Handshake’s Post

Had the pleasure of attending the Handshake workshop yesterday at the University of Chicago. What an amazing experience to hear from the Handshake team, and also a lot of Higher Ed partners, to work with and bounce ideas off of each other. Here are my key takeaways from yesterday: 1. Career fairs and networking events are still relevant. There has been conversations around whether or not employers are still wanting to come to college campuses to recruit students. Employers do you still want to come however, we need to make sure that the timing of events is right and there needs to be value for both students and employers. 2. AI is here and it is here to stay. We as Higher Ed institutions need to leverage AI technology to help coach our students on how to use AI, best practices, and how to safely and effectively leverage AI for their educational journey and professional journey. It is important that there is still human connection, but being able to have AI as a “sidekick” is the new way forward. 3. It’s not about competition, it’s about collaboration. We work in Higher Ed and in the career services field to help students prepare for life after college. And sharing resources, tips and tricks, and best practices across different institutions is something that has to be done more. It’s not a competition, we all have the same goal, and collectively, we need to lean on each other to help our next generation on young professionals. 4. Handshake is meeting students where they are. This is something we are always big on at Maryville, is meeting student where they are at, and getting student feedback to make informed decisions. Handshake has done this in a big way by introducing The Feed. Much like an Instagram feed, students now can see posts from peers, employers and our career services offices to see important information that is tailored to them. I am excited to see this in action this year with our students. 5. Leverage data to build strong partnerships. Handshake has lots of great tools and resources to help track data, report data, and it just keeps growing the things we can track. But data about employers and are partners can help us in guiding students to these “powerful partners”. Looking into how many alumni work at each employer, the internships they offered, and then in turn they hired that same intern full time etc. it is allowing us to see this more easily and I am excited to leverage it! Thank you Handshake for the invite and thank you to all of the Higher Ed partners and peers I met yesterday. Christine Y. Cruzvergara