Career services professionals are deeply invested in the mission of higher education. They provide a crucial role in helping college students face the challenges transitioning from academia to meaningful employment. Through a variety of services, career development professionals are very good at this job. Except there is a gap that exists which is limiting the impact career services departments could be making – and this gap is seemingly widening.
Some institutions operate at a 1,200:1 student-to-career coach ratio, but at larger institutions this caseload grows to 3,000:1, which has grown considerably in recent years according to the National Association of Colleges. It doesn’t matter how talented, knowledgeable, and dedicated a career development professional is, caseload for those student populations are unsustainable.
Why are caseloads so high? As with most things, it’s a bit of everything. Funding challenges, understaffing, and organizational structure are major factors. We hear it from nearly every career services person we talk to – from the director-level on down.
When you combine career services challenges with the challenges at the application stage of the job search – with Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) filtering resumes before they even reach human eyes – that’s when you see considerable gaps appear.
Yet the expectation for career services is to deliver better services, more efficiently. To do so, these gaps in career services and at the application stage have to be closed, or at least minimized.
Fortunately, they can be.
First, we have to understand where the strain of high caseloads inside higher ed is being felt by career counselors:
Career Services Challenges Are Created By Transactional Tasks
At Jobscan, we speak with career advisors on a daily basis. They are deeply passionate about helping student. However, they feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of transactional tasks they are devoting their time and brainpower to.
Ask any career advisor and you will hear a common answer. The primary culprit? The resumes.
Some coaches we talk to book a dozen resume writing or review sessions a week. These meetings can take up a lot of time and resources.
One recent example was a career advisor who had just met with a student who was frustrated after countless job applications that hadn’t led to a single interview. She suspected his resume wasn’t tailored, and when she asked, he admitted it wasn’t – he’d tried using the ChatGPT prompts she’d provided during their first appointment, but there was still a noticeable gap.
This meeting – focused entirely on a transactional task – took up almost her entire morning.
This kind of example doesn’t even include the other kinds of transactional tasks which can take up a significant amount of time, including:
- Cover letter writing
- Cover letter review
- Interview prep
- Interview practice
The volume of transactional tasks are devouring the time of career advisors.
Where Does Your Time Go?
Let’s do a little exercise.
Ask yourself how many students you see on a weekly basis for resume creation and review service. Let’s say, conservatively, you see one student each day.
If you spent 30 minutes reviewing their resume, you’ll have spent 2.5 hours reviewing resumes all week. That’s not so bad! That’s work over a morning coffee.
What if three more students book appointments to have resumes written. Writing a resume can take more than an hour – so that’s three more hours.
What if four of those eight students that came into your office also wanted to shore up their LinkedIn profile? There’s another 30 minutes each, two hours total.
If we add up all those minutes (2.5 resume review + 3 resume writing + 2 LinkedIn review), eight students in a week will chew up an entire day on resumes and profiles.
Now keep in mind that’s being conservative. We talk with dozens of career service departments who have advisors and coaches seeing up to 10 students per week, on average. At that volume, advisors are seeing half of their week (20 hours) spent on transactional tasks (resumes, cover letters, and profiles).
This issue is exasperated when career services are working across a variety of academic disciplines or within schools, because variety and specialization both require unique skills and effort to create resumes and profiles.
Did we forget to mention the other transactional tasks career advisors are responsible for? Organizing job fairs, interview prep and practice, just to name a few.
As one Associate Vice President for Academic Advising and Career Development put it to us:
“When you stack those transactional things together and you load it on an absurd caseload, the ability to do transformative career in a comprehensive setting is almost dead on arrival…”
The Resulting Gaps In Career Services
With all the time occupied by transactional tasks, something has to give. Working with dozens of schools, and meeting with hundreds more, we have found three areas most impacted by this focus on transactional tasks:
Personalized Career Guidance
Advisors believe that their most valuable responsibility is the strategic planning for students’ career goals while also providing emotional support. However, these crucial tasks are commonly lost in the time crunch.
Students need more than generic advice – they need tailored, strategic support. Career centers are doing their best, but with limited resources and constantly shifting employer expectations, calling it an uphill battle would be an understatement. When career planning is not as personalized or strategic, every student receives the same, lesser level of care.
The process of building deeper relationships with students and developing trust takes time advisors don’t have.
Soft Skill Development
Soft skills like communication, teamwork, and emotional intelligence are essential for success. It is still essential that students possess these competencies.
Advisors provide personalized feedback and interaction to help build these competencies. They use tools like interest inventories and aptitude tests to help students understand their unique profiles and strengths. Furthermore, advisors guidance on how to improve these skills through coaching, mentoring, workshops, and other strategies.
These tasks take time to plan and personalize for every student – time that is overlooked when resources are tight.
Strategic Career Development Services
Students all have particular needs. Not every student is the same – they come from all kinds of diverse backgrounds and these differences are accentuated by their chosen school of academics.
Which is why higher education provides dozens of career development services that offer specialized benefits.
Just to name a few:
- Mentorship Programs
- Speciality Students Career Path Planning
- Scholar Programs and Fellowships
- NACE Career Readiness Competency Programming
- Student Organization Involvement
- Academic Department Programming
These programs are high impact services that students depend on because they are so specialized.
They aren’t the only services, though.
There are specialized student programs – for scholar-athletes, transfer students, or military students – which require an additional layer of guidance. Those programs are unique, requiring special care and attention.
Then career services must also make strong inroads with employers and alumni associations. As we have written before about networking, there is a considerable hidden market of jobs that students can access when career service departments are opening doors directly to former alumni or employers. When these relationship-based tasks are also underserved, students are left to tackle the traditional application route – which is increasingly more difficult.
These strategic career development services require arguably the most time and resources. Which, once again, can be difficult to find when buried under a sea of transactional tasks.
How Can AI Tools Address Career Services Challenges?
Experiences like the one we mentioned above underscore the need for career advisors to have the right tools at their fingertips.
Tools? Really?
Yes, really. Tools cannot fill any of the gaps we just talked about. But they can make advisors be more effective with the tasks they want to do more by improving their efficiency with the transactional tasks that take up all their time.
Specifically, in Jobscan’s case: resume optimization, cover letter generation, and interview prep.
With With these tools implemented in the process, career service departments and service delivery can be transformed:
Strengthening Advisor-Student Relationships
Jobscan reduces the time advisors spend on resume writing/review, cover letter writing/review, and interview prep/practice, enabling them to build stronger, more meaningful relationships with students to provide strategic, personalized guidance. This enables advisors more freedom to do career exploration with their students.
Jobscan also adds value to advisors when they combine the data from their students’ resume data with their knowledge to guide students through complex career decisions.
Soft Skill Development
Advisors provide personalized feedback and interaction to help build these competencies. They use tools like interest inventories and aptitude tests to help students understand their unique profiles and strengths. Furthermore, advisors guidance on how to improve these skills through coaching, mentoring, workshops, and other strategies.
Jobscan also adds value to advisors by reviewing the skills data from their students’ applications to develop plans for skills development.
Program Development
With found time from more efficiency in transactional tasks, advisors can dedicated themselves to long-term, strategic programming. Those mentorship programs, career pathing, scholar programs, DEI Programs, and many other programs, can finally see some attention.
Empowering Emotional Support
By handling transactional tasks, Jobscan allows advisors to focus more on providing emotional support to students during challenging career transitions, reinforcing this important – and overlooked – function in the job search process.
Research and Learning
Automating routine tasks with tools unlocks crucial self-development time for career advisors. Vital research and learning can be completed on evolving market trends, innovative coaching strategies, and specialized student needs, ensuring advisors continuously enhance their expertise and offer the most current, impactful guidance.
Not To Mention The Challenges in Student Engagement…
The current generation of higher ed students (and the ones to come) use technology like its second nature. There is an ease and, frankly, an expectation by young people that institutions provide students access to tools like this to pursue their careers.
This matters for student success. For students, tools like Jobscan act as more than just software – they are seen by young generations as one of the best ways to get the job done. The tools create an instant boost of confidence because they abridge the gap between knowledge and doing. This baked-in knowledge that tools optimize for makes students confident they can navigate the job market more strategically, turning uncertainty into opportunity.
When student satisfaction is high, engagement is made easy.
Conclusion on Career Services Challenges
The factors that have led to these gaps in career services – funding, staffing, and organizational structure – may not go away anytime soon. They’re baked into the landscape of higher education. So the question is, what if this is the norm? What if caseloads are always going to be this high?
There has to be a way to make the work more efficient and sustainable.
Well, there are solutions. Transactional tasks can be made more efficient, for one. If career coaches are spending upwards of 50% of their week writing, reviewing, and optimizing resumes, then resume work must be made more efficient to overcome career services challenges.
Automation tools can’t replicate the trust and genuine connections built by career advisors, but they can provide more time to deepen relationships, strengthen partnerships, and focus on strategic career development efforts. Transactional to transformational career counseling can be achieved when the gaps are closed.
