Career Development
Forum

Kick off the Forum by connecting with colleagues from across Canada and the United States to explore the issues shaping career development today.

Through interactive group discussions, participants will share the challenges, emerging trends, and innovative practices they are seeing in their work with students. Together, we’ll identify what’s capturing the profession’s attention, where new opportunities are emerging, and what questions deserve deeper exploration throughout the Forum.

We’ll then reconvene to share highlights from each discussion, uncover common themes, and create a collective snapshot of the career development landscape. Together, we’ll establish a shared context for the conversations, sessions, and ideas that will shape the rest of the 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.

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.

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.

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.

Recruiting alumni volunteers for career programming is often time-intensive, decentralized, and heavily reliant on personal networks. As institutions seek to expand career readiness initiatives and strengthen alumni engagement, identifying, recruiting, and engaging alumni whose experiences align with specific student career interests and program goals is increasingly important.

This session will showcase the development, implementation, and evaluation of the Career Connections Directory at the University of Connecticut’s Center for Career Readiness and Life Skills. This centralized volunteer-matching resource was designed to connect faculty, staff, and student leaders with employer and alumni partners.

In this session, participants will learn how a searchable, database transformed alumni engagement by streamlining outreach, expanding access to diverse professional networks, and reducing administrative burden.

Attendees will learn how the directory was designed and managed, including volunteer recruitment strategies, data collection practices, relationship management processes, and campus partnership workflows. Presenters will also share assessment results, lessons learned, and key outcomes related to participation, efficiency, and program impact.

Whether attendees are launching a new alumni engagement initiative or enhancing existing efforts, this session will provide a practical, scalable framework that participants can adapt to strengthen alumni engagement and career readiness programming at their own institutions.

What are today’s students looking for from their education, careers, and future employers? How are their career goals, job search behaviours, and expectations continuing to evolve?

Drawing on responses from more than 22,000 Canadian university and college students, this session provides an exclusive look at findings from the 2026 Brainstorm Student Interests Report. Graham Donald will highlight the latest trends shaping career development, including students’ career aspirations, use of career, co-op, and work-integrated learning services, job search behaviours, employer preferences, and the factors influencing their career decisions.

Whether you support students through career education, advising, co-op, or work-integrated learning, you’ll leave with fresh insights and practical data to help inform programs, services, and strategy for the year ahead.

Many students, particularly commuters, first-generation students, and those balancing work and family responsibilities, face barriers to participating in traditional internships. Short-term, paid micro internships can expand access to experiential learning while strengthening career readiness and institutional partnerships.

This interactive session will provide a practical roadmap for designing, launching, and scaling a micro internship program on your campus. Presenters will share the evolution of the University of Connecticut Regional Campuses’ Micro Internship Program, originally developed in response to internship disruptions during the pandemic and expanded into a sustainable model serving multiple campuses and student populations.

Attendees will learn how to identify and engage campus partners, design manageable project-based experiences, and develop structures that support student success.

Participants will leave with practical tools, implementation strategies, and adaptable ideas to create equitable, career-building opportunities that increase student participation in experiential learning and strengthen career ecosystems across their institutions.

Universities are navigating crowded engagement calendars, unpredictable student participation, and increasing employer expectations for measurable return on investment. High volume programming and loosely structured engagement models can create strain for students, uncertainty for employers, and significant operational lift for career services teams.

Over time, the Virginia Tech Pamplin College of Business Career Services team evolved its approach and developed an employer centric career development model designed to create shared value for students, employers, and staff.

Using quantitative and qualitative insights gathered from students, employers, and participation trends, the team refined existing programming and more intentionally structured employer integration throughout the student career development journey. This evolution strengthened core programming, reduced excess and unpredictable engagement activity, and created clearer, more purposeful pathways for employer involvement. The result was increased consistency in student participation, more reliable engagement opportunities for employers, and a more sustainable operating model for the career services team.

Attendees will gain insight into the data that informed these decisions, the adjustments implemented over time, and the outcomes that followed across employer participation, student engagement, and team workflow.

Leave with a practical framework they can adapt to design a more intentional and sustainable employer engagement model within their own organizations.

As part of our ongoing commitment to improve the reach and impact of our programming, the UBC Career Centre has committed to a deeper integration of teaching and instructional practices. A core part of this strategy was the hiring of a dedicated Instructional Designer and a review of key online materials.

In this session, we will share the reasoning behind the updated design of a self-paced, online course developed for students in UBC’s Work Learn program (an on-campus employment subsidy program administered by the UBC Career Centre). With a focus on lessons learned, the presenters will share how principles of instructional design can bolster engagement from students and partners alike.