UBC Centre for Student Involvement and Careers

CACEE is pleased to recognize UBC's Centre for Student Involvement & Careers with this year's Excellence in Innovation Award for Student Engagement.  In a busy world, finding new and effective ways to reach students and engage in meaningful interactions has become an ever increasing challenge.  The team at UBC's Centre for Student Involvement & Careers (CSI&C) and  UBC-Vancouver’s (UBC-V) campus-wide career centre have remained innovative and creative as they support the career needs of graduate and undergraduate students across all academic disciplines.

While career development is supported in a comprehensive and coordinated way across all of UBC's CSI&C and UBC-V's initiatives, some key accomplishments in career service innovation that encourage and enhance student engagement include:

- Cross-Campus Collaborations: Strengthened connections and alignment with career strategy and activity across all campuses including UBC-Okanagan (UBC-O).  Through monthly meetings with career leadership and broader portfolios, collaborative efforts have grown and created more opportunities to align practices and approaches.

- High-Impact Practices: Facilitation of high-impact career intervention practices (site visits) into experiential and work-integrated learning programming, specifically with new supervisors and student employees (focused efforts to support new student employees, International students, Indigenous students, and graduate students) has led to increased gains in student learning.

- Digital Transformation and Engagement: Enhanced quality and quantity of self-accessed, digital resources for students, on-campus supervisors (UBC faculty/staff), and employer/community partners around various topics including equitable hiring, supervising remote work, workplace mental health, BC Employment Standards, and traditional career management skills and behaviours (Career Activation Video Series).
This digital transformation has also contributed to increased participation and engagement across various events and workshops including an increase of 18.5% in participation in Employer and Alumni Engagement activity, 150% increase in participation in career exploration and skill development workshops, and a 50% increase in participants in career workshops that were collaborative efforts with campus partners.

- Integrated Systems Management: Targeted efforts through campus-wide CareersOnline working group representing various campus departments/units who also use the Symplicity CRM platform has established system standards and guidelines for best practices, contributing to increasing collective system knowledge and use, as well as user experience for students, alumni, and employer/community partners.

- Strategic Partnerships: Several impactful collaborations and partnerships have been forged and have contributed to student engagement with career programs and initiatives. Some highlights include:

• Career Influencer Network: Building on an ‘ecosystem’ approach to career has strengthened UBC-V’s collective campus career literacy in supporting students’ career learning. Through the establishment Career Influencer Network their impact has been seen and felt broadly through various initiatives including integrating key career messages and mindsets into first-year experience programming (Imagine UBC), professional development for faculty and staff across the institution around ‘Design Your Life’ principles out of Stanford University, and collaboratively building out a curriculum with Extended Learning to develop coaching skills with career, academic, and other advising staff from across UBC.
• Increased Investment in, and Expansion of Student Employment: Increasing financial investment from International Student Initiative (ISI) has contributed to the expansion of research opportunities for international undergraduates as well as increasing the available subsidy to enhance equitable access for faculty to fund research opportunities and ensures undergraduate students are competitively compensated given the minimum wage increases in BC.
• Restoration of funding for Work Learn has contributed to an increase of 180+ additional opportunities for students
• AlumniUBC: Shared strategy has ensured intentional integration of alumni throughout career programming, as well as contributed to increased alumni engagement with UBC.  Engaging Alumni through Mentorship has been at the forefront and recently saw participation reach 574 mentors from across various industries and sectors (agriculture & forestry, technology, theatre & film, engineering, research & development, sports, recreation & kinesiology, food nutrition & science, health & wellness), 1,174 students (46% increase from 2019-20) across six Faculties participate in 8 different mentoring programs (89% of industry mentors are UBC alumni.

Other key partnerships and relationships that have impacted student engagement include with Faculty who are working with career educators to deliver Careers in Courses and strengthening institutional collaborations with neighbouring universities on regional Career fairs and events.

Congratulations UBC!