Georgia State University Is Ensuring Tomorrow’s Workforce Is Career-Ready

At Georgia State University, instilling the skills and competencies that employers value is baked into its DNA. And just as Georgia State pioneered the tools and techniques that have made it a national leader in getting students from all backgrounds to graduation day at equal high rates, it’s also focused on ensuring those graduates are ready for the day after graduation. It’s ensuring they’re ready to thrive in the workforce.

Daniel Varitek (B.B.A. ’20) says he’s proof that Georgia State’s approach to career readiness works. After a 10-week internship at The New York Times, he spent four years in leadership in the company’s marketing organization and today works on national marketing campaigns as a project manager with Verizon. 

“I gained the hard skills from my business degree — business analysis, designing marketing campaigns, even coding websites — but just as important were the soft skills: presenting, collaborating and problem-solving,” he said. “Honestly, I still think back to my GSU classes all the time. They gave me the confidence to show up, to lead and to make an impact.” 

As part of its reaccreditation process in 2019, Georgia State chose to focus its Quality Enhancement Plan on “College to Career: Career Readiness Through Everyday Competencies” to incorporate career preparation into the undergraduate experience beginning with the moment first-year students set foot on campus. 

Those competencies align with those defined by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, and are woven into virtually every experience a Georgia State student has. 

“We’re building much more of a career-readiness ecosystem,” said Allison Calhoun-Brown, senior vice president for Student Success at Georgia State and the university’s chief enrollment officer. “We’re working to infuse and scale career experiences throughout the entire university.” 

Georgia State’s curriculum aims to ensure students are aware of what they’re learning, have opportunities to practice those skills throughout their courses and have the tools to demonstrate proficiency and mastery of those skills.

It’s one thing for students to learn and practice critical thinking skills, but it’s another to be able to tell a hiring manager during an interview that they’ve developed those skills and discuss in detail how they’ve done so. 

“We’re helping the faculty with the language to talk about career readiness in a consistent way and giving our students the language to think about it and recognize it when they’re engaging in the classroom,” Calhoun-Brown said. 

LEARNING THE LANDSCAPE

Georgia State students now also have access to real-time salary and job-prospect data across various fields. Through the Steppingblocks platform, students can see Georgia State-specific data on nearly a quarter-million anonymized graduates to learn about the skills that lead to positions at top hiring firms, and the degrees that Panthers like Kelly Strickland (B.B.A. ’23) have earned that helped them get there. 

An analyst at Visa in the company’s Consulting & Analytics division, Strickland says Georgia State’s numerous career resources and extracurriculars helped her develop work-ready skills, like discipline, time management, leadership and social skills. 

“I wouldn’t be here today without Georgia State,” she said. “By having resume workshops, job fairs, employers visit us during class — I think all of those resources combined made the transition less scary.”

As part of Georgia State’s recently adopted strategic plan, BluePrint to 2033: Our Place, Our Time, the university also identified “Beyond College to Career” as one of its four strategic pillars. The initiatives being undertaken expand on existing College to Career strategies and tools, such as the Skills Briefcase and Portfolium, which provides students and alumni a vehicle for showcasing their projects and work samples while highlighting their skills, activities and accomplishments. 

Among the BluePrint to 2033 initiatives underway is establishing a student employment program that provides rigorous practical experience along with valuable employee evaluation feedback, so that student workers learn what strengths and weaknesses an employer might perceive. The program also includes comprehensive training for student employee supervisors, “so that the employee is really able to pour into the student,” Calhoun-Brown said. 

Another strategic plan initiative already completed was the rollout of the VMock SMART Career Platform, a virtual career assistant tool. Every Georgia State student now has access to the platform, which can review resumes and provide feedback based on various academic levels, from associate to bachelor’s to graduate degree holder, and conduct mock virtual interviews with students. 

SCALING INNOVATION

Calhoun-Brown said the VMock tool is one way Georgia State is working to scale up services and programs to serve every one of its more than 52,000 students. 

“We would never be able to hire enough staff to review 52,000 resumes and provide constructive feedback,” she said. “But VMock has been trained on thousands of resumes at different collegiate levels to provide that feedback. And it allows the Career Services staff we do have to focus on bigger-picture initiatives and more sophisticated work, such as engaging with employer partners.”

Working with its National Institute for Student Success (NISS), Georgia State is also developing a new AI-enhanced career coaching platform. 

Thanks to a grant from the Strada Foundation, Georgia State is developing a chatbot that can provide students information helpful in guiding career decisions. The work follows Georgia State’s pioneering Pounce chatbot rolled out in 2017 to help incoming first-year students navigate processes like registration and financial aid. Working with the NISS, Georgia State has since then piloted course-focused chatbots that have been shown, through text prompts, reminders and chats, to be effective at reducing withdrawal and failure rates in some of the most challenging early courses.

Plans are also underway to develop virtual experiential learning modules and virtual internship opportunities that allow students to complete simulations of real-world projects and add the skills learned on those projects to their toolkit. In this way, every student has the opportunity to have an internship experience, even if there aren’t enough real-world internships available to place them in. 

The university is also incorporating the same data-driven strategy to career services it’s known for in student advising, chiefly, tracking data points across all its students in order to ensure they’re reaching career-readiness milestones — such as attending career fairs, building out their Skills Briefcase and having career-related experiences. Georgia State will soon be able to identify career-ready students and say “this is how we know they’re ready,” Calhoun-Brown said. “They’ve done X, they’ve done Y, they’ve done Z.”

The comprehensive, integrated approach to career readiness and the scalable tools — such as VMock, the career coach chatbot and big-data tools — will ensure every student throughout their Georgia State journey has the support to be successful after graduating, Calhoun-Brown said. 

“We’re moving to scale up a standard of career services for every student such that ‘career services’ is not a place that you go — it’s infused as part of the experience throughout the entirety of the university,” she said. 

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