Career Development
Forum

Generative AI is reshaping the world of work, and many career practitioners — along with the clients they serve — are quietly wondering whether their roles are at risk. This interactive session reframes that anxiety as an opportunity.

Rather than competing with AI, career educators can lean into the distinctly human value they provide: focusing on the uniqueness of each person, making sense of lived experience (or the lack of it), identifying where a client is genuinely stuck, and building multi-pronged plans for moving forward.

The session equips participants with three practical, ready-to-use assessment tools that empower clients in ways generative AI cannot.

• First, a transferable-skills (T-Skills) identification process that helps clients build confidence, gain vocabulary for adapting their resumes, focus on employer needs, and answer interview questions with proof of ability.
• Second, the WRAP decision-making framework from Chip and Dan Heath’s Decisive (Widen your options, Reality-test your assumptions, Attain distance before deciding, Prepare to be wrong) as a structure for guiding clients through difficult career decisions.
• Third, an Employment Credibility tool, which breaks employability into five reflective domains — social, health, career, economic, and educational credibility that clients can use for ongoing self-assessment and to surface clear behavioural trends over time.

Learning Outcomes:

• Articulate the distinct, human value career practitioners offer in an AI-shaped labour market — focusing on the individual, interpreting experience, identifying where clients are stuck, and building multi-pronged plans.
• Apply a transferable-skills identification process to help clients build confidence, adapt their resumes, focus on employer needs, and respond to interview questions with evidence of ability.
• Use the WRAP framework (Widen, Reality-test, Attain distance, Prepare to be wrong) to guide clients through difficult career decisions.
• Implement the Employment Credibility model and its five domains (social, health, career, economic, educational) as a self-assessment tool that helps clients reflect on their activities and recognize behavioural trends over time.

Many career development professionals observe similar challenges among today’s students: uncertainty around professional communication, difficulty navigating ambiguity, reluctance to engage in difficult conversations, and a desire for frequent feedback and clarity. At the same time, Generation Z brings significant strengths to the workplace, including adaptability, technological fluency, creativity, and a strong commitment to purpose and inclusion.

Participants will explore common workplace expectations that students often struggle to navigate and examine practical, experience-based strategies that help bridge these gaps. Through real examples, discussion, and case-based activities, attendees will learn approaches for explicitly teaching professional norms, fostering initiative and resilience, strengthening communication skills, and supporting students as they transition into increasingly complex work environments. Attendees will leave with adaptable tools and activities they can immediately implement within advising appointments, career courses, workshops, and experiential learning programs.

Learning Outcomes:

• Identify emerging career readiness challenges frequently observed among Gen Z students.
• Apply practical strategies to teach professional communication, initiative, resilience, and workplace problem-solving.
• Adapt interactive activities and case studies for use in their own career development settings.

Modernizing co-op/internship delivery isn’t only about the student-facing experience — it happens at both ends of the program: the front end, where students meet employers, and the back end, where staff do the operational work that decides which opportunities students ever see. This session tells the story of two CEELCD initiatives at Ontario Tech University, one for each end, and what we learned building them.

First, a reverse career fair redesigned for scale: a two-session structure, a standardized five-element student-table framework, and expansion across Business, Social Science, and Education co-op programs — with results from the live November event.

Second, the Co-op & Internship Job Tagging Assistant, a custom GPT running on a free account that recommends program tags for incoming job postings faster, more consistently, and more inclusively — demonstrated live. Attendees leave with an adaptable planning framework, a replicable path to building their own practitioner-facing AI tool, and an honest look at the governance, accuracy, and equity questions involved.

Learning Outcomes:

• Redesign a reverse career fair for scale — using a two-session structure, a standardized student-table framework, and multi-program expansion — to create more meaningful student–employer conversations.
• Build and pilot a practitioner-facing AI assistant custom-GPT platform to tag co-op/internship job postings to programs more quickly and consistently, while applying appropriate guardrails and equity safeguards.
• Identify opportunities at both the front end (student–employer engagement) and the back end (operational workflows) of their own office to modernize co-op and internship delivery without expanding budgets.

Many students feel a sense of apprehension or uncertainty when they are encouraged to participate in “networking.” Yet, making connections is key to their career readiness and building confidence to launch their career.

This interactive panel will discuss ways that the team at Suffolk University in Boston, has broken down the steps to strengthen the networking muscle in our students. Bringing together students, alumni, employers and faculty in increasingly committed engagements has delivered effective results. Starting with informal interaction via “Employer Coffee Chats” and “Careers In” industry information & networking event continuing through a job shadowing experience and culminating in a mentorship with an Alum in their field of interest – this 1-2-3 sequence leans into the value of community.

Join our panel for an overview of the programs sequence and the increasingly impactful results. We will then move into break-out rooms to discuss more details and operational guidance for each of the three interchangeable steps.

Learning Outcomes:

• Identify ways to operationalize a sequence of programs that deliver aligned results
• Convey to students that aspects of career readiness perceived as daunting can be minimized through breaking down the steps
• Guide students to develop their confidence and skills to leverage conversation into a connection