Have a wonderful summer!

We are thrilled to invite you to CCWT's 2024 Fall Conference!

Join us for a day of learning, sharing, and collaborating with others who are committed to improving student career wellness and development through research and practice.

Students, Faculty, Staff, & Community Members are encouraged to propose 20- or 50-minute sessions in formats including panel sessions, workshops, and roundtables.

New this year! Your organization or institution can support free student participation AND get valuable PR/marketing benefits AND get discounts on the already low, low registration fees!

Over the course of the spring 2024 semester, CCWT was honored to host scholars and professionals who generously shared their expertise and helped us grow our network. We would like to extend a special note of gratitude to our guest speakers from this semester:

Kaila Bingen: Safety in experiential learning

Anderson Lee & James Mallory: Technology for deaf & hard-of-hearing students

Ran Liu & Mindi Thompson: Internship research data and practical applications

Taewon Kim: Racialized poverty among college students

Trevor McCray: Community cultural wealth

Ericka Wills: Mentoring women in the building trades

Kara Woods: History and future of land grant institutions

We post recordings of webinars that do not have poor sound or video quality on our website. You can find those recordings on our website at https://ccwt.wisc.edu/videos/. You can also search by topic through all of our video recordings on that page!

Thank you to all who joined us this semester and helped further our mission to improve student career wellness and development experiences!

If you have research or a best practice you'd like to share, CLICK HERE to let us know!

The CCWT Early Career Scholars (ECS) Program is approximately 12 months long, starting in late January 2024 and ending by January 2025. ECS aims to develop and support the next generation of scholars by promoting leadership skills and providing community to early career faculty members or researchers who have an interest aligned with CCWT’s mission.

Assistant Professor

Bryn Mawr College

Assistant Professor - Higher Education

Empire State University

Clinical Assistant Professor

Fordham University

Hora, M.T., John Fischer, J., Jang-Tucci, K., & Song, H. (2024). An integrative review of the employability literature (2005-2020): How a simplistic and individualistic view of job acquisition inhibits theory, research, and practice in higher education. Center for Research on College-Workforce Transitions. University of Wisconsin–Madison, Division of Continuing Studies.

Abstract: The term “employability” (and its close cousin career readiness) is an idea that is playing an outsized role in shaping the future of global higher education in the early 21st century. In this paper the authors report findings from a critical, integrative review of the conceptual and empirical research on employability, where the primary aim was to evaluate whether recent scholarship has addressed long-standing critiques of the concept. These critiques include its tendency to be used as an ill-defined buzzword, an over-reliance on human capital theory, simplistic views on how people get jobs that over-emphasize skills and overlook structural forces, and ambiguous and/or evidence-free recommendations for campus practitioners. Thus, it is possible that a contested and poorly conceptualized and operationalized concept is driving a considerable amount of educational practice and policymaking in higher education – a hugely

problematic proposition.

The paper calls for scholars to reject the term “employability” in favor of “employment prospects,” as it underscores how job acquisition involves a complex array of both “supply” (e.g., individual student KSAs) and “demand” (e.g., labor market conditions, global pandemics) factors, and how an individuals’ prospects are not solely based on merit but are also shaped and constrained by the structural inequality. It also offers seven methodological questions that future scholars should consider when designing studies of graduates’ employment prospects: varying perspectives on causality, alternatives to human capital theory, methods for capturing multi-dimensional phenomena, the need to foreground student and worker voices and interests, how to engage in translational research, and considerations for framing research that does not solely position the purpose of higher education as a financial return on investment but also as an endeavor to benefit the common good.

This April, CCWT Project Assistant Hee Song traveled to Tampa, FL to accept the James W. Wilson Award for Outstanding Contribution to Research in the Field of Cooperative Education and Internships from the Cooperative Education & Internships Association at their annual conference on Dr. Hora’s behalf. James W. Wilson was the Asa S. Knowles Professor of Cooperative Education and Director of Northeastern’s Cooperative Education Research Center for many years. The award recognizes outstanding contributions to the promotion and advocacy of research activity in cooperative education. The award is competitively determined and is intended to recognize longstanding contributions to the field both by participating in research activity and providing leadership for others.

CCWT Undergraduate Research Assistant Manal Hasan, a McNair Scholar, presented at the 2024 Undergraduate Symposium on April 25, 2024. Mentored by Dr. Pa Her on the Tune In to Strive Out Career Wellness & Development project, Manal’s presentation, entitled “Understanding Underrepresented Students’ Critical Consciousness with a Career Wellness Intervention,” discussed emergent themes and subthemes from the study data, and explored implications for working with underrepresented students.

In these three skill-building, self-paced courses, college educators and administrators gain a strong foundation in the theory, research, and practical applications of crucial skills in both face-to-face and online college courses. Learners examine skills frameworks, critiques of these frameworks, instructional design principles, and the science behind each of the four skills. The course features tips and strategies for teaching these skills in online courses, with a focus on instructional design, teaching, and assessment. The course is taught by award-winning author and presenter Matthew Hora, who will be actively moderating the course and providing regular feedback to each learner.

The Student Networks & Cultural Assets (NCA) team disseminated the survey instrument and conducted interviews with students as part of the second phase of their research project this semester. Students who participated in time period two received $30 Amazon gift cards for completing the survey and another $50 Amazon gift card if they were interviewed by a member of the team. Funding from the National Science Foundation supported CCWT’s commitment to compensating these research participants for their time and expertise, which are crucial to the success of longitudinal research like the NCA project.

The enthusiasm and eagerness to collaborate at CCWT’s 2023 Fall Conference was palpable. So, in the weeks and months that followed, we did some research, reached out to other programs, and examined our own programming to determine how we could more effectively serve as a resource for others. Our objective was simple: Develop a program that connects people around a common mission to facilitate partnership and collaboration. The result is the CCWT Affiliate Program. Students, faculty, staff, and community members who share CCWT’s mission to improve career wellness and development are invited to cross-collaborate in research, program development, sharing best practices, and more.

We are all engaged with, and affected by, the world of work. Career development is a lifelong process that includes tasks and decision-making related to selecting our dream job at age five, planning our major in college, transitioning to a new field, working as career counselors, and planning for retirement. This summer, asynchronous course for juniors and seniors, offered by the UW-Madison Department of Counseling Psychology, surveys foundational and emerging career development theories and interventions. A key component includes exploration of how knowledge from career development scholarship can be applied to students' own lives within a changing socioeconomic context. It requires reflection on personal development (e.g., personalities, identities, life experiences, cultures, interests, skills, needs, and values) and applies this self-knowledge to engage career exploration and planning. Those interested can find it in UW’s public course catalog by searching for CP665: Career Development Through the Lifespan.

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