Abstract
Career development programs are a valuable part of any student’s experience, and increasingly is an expected part of graduate school training. While such programs are commonly available to undergraduates, there is a growing need for career support to be offered to graduate students. Making the case for resources can be a challenge in this domain, however. Research on the impact of career services for graduate students and post-doctoral scholars is a growing scholarly concern. However, there remains a need to better understand what level of intervention is most appropriate: What kind of activities, how much time, and what resources would best serve the professional development needs of graduate students and post-doctoral scholars? And to answer these questions, a more foundational one: what activities are drawing the attention of graduate students and post doctoral trainees, and in what activities are they spending their time? In this manuscript, we describe how Our University approached this research question by developing an online data tracking system to capture graduate and post-doctoral trainee participation in one co-curricular professional development program. We demonstrate how this data tracking system can be used to advocate for institutional resources in career development programming, for research, and for practical purposes such as advocating for institutional support and for program design and assessment.
Highlights
Higher education scholars and administrative leaders are increasingly preoccupied by the changing career landscape for students
In our efforts to build, assess, and sustain a new career and professional development program at Michigan State University (MSU), we found one challenge to be the need for participation data specific to our institution and about our students that would help make our case to institutional leaders
There are several ways that implementation of a data-tracking system like BEST Action Inventory (BAI) make a useful contribution to the scholarship on assessment and evaluation in higher education, on the scholarship of graduate education and professional development, and for education leaders advocating for program support
Summary
Higher education scholars and administrative leaders are increasingly preoccupied by the changing career landscape for students. Students and others question whether graduate degrees, in particular, are “worth it” (Bledsoe and Oatsvall 2009; Hogan and Ramamurthy 2020; Okahana and Hao 2019) among a job landscape that remains uncertain (Carey 2020). This is not a new problem; such questions have preoccupied those working in undergraduate education for years. Graduate schools and graduate students have begun asking similar questions, prompted by changes in a job market for advanced degree holders. Many hiring managers outside academia value the maturity and problem solving skills Ph.D.s bring to a variety of jobs (Chhinzer and Russo 2018)
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