A Successful Career Development Program in Action

In 2023, Chaz Austin and Mary Cannon described how a series of nine experiential workshops at the SUNY Geneseo School of Business was built from Austin’s dissertation. Below their account, an updated section sets the program beside national graduate outcome figures and a national set of career readiness competencies.

I published my Doctoral dissertation, “A Model for Integrating a Career Development Course Program into a College Curriculum,” in January 2011. 

As I wrote,

“After teaching career development courses and coaching hundreds of college (and graduate) students for many years, it is the author’s belief that career development must become a mandatory part of the curriculum, where (a) everything a student has learned is synthesized into an awareness of the talents and skills they have developed, and (b) the student is then trained in how to sell that skill set to potential employers. It is proposed that this career curriculum be integrated into the general curriculum beginning during a student’s freshman year of college.”

I’ve designed and taught career courses to graphic artists, culinary students, fashion students, musicians, filmmakers, MBA students, and doctoral candidates. In these courses, I’ve worked with high school students as young as 14 to re-careering Baby Boomers as old as 84.

I’ve evangelized for my career training program for years, always searching for a university willing to test its viability.

Without my knowledge, Mary Cannon, BCC, MS. Ed. and Board Certified Coach, recently at the School of Business at the State University of New York at Geneseo, did exactly that. 

Mary Cannon on Developing the Curriculum

Upon arrival at SUNY Geneseo School of Business, I was thrilled to learn about their (required) professional development career series of workshops. The program’s goal was to ensure that students leave with the confidence and skills to successfully transition between the academic and professional worlds. What didn’t make sense was that the participant feedback and graduate outcomes were low. These professional development workshops did not have the intended impact. 

I dove into researching career curricula to improve outcomes and feedback. It was at this time that I discovered Dr. Austin’s dissertation. His focus on the importance of experiential instructional design resonated with me. In my previous years of teaching, he helped me realize that content drives design. For example, I taught my accounting classes differently than my entrepreneurial classes. Dr. Austin’s work allowed us to move forward as we tapped into his years of career experience and insight. Furthermore, I used his dissertation to persuade stakeholders of the value behind experiential design. 

Instructional Design for Career Development

When proposing the instructional design for the workshops, I quoted from Dr. Austin’s dissertation:

• Career development coursework is enormously relevant to the needs of students.
• Experiential learning creates meaning from direct experience and reflection on doing instead of rote learning.
• An effective experiential facilitator can immerse participants in the learning environment, stimulating their imagination and encouraging students to gain new knowledge from both their peers and the environment. 
• Base successful learning on participation and practice.
• The author’s role in designing the career development course program is to create environments where students can be active learners.

The nine professional development workshops were redesigned using Dr. Austin’s insights in his dissertation. Since the relaunch in the Fall of 2019, he has given 3,000+ students an incredible gift.  

The Success of the Career Development Program

The (redesigned) series of workshops won an “Innovative Programming” award from the State University of New York Career Development Organization, supporting 64 colleges and universities. It has consistently earned feedback ratings such as “93% of students either agreed or strongly agreed the professional development workshop they attended was helpful to their career development.”

Lastly, 94%-100% of our 2021 School of Business graduates found employment or enrolled in grad school seven months after graduation. Post redesign, the graduate outcomes for our accounting students improved by 6%, Business Administration improved by 24%, and Economics graduate outcomes improved by 29%.

I remain grateful to Nick Palumbo, a statistical genius and SUNY Geneseo’s Assistant Dean of Students for Leadership and Service. He provided the “proof,” designing multiple tracking systems and collating the participant feedback from thousands of surveys.

Chaz Austin on the Relevancy of the Career Development Program

The program requires collaboration between students, faculty, administration, parents, alums, and the business community. The workshops and courses must be mandatory for maximum efficacy. I have hundreds of individual testimonials about the effectiveness of my work. My goal is to replicate and adapt what Mary has done at SUNY Geneseo. Mary and her team provided exactly the hard data I was looking for.

Mary did it right. She got buy-in from the School of Business and the alums. Additionally, she also structured the program in such a way as to provide enough time for the participants to develop what I call a “self-marketing mindset.” Her program created safe environments and stressed the relevance of the work. Mary developed a community in which students would embrace the value of these workshops.

Mary Cannon on the Foundations of the Program

There are nine workshops in the series:

1. Designing Your Life
2. LinkedIn: Creating a Professional Profile
3. Introduction to Resumes
4. Advanced Resumes
5. Interviewing for Success
6. Advanced Interviewing
7. Networking 101
8. Job Search Strategies
9. Transitioning to the World of Work

For colleges and universities interested in designing experiential career workshops, we suggest facilitators consider the following:

1. Express respect for the students’ perspectives and time. I began each workshop with an array of eye rolls as the participants had other places to be. To capture their interest, I immediately shared the value of the learning objectives via their lens. I followed this by sharing my understanding of their many commitments. Out of respect for their time, I promised them they would leave with a handful of valuable tools they could use immediately or pull out of their back pocket when ready.  
2.  Build in time to create a safe, comfortable environment. The workshop participants didn’t know each other and ranged from freshmen to Masters students. Experiential design requires active involvement. Since I was going to ask them to share personal information (i.e., practice interviewing or networking), I prioritized dedicating time at the beginning of the class for all to get to know each other.
3. Continuously update the content to ensure alignment with best practices. The content was updated each semester, driven by weekly conversations with students immersed in the application process, recruiters, alums, Human Resource experts, and faculty. In my time as a coach, interviews and events went fully virtual, Handshake disrupted the recruiting process, and the Applicant Tracking Systems drove resume design. 
4. Build connections by making it easy for the participants to follow up by ensuring easy access to additional resources. For example, demo the Career Design website (“Make an appointment” tab) or encourage them to meet visiting alumni. 

Chaz Austin on the Future of Career Development

After 12 years in business education and over four years as a Career Coach, Mary has begun her own practice. Cannon Career Coaching, LLC specializes in 1:1 career coaching and supporting employers as they recruit, onboard, and retain Gen Z.  SUNY at Geneseo plans to continue its Professional Development Program.

My goal is to have programs like Mary’s become a mandatory part of the curriculum at every college and university in the United States. For further information, see the resources in my bio. 

Stay Connected with Career Development on edCircuit. 

The college career development program in 2026: how to plan workshops and judge results

A college career development program is a planned set of courses or workshops that helps students describe their skills, search for work and move from study to employment. Mary Cannon and Chaz Austin describe one such program above, a series of nine required workshops at the SUNY Geneseo School of Business, and they report encouraging results. This section helps colleges decide what to borrow, which national benchmarks to use and how to read outcome numbers with care.

A shared language: the NACE career readiness competencies

The National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) publishes a set of career readiness competencies. The page lists eight: career and self-development, communication, critical thinking, equity and inclusion, leadership, professionalism, teamwork and technology. NACE notes that the equity and inclusion competency is currently under review. Many career centers map workshops to this list, and the exercise is useful because it shows gaps. Geneseo’s series, for example, covers self-assessment, resumes, interviewing, networking and job search strategy clearly. A department using it as a model might ask where teamwork, leadership and technology skills appear in the sequence, whether in the workshops or in the courses around them.

What national outcome numbers say

NACE’s first-destination survey tracks what graduates are doing after they leave. On its Class of 2025 results page, NACE reports a career outcomes rate of 86.2 percent for bachelor’s graduates, up from the previous year, full-time employment of 55.6 percent, and an average starting salary of $70,317, up 5.7 percent from the Class of 2024. NACE also reports that 25 of 30 bachelor’s disciplines had improved outcomes. A college can compare its own graduate outcomes with these figures, as long as it uses the same definitions of employed, continuing education and still seeking.

These are national figures about all graduates. They do not show what any workshop series contributed, and a program that wants to claim credit for an outcome needs its own comparison.

Reading the Geneseo results carefully

Cannon reports above that 93 percent of students agreed or strongly agreed that a workshop was helpful, that 94 to 100 percent of 2021 School of Business graduates were employed or in graduate school seven months after graduation, and that outcomes after the redesign improved by 6 percent for accounting, 24 percent for business administration and 29 percent for economics. Cannon credits Nick Palumbo, the college’s assistant dean of students for leadership and service, with building the tracking systems.

Those are the program’s own figures, reported by the people who ran it, and the article does not describe a comparison group. The article does not say whether other factors, such as the pandemic and the job market, also changed in those years, so the numbers show that students rated the workshops highly and that outcomes rose, not that the workshops alone caused the rise. This does not make the program less valuable. It means other colleges should plan to measure their own results, and should be careful about repeating the percentages as proof.

Questions for a college that wants to start

1. Who owns the program, and is it required, as Austin recommends, or optional? A required series reaches students who would not volunteer, but it needs agreement from faculty and administrators.
2. How will the content stay current? Cannon updates content each semester through conversations with students, recruiters, alumni, human resources staff and faculty, and mentions how virtual interviews and applicant tracking systems changed resume advice.
3. How will students be invited to take part? Cannon began each workshop by showing students how the learning objectives served their own goals and by respecting their schedules.
4. What will the college measure, and when? Feedback ratings, placement at a fixed number of months and a comparison with earlier cohorts are all useful, and they answer different questions.
5. Where do students go next? Appointments with a career office and meetings with visiting alumni, which Cannon mentions, give workshop learning a follow-up.

Austin’s argument, that experiential learning works because students practice and reflect, is a design choice and a testable one. A college can test it in a small way by running one workshop with practice interviews, collecting ratings and comparing them with a lecture-style session on the same topic. A college that starts small, measures honestly and shares what it learns, as Geneseo has done, gives other campuses something solid to build on. Career offices that already run workshops can use the same approach, keeping the sessions that students rate highest and redesigning the rest with the participation and practice that Austin describes.

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