Q&A: How Bucknell Is Building a National Model for Integrated Career Development

Bucknell is already recognized as one of America's best universities for long-term career success. Now, the University is at work building a national model for career development at the undergraduate level — one encompassing internships, research, study abroad and activation of Bucknell's powerful and passionate alumni network.

Helming those efforts is Sean Schofield, the inaugural Freeman Family Associate Vice President and Director of the Center for Career Advancement (CCA). In his newly established leadership role, Schofield works collaboratively to strengthen the integration of career development, experiential learning, academic excellence and employer engagement across Bucknell.

At the start of a new academic year, Schofield sat down to discuss his vision for holistic career development, strategies for navigating an unstable job market and why resilience may be the most valuable skill that students can build in college.

Bucknell was just ranked the top liberal arts college for career success by LinkedIn. Why is it important for us to continue to invest in career preparation?

Resting on your laurels is dangerous because the world is changing more quickly than ever before. We're seeing this with AI and automation — we're truly preparing students for jobs that don't exist yet. So we're really focused on leaning into our liberal arts and sciences heritage, because those are the skills and competencies that will give students that ultimate flexibility with where they go. And they will carry that through the four, five or even 10 transitions that they'll make in their lives.

Being number one and staying number one will help students get through the door with employers, but then those students' expectations are always increasing. So we want to make sure that we're delivering on the promise that we're going to be there to support them. And that's what takes the investment. It takes listening to the students and the community to identify gaps and always be improving. Your shelf life at number one will be very short if you don't continue to take proactive action.

What is Bucknell doing well that you want to build on?

There is a real kind of excitement around what we've been able to build here already, and the team in the Center for Career Advancement has done a lot of really great and innovative things. We're also intentionally inviting partners into the work we're doing here. Unless we integrate into the rest of the community so that students hear the same kind of persistent message from different people, it gets lost on them, because it just becomes another thing that they have to do. Career development can't be a checkbox and it can't be something that lives off to the side. It has to be integrated into the curriculum. It has to be integrated into conversations with alumni. Students have to really feel like they're immersed in this sense that career development is really important to their experience here.

So how do the CCA and the classroom work together?

I see what I do as an extension of what the faculty are doing in the classroom. A lot of the essential skills that make students career-ready are taking place in group work, in presentations and public displays of competence, in being able to communicate, in learning to be critical. One of the unspoken skills that's most important for students right now is to be able to assess the information that they're taking in. They're learning this in the classroom: There are good sources and there are bad sources. If you make decisions based on bad data, you're basically only relying on luck to get the right answer.

So we're working with faculty members, explaining that the work we do is to support that experience for our students — and then also take it beyond the classroom. Because when students get immersed in an experience and start to feel it bump up against their values, that's an opportunity to reflect on what they've learned in the classroom. And when they have these great experiences, they bring that back into the classroom and make the conversations more robust. You know, we're all educators here; all of us are.

You've talked about the five-year career program that Bucknell is building. Why is it important to extend support to students at both ends of a four-year degree program?

In order for us to be successful and help students by the time that they reach graduation, we have to have worked with them a lot throughout their entire experience. It's a hard thing to talk about, but we do talk a lot in career development about the cycle of competence-building — we all start out being bad at stuff and not knowing it, right? And when you're bad at stuff and you don't know you're bad at it, you do not seek help.

And so initially, in the pre-work we give to students before they even arrive, we'll ask them some questions or challenge them to have experiences that showcase where they might have a gap or where development needs to take place. Because only when you're consciously incompetent do you seek out help. Only then will you say, “I'm bad at that, but I know it's important, and I need to get better.”

Working through that will lead to a lot of experiences, conversations and connections with folks who can inform them about what they need to improve, so they can work on developing that behavior over time. In career development, we're less focused on the endpoint as we are about the one thing you can do in the next two weeks to change your behavior, because that's how you build a reputation. Really, that self-awareness piece is much more essential for students than I think anybody gives it credit for.

At the end of that journey, graduates are dealing with a job market where entry-level opportunities have tightened, drastically so in some areas. What strategies do you teach students for starting out in this kind of environment?

Careers in general have destabilized. It's less important for us to help students prepare technically for a single career and more important to help them build strategies for adaptability and resilience. We're seeing AI and automation shake up industries that we didn't anticipate that they would, and we need students to be adaptable, to pivot, to learn to use a tool — those kinds of skills are more valuable at this point.

You also have to be building a network. That becomes clear to every student by the time they're a junior or senior, but to a student who’s 18, 19 years old, often it's just not on the radar. We want to help students understand that networking isn't just exchanging business cards or giving a pitch. Networking is a human connection where both people benefit from the experience.

We talk to students about how they can add value to an alum's life. Because they have a lot of nostalgia about this place, and the students are actually adding value for that alum by talking about their classes, the faculty and their experience at Bucknell. If a student waits until they're a junior and they see an internship to reach out, then it feels like they have their hand out, and alumni may resist that. That's why we have to be there early and showing students that everyone has something to gain from networking. It's about building relationships over time so that it doesn't feel icky when they need something.

How has AI affected the career landscape for recent grads?

It’s having a lot of impact right now in a lot of different ways. The workforce is completely being reshaped, and the scary thing is that most employers don't know how AI is going to shape their workforce. And so they're making these big pendulum-swinging motions — freezing hiring across the board, mass layoffs, but then rehiring to fill the vacuum because AI is not doing what we thought it could.

I think there's also a lot of fear among employers because these large language models have some inherent biases, so much so that I've worked with a lot of employers who are not using AI to screen candidates. Everybody's afraid that they're going to get screened out by AI, but a lot of employers that I speak with are saying no, we're still having human beings do the screenings because of those problems.

The essential piece that Bucknell is doing really well is in opening those conversations about how there are acceptable uses and unacceptable uses for AI. Plagiarism has never been OK, right? Laying out those barriers for students actually helps them, because they know employers will expect them to have a relationship with AI, and they want to learn to use it without doing something wrong. The conversations we're having about the ethics around AI will actually open up students to using it appropriately and to us guiding them on their usage — just like we had to do around 1996 about the internet.

When should a college student start planning for their future career? How can the career center help them with their exploration?

I'll never ask a student what they want to be when they grow up, because it's a ridiculous question. What I will ask is, what are the things that are really important to you? What are the things that you value? What are the things that make you feel best when you spend time doing them? What are you curious about, because curiosity and interest build happiness.

Following up on their curiosity is really a great career goal for them to lean into early on, and it also works in the classroom. We tell students all the time, don't pick a major based on what career you think it will lead you to, because that journey is yours; it doesn't belong to a major. Choose a major based on something you are really interested in and that you want to dive really deep into, and we'll help you translate that into what is needed for the career you'd like to do afterward.

For me, the key thing is that they see this as a long development process that continues on well after they're here; that success is not a destination but a set of everyday behaviors that are going to bring them closer each day to where they ultimately want to get. Starting out, the most important thing students need to understand is that there's this entire brilliant community of supporters that's built around them, and we are all very excited to get started with them.

Bucknell's Class of 2030 just arrived on campus a few weeks ago. How will their experience be different thanks to the investments Bucknell is making in career advising?

I think that we're going to be unavoidable to them, and that's really important. If a first-year student does not have a career person kind of in their face, it will be very easy for them to push career development off until they absolutely need it, which is usually junior or senior year, or never to use it. I tell students constantly, I want you to drink this place dry. Take advantage of everything. We have intentionally built so much here to help you. And if you don't do that work, then you're going to miss out on a lot that your peers are going to get.

As we continue to build partnerships, I also think that students are going to see it integrated more into their classes, into their residence halls and around this whole campus. The life of the mind and becoming well-adapted citizens are essential functions of college, and that never will change — it's actually the heart of what we do. But I don't think anybody wants the knowledge that they build to be esoteric. I think that they want it to also be translatable into a variety of things, so that they can change the world with that knowledge. And I think that's the work that career development does.