Bridget Burns
speaker
389 appearances
6 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard May 2025
Bridget Burns’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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And I just say that my problem is the architecture of this entire sector would make it so that we would hunker down and work alone independently and wait until we feel like we have a peer reviewed article to publish before others find out what we've been doing. And students cannot afford to waste that time.
Yeah. In 2017, we partnered with Strata Education Network to, as a next, we do a big change initiative. So like predictive analytics, chatbots, proactivizing, our whole thing is scale. So we take a model from one place and scale it on other campuses and we learn a method for scale. Like how do you need to adapt that idea so that it survives and thrives in a different ecosystem?
And then we create playbooks for the rest of the sector to learn from us. So That's been our model, scale. But we ran into this issue in 2017 of this issue of college to career. There's nothing to scale.
There are lots of little tiny things out there, but we recognize that the entire... We've come at this work thinking with the baseline belief that higher education was never designed around students. And that's the problem. And it was especially not designed around the students that we need to serve. Low-income, first-gen students of color. So...
Then we get to college career and it's, oh, my gosh, if we thought if we thought we had bad design once, watch out, because when you look at career services and just that model and that approach, it became very clear that was a manifestation of what we're talking about.
And we agree with you about the the students measure their success by it's much more nuanced and complex, but they want a job, of course. So we did a multi-year initiative to actually come up with, instead of the scale, it was about innovation, which was how should this be if we were to design it based around the needs of students and specifically use design thinking.
If you could reimagine that whole college to career handoff around the needs of students where you could actually make up for privilege. Meaning if you looked at the data that a student from a low income background would have the same kind of results or outcomes as a high income student who comes in with a deep social network, etc.
And so we got seven universities together to first we started with process mapping, as always, to understand just how bad is this?
because the system seemed really dysfunctional for students you have a office in some basement somewhere with like a tiny budget um that nobody wants to go to other than to get their resume looked at and so we first started with this false assumption we quickly checked which was let's see all the things that career services is responsible for and then let's like map those things and let's look at their kpis and then we would be able to benchmark against those and try and improve those that's what we thought it turns out
step one is we didn't have any kpis because nobody was actually tracking any data we had no idea that if you wanted to measure the number of students who go into career services from certain backgrounds they don't have that data they don't even know how many people come in depending on who you're talking to like they just they're overwhelmed the i one of my institutions had 70 000 students and they had two people in the office of career services
And that was a bust. And we also mapped all of the things that campuses did around career services. And we found out the vast majority had no relationship with career services. Oh, man. So if we were trying to fix career services, we were in trouble because it turns out most of these things report to the deans or they're over here in this other office.
And no surprise, there's nobody at the end of the day who's responsible for career services or career outcomes for students. It's just very distributed. And that's a formula for chaos. So that gives us... So already we're wrong in our design, but we've learned a ton.
We also then get all the career services folks together and we engage in a series of empathy sprints where we interview hundreds of students across all these campuses about what success in college would look like, what kinds of experiences have been most valuable to that end, what they've been struggling with, all that kind of stuff. And use those empathy insights to then generate...
create design charrettes and design thinking sprints where we actually came up with prototypes of what would it look like if we actually designed this part of the higher ed system around the needs of students and came up with seven different prototype models that are then our next step was you could not implement your own idea. And so Ohio State had to implement another campus's idea.
Riverside, University of Central Florida, they all had to implement someone else's idea. And that was a way for us to not fall in love with our own idea. And then COVID happened. Despite that, much of that kind of calibrated it down a bit. But despite that, we did end up developing a robust playbook and a clear picture of how you should design that whole space.
And the spoiler is there are several of the models that actually still live today. In fact, University of Central Florida just announced a $10 million gift to match COVID. their initiative that came from that project. Now it's several years later, and they're just continuing to expand it. The outcomes have been improved.
But again, it was hard for us because we couldn't baseline because it turns out nobody captured that data. It wasn't as scientific as we expected it to be, but... What we figured out is the only place that all students go is the classroom.
And so instead of an office shoved in a basement, the answer is that career services people, professionals, they should be reimagined as instructional designers. And they should be coaches for faculty to embed career readiness into every single classroom, starting from the first class a student takes. They should have a career readiness experience, activity or exercise.
They should engage and learn from alumni who are working in the field. They should be doing team-based learning. They should be doing work where we actually use what is called NACE competency language, which is like language that you could use in a job interview to describe what you did in a class. And so it's things like that. It was also paid virtual and in-person internships, micro internships.
We implemented those. It was a variety of other suite of solutions. You can download the playbook on our website. So that's what we've done thus far. I would say COVID was a disruptor for us in a significant way because building change management was really hard during that time. But now
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