Back when I was leading a merged alumni and career services team, I routinely got calls from other alumni and advancement leaders asking about the alignment. I’d write about the upside on LinkedIn in articles, and my feeling back then was that more colleges and universities would certainly bring alumni and career teams together under one senior leader or shift the unit under advancement, with the career leaders reporting to the advancement chief. It felt like the alignment was gaining momentum.
I’d usually clarify back then that I was part of a unique team called Strategic Operations at Longwood University, where alumni and career services was organized alongside the marketing, communications, enrollment, and student success teams. The team I led was not part of advancement — a distinction I made a point of stressing whenever sharing ideas. To this day, I’m not aware of another unit that’s similarly aligned. The alignment seems to work at Longwood.
As for career services as part of advancement, something I’ve learned more about as a consultant. I was wrong. I think it’s fair to say that at most schools, the organizational shift hasn’t worked out, and this approach remains an enigma — it feels right conceptually, but the vision at most schools that tried it was never realized.
It’s no longer a trend.
Many of the colleges that pioneered the alignment — UCSD, Colgate, Bucknell, Lafayette, and the University of Richmond — have all since moved career services out of advancement, most often into academic or student affairs. A few holdouts remain and champion the alignment, like the University of Northern Colorado, William & Mary, and Washington and Lee, where alumni and career still sit under one senior leader, or career services still lives inside advancement.
I see three primary reasons why career services, as part of advancement, remains an enigma.
Career services engagement strategies never pivoted to focus on donors
One reason to align alumni and career services under advancement should have been to converge their strategies on a specific segment: recent-to-mid career graduates who are also annual-giving-level donors in order to keep them involved. Too often, that convergence never happened.
Career services leaders were used to working with a different cohort of alumni — one whose donor status didn’t matter. They’d lean on alumni from well-known brands to anchor the recruiting and mentoring community, but rarely worked with advancement to cross-reference engaged donors and prioritize that overlap.
Advancement leaders struggled to articulate how the career-in-advancement dynamic was designed to help successfully fuel today’s campaign, not tomorrow’s.
Investment in mentoring technology has failed at the vast majority of schools
The opt-in network platform era has been rough on advancement and the alumni-career relationship. Since around 2010, approximately a dozen companies have sold opt-in networks promising alumni-student mentoring and affinity group-based engagement at scale and other features as well like calendars and newsletters. Long-time readers will probably recall my sentiments about them, but let’s just say I’ve been a “platform skeptic.”
These mentoring platforms only work when they’re grown organically, first as communities. The tech companies tried to solve alumni network access for students and recent grads in the wake of the Great Recession to find jobs, but never reinforced from the beginning the importance and challenge of building online communities and taught schools how to build them — and alumni and career teams were neither prepared nor staffed for the long game of community building. I can think of very few success stories from the prevailing technology of the last decade that was supposed to bring alumni and career teams together. Over the last five years, I’ve worked with about 50 colleges and universities. Most of them procured a platform over the last decade. They’ve been a failure almost everywhere.
The failures of these platforms created so much friction between alumni and career teams that, I’d argue, this dynamic caused a deceleration around this important cross-campus collaborations and thwarted any near-term realignment. If a merger was ever going to take place, this broad-based failure around network platform technology has created doubt and conflict around important new digital engagement initiatives that better meet the moment.
The collecting, curating, and creating of applied work and experiential learning opportunities never materialized
At the heart of this alignment is the need to do two things at once: scale volunteer opportunities that lead to experiential learning and micro-internships, and use the campus’s internal referral network to place students in the right roles.
But the teams were never given new resources to make that happen. They struggled together to build and prioritize new workflows, and mostly defaulted to the old ones: the alumni team still ran traditional events, and the career team still booked one-on-one appointments with students. The merger asked teams to stop doing things the old way and treat the work as a new enterprise — not one unit bolted onto another, but a whole new way of doing engagement from perspective student to former.
A final point: career services may belong in academic affairs anyway. The most important dynamic is that career and professional themes — along with alumni volunteers — have to be part of the classroom experience. That’s the real first step toward scaling experiential learning: making alumni involvement in the classroom expected. Everything else runs downstream from that cultural shift, in my view.
About Speaking Engagement
This week was an important milestone because we published our first guest post on Wednesday. Anna Gonzalez from Madison College writes about the four archetypes for alumni engagement.
If you enjoy writing and would be willing to share your views on Speaking Engagement, I’d love to hear from you. I offer a small honorarium and a few different types of articles you might consider.
About the Keynote for Monday
When I set out to create Speaking Engagement, I wanted to make sure to include lots of voices from the operations side of the house. My conversation next week is with Chris Cannon. Chris is the Founder of Generosity Collaborative, Inc. and former Chief Strategy Officer at the Zuri Group. Chris is also the author of two books on fundraising operations. I know you’ll enjoy my wide-ranging conversation with him.
Thanks for being a part of this community!
Ryan
Register for our Next Agora
Topic: Talent Development
Title:
Starting With Yourself: Set Mini-Boundaries to Preserve Your Capacity
Date & Time:
Thursday, July 16 from 12-1 pm ET.
Event Type:
TED-style presentation plus small-group networking and discussion
Speaker:
Ellen Whitlock Baker - Executive Coach and Leadership Consultant
Big Themes This Week
Career readiness is everyone’s job, but it still needs a leader and a central office, or it turns into chaos.
The personal board of advisors: every student should graduate with at least three alumni they can actually turn to.
Advancement and career services lose real opportunities when they gatekeep information and relationships from each other.
The young-alumni-donor overlap is a bridge, annual-fund donors who are also natural mentors and volunteers.
In an AI world, the human connection an institution can broker is becoming more valuable, not less.
Team Discussion Questions
Where do our career and alumni offices operate as if the other does not exist, and what would sharing look like?
Could we set a real goal of three alumni relationships for every student, and what would it take to get there?
Who are the young alumni already recruiting or giving that we have never thought to engage as volunteers?
Are we treating career outcomes as an engagement strategy, or as someone else’s department?
How are we helping students become builders with AI while protecting the relational skills employers still want?
