How Career Services and Employers Can Partner to Get Students Career Ready (feat. Leonelle Thompson)

Career Everywhere

Leonelle Thompson, Manager of Early Career at Williams and a former career services leader at Langston University and the University of Tulsa, talks about how career services teams and employers can work together to get students career ready.

Having worked in both corporate recruiting and higher education career services, Leonelle discusses:

• What career readiness means
• What skills today’s students are lacking as they enter the workforce
• Why it’s so important for the two sides to partner
• What questions career services can ask employers to open a productive dialogue
• What programming ideas employers can approach career services with
• What both sides need to know about each other’s workflows
• And more

“This partnership is so important because it shows the importance of career services. Career services has got to move away from the transactional piece… the resume writing, the mock interviews, the posting of the jobs,” Leonelle says.

Leonelle also encourages employers like herself to be more proactive and creative when it comes to pitching programming for students. Discuss with career services what skills your current interns or new hires were missing when they started their roles and create a program addressing those gaps.

With that ongoing, open dialogue, career services and employers can both make sure today’s students are career ready.

Resources from the episode:

• Leonelle’s LinkedIn profile
• Langston University’s virtual career center (with digital corporate sponsors)
• Digital corporate sponsorship program podcast episode (featuring Leonelle and Harold Bell)

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