uphill battle.

A May 2024 Student Voice survey by Inside Higher Ed found just about one-third of college students had no experience with or no opinions on their career center staff. Research from the National Association of Colleges and Employers shows a correlation between students who utilize their career center and the number of job offers a student receives. 

Lebanon Valley College in Pennsylvania decided to bring careers to students with an event called the LVC Success Expo. On the day of the expo, LVC cancels classes so students can engage in an all-day career fair or meet with academic support staff to ensure their success in and after college.

In this episode of Voices of Student Success, host Ashley Mowreader spoke with Tomomi “T” Horning, vice president of college partnerships and strategic initiatives, and Jasmine Bucher, senior director of the Breen Center for Career and Professional Development, to learn more about the event and campus partnerships and how it contributes to a larger institutional mission.

An edited version of the podcast appears below.

Inside Higher Ed: Give me the 30,000-foot view of the Success Expo. Where did this idea come from?

Horning: This is our third year undertaking this initiative, and we’re so pleased at how it’s developed and changed and improved over that time period.

The original genesis was we wanted to make sure that students had dedicated time to develop a success plan, whether it involved academic advising, career and professional development services. So [staff at] the provost office and the Breen Center for Career and Professional Development got our brains together and said, “What if we canceled classes on a day in the spring and really dedicated, marshaled all of our resources together to make this happen?”

This includes a whole variety of programming, events, presentations, interactive workshops, some fun, but mostly on that adulting 101 idea around making sure that our graduates are as optimally prepared to enter the workforce as possible.

Bucher: One of the things that I think is so extraordinary, not only is it that we do have this dedication of truly not having classes that day, and our students know that is worked right into their academic schedule, but also that the career and success expo really reaches beyond just our doors here on campus as well.

Not only inviting our community members, [but] K-12 leaders in those different areas as well as high school students come with those leaders to really see what [college] could be [like]—even the questions to ask when starting your career plan. But also our alumni and our faculty, who are a huge part of this day.

Not only do our faculty come to support our students in their advising and what comes next in their career exploration, but they’re really reminded about the resources that we have, the services we provide and how that weaves in and out of not only the time that students are here at Lebanon Valley College, but also beyond … graduation. We have alumni who are welcome—they come back and they learn so many incredible things, as well as make connections with potential employers.

Inside Higher Ed: A lot of colleges and universities will have career fairs throughout the academic year—I’m thinking about new student orientation, where there’s club fairs and different ways to get plugged in on campus. But I love the timing of this event, and that it’s in the spring term, and maybe when students already have questions, or they’re thinking about internships.

I wonder if you can talk about how the timing is strategic and making sure that all students are captured and those different interests or questions that may be coming up during that point in their academic experience?

Horning: I would say it’s not only strategic in terms of in the calendar year, helping maybe graduating seniors prepare for that entry into the workforce, but as you indicated, preparing for summer internships, which is a very popular time for students to be out in the field.

But also it operationally manages some opportunities we have in the fall and then making sure that those same opportunities are spread out in the spring. So sometimes, based on student schedules, they just can’t get around to it in the fall, and some of our fall events are more dedicated to specific lines of career or specific industries.

This pathways to professions, all-majors career fair—which is part of the larger success expo event itself—gives that opportunity for everyone at the key time that they need to be thinking about these things, to have access to the resources and as well as the employers through specifically the career fair itself. It’s an opportune time for those students to make those connections.

Bucher: And it really helps our students be well prepared for it. They’ve been working throughout the year on résumés, cover letters, even mock interviewing skills and knowing what that is like, having their elevator speeches ready so that they can really speak about the skills that they’re learning, not only in the classroom, but also through our services here in the Breen Center. I really like this time of year. I think it fits well with where the student brain is, but I think it also works really well so that we can help support them in the success of that day.

Inside Higher Ed: Totally. I think about lower-level students who might still be career exploring and trying to understand how their major ties into that first job after college. By the spring, they might have figured it out by March, or at least have an idea of where they’re going, versus that first week of first semester, where it’s like, “What is happening right now?”

Bucher: Or at least have an idea at that point of sort of the fields they would like to continue to explore. It’s not at all about finding the end of a journey. It’s about the next steps on that journey. So this day provides wherever that is—if they’re going off into the employment world, we have information in sessions that help them with decisions around insurance and the next steps of what comes in repayment of loans and all of the things that is that adulting 101 piece.

But also, if it’s students who are just getting into [career thinking], what would it be like to have a meal with future employers? We have an etiquette dinner that day where we can help to teach those skills as well. It’s really hitting up all of wherever they are in their career journey and whatever that is, really trying to make sure that we are thinking about how they’re best prepared to take that as well. Because nothing is worse than when you’re getting all this information thrown at you and you’re not ready for it, right? That’s why we want to be there, making sure they’re well prepared.

Inside Higher Ed: You bring up an interesting point in that sometimes these events can be overwhelming for students. A career fair, I know as a college student, was a very scary experience. You never know how to dress or how to prepare, and obviously your career center is there to guide you in that experience and prep you for that.

But at the success expo, how do you make sure that students know how to navigate these situations? What are some of those forward-looking messages that you’re giving to students to make sure that this is something that they are taking advantage of and are getting the most out of?

Bucher: Absolutely, as someone who spends a great deal of time figuring out how we communicate that to students who are in all different places, and alumni and all of the different pieces—making sure that we have a schedule that can be broken down very well. Making sure our communication is very much around providing those opportunities for wherever you are.

If you’re looking for sessions that help support and prepare you, those are there. If you’re ready to jump in and meet future employers, we have all of these wonderful employers. We make sure that we are communicating to the students who [the employers are] are ahead of time, so they’re not coming in blindly.

We have a robust website that has information on it; our social media campaign will be very robust this year to help with that messaging as well. So that may be, instead of it being overwhelming, because they [feel they] have to incorporate the entire day on all those pieces, but really being able to see where they can make the most of their time.

They’re busy, and even a day without classes, they could be studying, they could be preparing for finals, they could be doing a lot of things, so making sure that they know the choices.

And also making sure we’ve got some fun in there. We’ve got some great speakers. We have Tunji [Adebayo] who’s coming in, talking about picking yourself up from failure. Where you are anywhere on the journey, we all need to know how to be resilient and do that. So some things that aren’t so much about, “this is what you do in the career,” but “this is what you do in life.”

Jack Hubley is coming in and is going to speak not only about what it’s like to work with the birds that he has trained all this time. He’s such a celebrity in this area, people are pretty familiar with he does. But also, how do you do that and stay on brand? If you’re working with live animals and you’re in environments that are not always predictable?

So trying to make sure that we have this clear idea of skills beyond just what you see as career is also an area where we think would help students to not be as overwhelmed and know that we’re there to help them through this process.

Inside Higher Ed: You’re going into year three of this event. When it comes to logistics, or how the event has scaled up, can you talk a little bit about those partners that are involved in this work? We’ve mentioned a few different groups and stakeholders on and off campus, but who’s going to be there in the spring?

Horning: We do extend an invitation to K-12 partners, and mostly it’s going to be high school students who are interested in a field trip opportunity to get to understand what higher ed is like. But also, some of the sessions that Jasmine mentioned, those we purposefully choose to make sure that it’s a broad-reaching topic that any of our K-12 partners would benefit from hearing, not only the educators that bring the students as chaperones, but also the students themselves, right? Picking yourself up from failure is one of those life lessons that anybody can benefit from.

We also try to make sure that the concept of career development is woven into the day as well. Some of our high school students will get exposure to how internships themselves may help direct someone deeper into the trajectory of what they had hoped to achieve upon graduation, and sometimes completely flip it, 180 degrees through an internship experience. They learn those life lessons that, through experiential learning and high-impact opportunities, they may want to readjust what their career outlook is like.

Through the community, we also connect with the Chamber of Commerce to make sure that if there are things like venture capital or even some of the entrepreneurship opportunities. That if there are businesses with young people, or maybe recently just graduated college—maybe the alumni want to start their own business—that they have access to some of these workshops where they can talk to experts or talk to students who want to get into that business, maybe to do some idea sharing, networking.

We all know that professional networking is just one of those great benefits of bringing people together.

The college community, and even within Annville, it’s a small little quaint town here, but we make sure that our employer partners know about our restaurant and eateries that are in town. We make sure that those venues and opportunities of connection [are known] to make sure that we’re pushing business to make our local community thrive as well.

Inside Higher Ed: I don’t want to get too high-level here, because this is obviously focused on a specific event, but it seems like this is really fulfilling a lot of those goals of higher education, right? Helping students navigate their pathways to and through college, helping students thrive while they’re enrolled but also beyond college. But then continuing to invest in your local community with that socioeconomic development and those community partnerships. This is one day, but it seems like it’s connecting a lot of these bigger pieces of the puzzle to the institutional vision, which is really exciting.

Bucher: It’s very true to the Lebanon Valley College mission and method of what has always been very true and practical and hands-on and community-oriented, and so it stays very true to who we are. There are so many incredible initiatives that T has in mind and has been brainstorming for years. Me, as a new person on this staff, I’m incredibly excited for all those things, but we always bring them back to the mission, exactly what you’re saying, which is that they have to be true to the mission, otherwise we would be spinning our wheels in 100 directions that don’t make sense.

Inside Higher Ed: One group that we have alluded to but haven’t talked about a lot is faculty on campus. I wonder if you can talk about their role in this event and how they’re incorporated.

Bucher: We work very closely with our faculty to incorporate curriculum directly into their classroom, and we are as helpful as possible. Several of us on the staff here are educators ourselves; we teach courses.

Some of the specific ways are students who need to come [to the event] and interview specific employers and then provide reflections and pieces like that. So we help to provide the structure to that to faculty members who are very happy to partner with us.

But then we even have exciting things going on, like we are piloting an app this year for wayfinding through [the event]. So we’ve partnered with a marketing professor who is going to have a portion of her class use the app, a portion of the class use nothing and a portion of the class explore other items.

We’ve really taken the opportunity to not just do sort of the traditional, yes, you can come and attend and reflect and do it, which is wonderful, of course, but also to really integrate into the curriculum in meaningful ways and in ways that give the students experience on that day for true, real-life experience. Our faculty are very keen on this. They’re thrilled for the partnership, and so are we. It’s one of the things that a school this size and energy of Lebanon Valley College really allows you to do.

Horning: Something else that I would add, too, is some of our specific academic programs are able to incorporate opportunities to marry not only their academic program, but also employers and create opportunities for the collaboration.

For example, we have the Pennsylvania State Department of Environmental Protection coming, so [the faculty member is] weaving that into environmental sciences, the academic curriculum. Also as an employer, they’re looking to recruit interns and potential future employees. So really connecting all of those dots to make sure that we’re optimizing the program time that we have on this day.

Specifically because classes are canceled, we know that that also puts a hardship on some of the faculty to make sure that they’re covering all of their academic points. So finding creative ways to incorporate that, just like Jasmine said, with marketing, there are definitely ways that faculty are creatively making sure that they’re driving participation also to our events. We’re very appreciative of, just generally, the partnership that happens across campus.

And of course, a lot of the sessions, like I said, are relevant to any audience. So if they wanted to do some sort of professional development, we have something on customer service, and that’s something that we’re rolling out as an institution that could be relevant for any staff person or faculty.

Inside Higher Ed: What kind of feedback have you heard from students over the past few years as you’ve created and led the event, and how has that driven decision-making, if at all?

Horning: We always try to keep our surveying or feedback assessment from students to the point: “Would you recommend coming to this event? Why or why not?” Or “Did you have any recommendations for changes? Why are you making those recommendations?”

And I think over all, the feedback has been very positive. Mostly all of the suggestions are logistical in nature, which can be easily addressed. I think students are hungry for it. This is our third year doing it, so I think there is now a knowledge and an understanding of what students can expect. So maybe coming in future years, they’ll have more substantive feedback, like, “I would like a session on fill-in-the-blank,” but we try to hit those high-level adulting 101 topics as best as possible with the input from our student workers.

Some of our student workers will actually go upstairs [on campus] and survey some of the students: “Hey, if it was a choice between this session and this session, what would you prefer?” We try to [work in] real time as we’re developing programming and workshop ideas, make sure that that student voice is incorporated from the get-go.

Inside Higher Ed: When you talk about adulting 101, can you give a few examples of what those subject matters are?

Bucher: Some of the items that we have going on: understanding your student loans and repayments. Pieces like that obviously are in the forefront of our students’ minds. They work hard. Every dollar means something and how that repayment is, and really understanding it afterwards, is not easy.

Some of the other things I mentioned before, discussions around insurance, so in their next stages of life, they’re going to be having to choose [insurance coverage], and I was saying to T this morning, it doesn’t get any easier. I’ve been doing it for 20 years now, and it changes all the time, our choices in insurance, whether that’s health insurance and the other pieces of that. I was just talking about pet insurance yesterday. So there’s so many decisions to be making, and what’s worthwhile and not.

In many ways I think the etiquette dinner really calls into that as well. Once you’re outside of the walls of school, expectations change, and you expect something different of yourself, [but] just having that confidence and knowing what comes next. That has been an event that has been around the college for quite some time, and I really appreciate that it’s been incorporated into this day, remembering that it’s part of the next steps. So sort of from morning to night, it’s woven into all of our many, many events throughout the day.

Horning: I would just add there are other things that, you know, the event happens in April, and so we’re still going through the process of adding some additional workshops.

Some things that we have brought back from year one are things like credit cards, car loans and common-sense investing. So just a primer; we’re not trying to overwhelm students, but present to them what options and what type of decisions they will have to make as an adult.

And along with that, Jasmine mentioned about insurances, and we actually have a senior who is going to go into personal financial planning as a career track; he will be employed by a wealth management firm. And we thought, “Hey, why don’t we pair entrepreneurship with a hands-on workshop?” So he’ll be providing consultations. It helps him practice his skill set becoming an entrepreneur and providing those professional services along with the students, so they get an understanding of, “Gee, when I’m out there, these are the types of questions I will be asked if I have an appointment with a personal financial planner.”

A lot of just realistically making sure that students understand the variety of adulting 101 decisions they will have to make, and then hopefully educating them to be better prepared.

Inside Higher Ed: I love that idea of a peer who can support in those ways, because it’s a little less intimidating than asking somebody you’ve never met before, somebody who’s decades older than you. There’re no silly questions when it’s a classmate.

Bucher: And then they tend to continue that conversation, then with other peers, which is really what we want, right? We want to put this out there in a nonscary way, so that it can infuse out to the student body.

Horning: You really bring up a strong point there. We have recognized that the peer-to-peer learning and education is really important. Whether it’s mentoring, trying to identify peers with common experiences that you can start a conversation with the comfort of knowing, “Oh, you had my professor. You lived in my dorm.” Those types of connections are so invaluable.

Even the program about credit cards and car loans, we specifically tap into one of our corporate sponsors that runs a management trainee program so it’s employment at that particular place of business. And we ask those individuals so they’re like, one to three years out from graduating college, they’re the ones that present on those topics because those are also the decisions they recently made, and now, with the backing of their employer, which is a financial institution, they’re able to speak a little bit more eloquently about what those options might be.

Inside Higher Ed: If you had to give advice to a colleague at a different institution or someone else who wanted to model this on their campus, what’s something that you’ve learned or advice that you would give?

Horning: I think the biggest piece of advice is make sure that the communication and the collaboration across campus is set at the highest levels of leadership. Without the support of the entire community, people are going to wonder what the benefit is or what the return is for their areas. But this truly is a multistakeholder, an entire-campus event, and it has to be treated with that level of engagement. So leadership and just making sure the communication and the coordination, also that everything is moving without a hitch, occurs.

Bucher: I completely agree. This was an initiative started before I worked in this office, and I remember being incredibly impressed knowing that the institution was fully behind it, and that was clear because it was from the top down.

I think really remembering the audiences that it’s serving has also served us really well. I think I would just remind people to really keep in mind who those audiences are, making sure you know that that pairing of young alumni with students, so that they’re not feeling fearful of what’s coming next or intimidated—all of those pieces really lead to success.

Inside Higher Ed: The event is looming; it’s in the next few months. What is something that you’re excited for or something that you would like to tease our audience with as you’re preparing for the event in April?

Bucher: I’m extremely excited for the wide variety of items that are offered here and scheduled, if I could say so, in a really smart manner, so that students can sort of pick and choose throughout the day what creates the best journey for them on that day.

I’m really excited for the communication that’s coming to say, you want to work on your personal brand? Here you go. Looking for an internship? Come and hear how interns have been successful and what has led to that.

I’m just really excited for sort of that audience-speak that really gets to offering to people the really nice variety of pieces that are making up this exciting day.

Horning: Because this is our third year, I’m just excited that it feels like we have found our groove, and people are anticipating this event. People are excited and they want to get in on the action. And I think that is exciting to us in the Breen Center, because we do this because we want it to be of value to the community, and the fact that people are eagerly waiting for this and asking about it, talking about it, just builds the energy, builds the enthusiasm.

I’m looking forward to a great third year and making sure that, again, we’re delivering on the promise of making sure our graduates are really well prepared and that we are behind them 100 percent.

Listen to previous episodes of Voices of Student Success here.