Career Everywhere

Scaling career readiness across an entire campus takes more than good intentions—it takes shared language, faculty buy-in, and a whole lot of infrastructure.

In this episode, host Meredith Metsker sits down with three leaders from the University of Montana's Experiential Learning and Career Success (ELCS) office: Andrea Vernon, Executive Director; Melissa Dadmun, Associate Director of Curriculum Design and Integration; and Stacy Ulery, Associate Director of Career Success. They share how UM built ElevateU, its signature career readiness program, and scaled it campus-wide through curriculum integration, a thriving Career Champions program, and deep faculty partnership.

Andrea, Melissa, and Stacy cover:

• How a provost mandate and blunt alumni feedback sparked the merger of three offices into one
• The 10 shared career competencies UM built its work around—the NACE 8 plus two homegrown additions
• The custom AI tool they built in ChatGPT Edu to help faculty align syllabi to career competencies
• How their Career Champions program grew from a pilot to 240 champions in under two years
• The role stipends, recognition, and grassroots trust-building played in getting faculty and staff on board
• How they're measuring success and what's next as UM welcomes a new president

Resources from the episode:

• Connect with Andrea, Melissa, and Stacy on LinkedIn
• Chronicle of Higher Education case study: Embedding Career Readiness—the report that inspired this episode
• UM's Experiential Learning and Career Success virtual career center (powered by uConnect)
• UM's Career Champions program
• Griz Career Skills Program
• UM’s Career Readiness Competency (CRC) Course Attributes
• Public-facing version of UM’s Career-Ready Course Designer GPT

Continue the conversation in the Career Everywhere Community! Join 2,000 other higher ed career services leaders today: careereverywhere.com/community

What does it take to get career services a seat at the table—and keep it, through four presidents, eight bosses, and constant reorganization?

In this milestone 100th episode of the Career Everywhere Podcast, host Meredith Metsker welcomes back Dr. Josh Domitrovich, Executive Director of the Career Center at Pennsylvania Western University (PennWest)—and her very first guest when the podcast launched back in January 2023.

Nearly four years after that first conversation, Josh returns to share how far PennWest's career center has come. Formed in 2022 from the consolidation of three standalone universities in western Pennsylvania, PennWest has put Josh and his team through the gauntlet:

• Three different divisional homes (enrollment management, student affairs, and now academic affairs)
• Four university presidents
• Eight different bosses
• A nearly 50% budget cut (some of which has been clawed back)
• A 15% enrollment decline

And yet, through all of it, Josh and his team have made career services an indispensable part of PennWest's institutional identity—culminating in career readiness being a core pillar and value in PennWest’s new strategic plan (launched in 2026).

In this episode, Josh shares a behind-the-scenes look at how this all happened:

• How he and his team got invited to help write the strategic plan
• How they "infiltrated" other pillars to make sure career showed up throughout the entire student experience (not just around graduation)
• How relationship-building, strategically saying yes, and (most importantly) data became the tools that earned them a seat at the table

Josh also shares the persistence and engagement data his office tracks, what's made him stick with the work through constant change, and his advice for other career leaders hoping to do the same at their own institutions.

Key takeaways:

• Relationships are your biggest asset. Being bounced between enrollment management, student affairs, and academic affairs over four years was extremely challenging in a lot of ways. But it also meant Josh built relationships across nearly every division on campus, all of which paid off when the strategic plan process began.
• "Strategically saying yes" is a long game. Josh rarely said no to opportunities to help other departments, even when it stretched him thin. Saying yes to things like analyzing enrollment data, leading a new exploratory studies program, and project managing a state system advising grant built the credibility that eventually got career services a seat at the table.
• Data has to connect to what leadership already cares about. Josh recalls a mentor telling him: “If it doesn't touch enrollment, retention, or outcomes, don't send it to me.” Josh took that to heart and framed all future asks around those initiatives. His team built a persistence dashboard comparing engaged vs. non-engaged students, and even preemptively countered the "only high-performing students use career services" critique with GPA data.
• Career readiness shouldn't be positioned as a post-graduation focus. When career readiness was initially only included in PennWest’s “post-graduation purpose” pillar in the strategic plan, Josh worked to embed career across the other three pillars, too. That way, career readiness was woven throughout the entire student experience—a reflection of Josh’s Career Everywhere mentality.
• Curiosity beats accepting "no" at face value. Josh's approach to pushback is to ask, respectfully, what it would take to turn a no into a yes—and to treat "not now" as an invitation to try again later, not a dead end.
• None of it works without a team that believes in the mission. Josh credits his team's consistency and belief in Career Everywhere as the throughline that carried the office through constant changes and challenges.

About the guest:

Dr. Josh Domitrovich is the Executive Director of the Career Center at Pennsylvania Western University (PennWest), where he has built the university's career services function from the ground up following PennWest's 2022 consolidation from three legacy institutions. A first-generation college student and Air Force National Guard veteran, Josh holds a doctorate in Higher Education Administration and Leadership.

Under his leadership, PennWest's career center has grown its team, clawed back budget, and helped write career readiness into the university's newly launched strategic plan. Josh is a longtime member of the Career Everywhere Community and was Meredith's very first guest on the Career Everywhere Podcast back in Episode 1.

Resources from the episode:

• Josh's LinkedIn profile
• Josh's email: [email protected] 
• Josh’s first appearance on the Career Everywhere Podcast (Episode 1)
• PennWest’s virtual career center (powered by uConnect)
• PASSHE (The Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education) — the state system PennWest belongs to; referenced in connection with the multi-institution advising infrastructure grant Josh now project manages
• Six Thinking Hats by Edward de Bono — a book Josh recommends for facilitating more focused, productive meetings

Continue the conversation in the Career Everywhere Community! Join 2,000 other higher ed career services leaders today: careereverywhere.com/community

What does it take to build a 25-year career in higher ed career services—and know when it's time to walk away on your own terms?

In this episode of the Career Everywhere Podcast, host Meredith Metsker sits down with Harold Bell, who recently wrapped up 25 years as Director of Career Planning and Development at Spelman College, the No. 1-ranked HBCU for 19 consecutive years and, more recently, the top-ranked women's college in the country. Harold is a longtime NACE leader and a mentor to countless career services professionals across higher ed.

Harold traces his winding path into the field—from an early student affairs role, to a nonprofit that connected him with employer recruiting, to two corporate stints in banking and consulting, and finally to Spelman, where a key introduction (and a very direct first question: "Will you hire men?") led to a job that had quietly sat open for a year.

He talks about the proudest moments of his tenure, including helping bring career services into the classroom through grant-funded work, building out Spelman's virtual career center (powered by uConnect) during the pandemic, and being inducted into the NACE Academy of Fellows.

Harold also shares candid reflections on leadership, including why he believes your own team is the most overlooked stakeholder in career services, and why he decided the time was right to leave Spelman this past June.

He closes with what "semi-retirement" looks like for him right now, and his philosophy for anyone thinking about their own next chapter: see yourself as the answer to a problem, and the right opportunity will find you.

Key takeaways:

• Your team is your first stakeholder. Harold argues that career leaders often look outward first—to students, parents, employers—without recognizing their own staff as the biggest stakeholder in the work. Investing in your team (and in yourself as the leader) has to come first, not last.
• A winding path can be the best preparation. Harold's route to Spelman ran through student affairs, a nonprofit, and two corporate roles in banking and consulting. Each stop added a skill he'd eventually bring to career services—recruiting, training, budgeting, and leadership development among them.
• Relationships open doors that job postings don't. Harold landed the Spelman role through a networking chain: a former colleague, a mutual contact, and a search committee chair who'd already seen his resume before he applied online. As Harold puts it, “It's not what you know. It's not who you know. It's who you know, who knows what you know, and who likes you.”
• Know the signs it's time to move on. For Harold, the signal wasn't burnout or conflict—it was the sense that the work had become repetitive and that he could no longer move the needle on the things he cared most about advancing.
• Choosing your own exit is a privilege. Harold left Spelman voluntarily, on good terms, and with a proud legacy—something he considers rare and worth planning toward.
• Rest before you relaunch. Harold's framework for his “semi-retirement” transition: rest, reset, reload, relaunch. He's intentionally giving himself time before deciding what's next, rather than rushing into consulting or another career services role.
• See yourself as an answer, not just an employee. Harold's closing philosophy: sustainability in your career comes from identifying the problems you're uniquely equipped to solve and positioning yourself as the answer to them.

About the guest:

Harold Bell recently retired after 25 years as Director of Career Planning and Development at Spelman College, a private women's HBCU in Atlanta ranked the No. 1 HBCU for 19 consecutive years. Before Spelman, Harold worked in student affairs, at the nonprofit INROADS, and in corporate roles at NationsBank (now Bank of America) and EY. He is a longtime NACE volunteer and was inducted into the NACE Academy of Fellows. Harold now considers himself "semi-retired" and is exploring what's next.

Resources from the episode:

• Harold’s LinkedIn profile
• NACE (National Association of Colleges and Employers)
• INROADS—the nonprofit where Harold gained early experience connecting employers with student talent
• Spelman College's virtual career center (powered by uConnect)

Continue the conversation in the Career Everywhere Community! Join 2,000 other higher ed career services leaders today: careereverywhere.com/community

What if the single biggest predictor of a student's success after graduation isn't their major, their GPA, or even their school's brand name—but simply whether they engaged with career services?

In this episode, host Meredith Metsker welcomes back David Kozhuk, Founder and CEO of uConnect, for his second appearance on the show. David makes the case that career services engagement is the most important thing a student can do during college—more influential on outcomes like retention, graduation rates, and earnings than the major they choose or the classes they take.

David traces this conviction back to his own experience as a finance student at UMass Amherst, where regular use of the career center helped him land multiple internships and his first full-time job.

He also shares the story of how he returned to campus several years after graduating to recruit top-performing students for a few open roles at his company. Despite the marketing and promotion, a great venue, catering, and the whole nine yards, only three students showed up to his presentation. That gap between what career services offers and how few students actually engage with it inspired David to start uConnect and build the first-ever Virtual Career Center platform—now trusted by hundreds of institutions across the country. 

From there, the conversation turns to the data. David unpacks:

• Why so many institutions are sitting on a goldmine of outcomes data they aren't using
• How uConnect is helping schools connect career services engagement to outcomes data and real-time labor market trends
• How AI is now making it possible to deliver personalized, trustworthy recommendations to students at scale (no matter your career team size)

He also gets candid about what's at stake—for students, staff, and institutions—when career readiness stays a talking point instead of a funded priority, and offers concrete advice for both career leaders and senior higher ed leadership on how to close that gap.

Key takeaways:

• Career services engagement is the No. 1 influence on student outcomes. David points to data showing that students at institutions with strong, scalable career services engagement see meaningfully higher average earnings, retention, and completion rates than the NACE national average—across hundreds of institutions and hundreds of thousands of students.
• Small amounts of engagement can have an outsized impact. An hour spent in a mock interview or talking with an alum about a career path they'd never considered can do more for a student's trajectory than almost any other hour of their college experience—largely because it builds confidence, and confidence compounds.
• Non-engagement is rational, not a motivation problem. Students who don't know what they want to do often assume the career center can't help them until they do—a branding and positioning gap David sees as one of the field's biggest opportunities, especially for reaching underserved and unengaged students early.
• Outcomes data is one of higher ed's most underutilized assets. Most schools collect rich first-destination survey data but rarely operationalize it. It sits in a spreadsheet rather than informing real-time recommendations to current students or messaging to prospective ones.
• Reframe outcomes data as inspiration, not judgment. David encourages senior leaders to stop treating outcomes data as a referendum on institutional effectiveness and start using it—even a small sample size—as proof of what's possible for students in a given major or pathway.
• Intentionality is a career leader's edge. David points to other podcast guests like Barbara Zerillo (Post University) and Josh Domitrovich (PennWest) as examples of career leaders who used data to earn a seat at the table. Josh manually tracked correlations between career services engagement and institutional KPIs for years before career became part of PennWest's strategic plan.
• The stakes are institutional, not just individual. David connects career services engagement directly to enrollment, persistence, completion, and ultimately institutional revenue—arguing that as other funding sources shrink, delivering on the ROI promise of a degree becomes existential for many schools.

About the guest:

David Kozhuk is the Founder and CEO of uConnect, the all-in-one Virtual Career Center platform used by hundreds of institutions across the country. He started uConnect over a decade ago after a formative experience recruiting on his own college campus, where he discovered how few students were engaging with the career center that had shaped his own path from student to full-time offer.

David built an early prototype of the Virtual Career Center concept to help make career services more visible, accessible, and personalized for students—and has spent the years since working directly with career leaders, provosts, and presidents to connect career services engagement to measurable student outcomes.

Resources from the episode:

• David’s LinkedIn profile
• David’s article: The Answer to Higher Ed’s Outcomes Problem is Hiding in Plain Sight
• uConnect website
• Barbara Zerillo episode (Post University)
• Josh Domitrovich's episode (PennWest): Coming soon!

Continue the conversation in the Career Everywhere Community! Join 2,000 other higher ed career services leaders today: careereverywhere.com/community

In this episode of the Career Everywhere Podcast, host Meredith Metsker sits down with Dr. Nicole Hall, Senior Associate Vice President of Student Affairs and Dean of Students, and Christian Garcia, Associate Vice President of Career and Professional Development, at the University of Virginia. Christian is also Nicole's direct report—a dynamic that shapes nearly everything they discuss.

The conversation opens with trends the two surfaced during a recent fireside chat at the Virginia ACE conference: the deepening of skills-based hiring, a widening gap between internship demand and supply, the state of Virginia's growing involvement in internship policy, and the layered, still-unsettled role AI is playing in the job market.

Nicole, who currently chairs the NACE Board of Directors, brings a national data lens. Christian brings the day-to-day view from UVA's career center, where he's seeing high fair attendance and strong demand for one-on-one advising even as some employers pull back on-campus interviewing (or “on-grounds” as they call it at UVA).

From there, the episode turns to what makes this pairing unique: Nicole's path from 20+ years leading career centers into executive student affairs leadership, and her decision—negotiated during her own UVA hiring process—to bring career services into her portfolio rather than let it sit as a separate, siloed unit.

Christian and Nicole talk candidly about what it's like to work together day to day, how they balance "reading the tea leaves" with tactical execution, and the advice they'd give other career leaders hoping to build stronger relationships with student affairs (or vice versa).

Key takeaways:

• Career Everywhere means shared ownership, not shared job titles. Christian compares it to a mental-health-referral mindset: you don't need to be a career counselor to play a role in a student's career readiness—faculty, staff, peers, and alumni all have a part.
• Skills-based hiring is deepening, not just spreading. Nicole points to NACE data showing employers have moved from mentioning desired skills in job postings to building specific skills assessments directly into their application and interview processes.
• Internship demand is badly outpacing supply. A 2023 Business-Higher Education Forum survey found that eight million students wanted internships, but only about four million internships were available—pushing career centers toward creative alternatives like short-term, skills-rich projects that don't require a full semester or summer commitment.
• AI anxiety is real, but the "doom and gloom" narrative isn't backed by employer data. Citing NACE's 2026 Job Outlook, Nicole notes 61% of employers surveyed have no intention of replacing roles with AI, while about 25% are exploring ways to augment existing roles with it. The bigger opportunity for students, both guests agree, is building genuine AI literacy.
• Bringing career services under student affairs was a deliberate, negotiated choice. Nicole pushed for the structure before she'd even accepted her offer, driven by a belief that career development should be woven through the entire student experience rather than managed in isolation.
• A thought-partnership beats a reporting relationship. Christian and Nicole describe weekly check-ins built around mutual trust rather than oversight—Nicole intentionally stays "at arm's length" from day-to-day career center decisions so Christian can lead.
• Relationship-building is the real integration strategy. Christian's practice of meeting broadly across campus (352 meetings in one semester alone) helped him build trust quickly in a new role—something both guests see as foundational to breaking down silos between career services and the rest of the institution.
• Career leaders should apply their own advice to their own careers. Both guests encourage career professionals to stay open to unexpected opportunities and to release the pressure that career advancement has to mean climbing to a director- or VP-level title.

About the guests:

Dr. Nicole Hall is the Senior Associate Vice President of Student Affairs and Dean of Students at the University of Virginia, and the current Chair of the NACE Board of Directors. She spent 20+ years leading career centers before moving into executive student affairs leadership, and now oversees career services alongside orientation, fraternity and sorority life, leadership development, and other student-facing units at UVA.

Christian Garcia is the Associate Vice President of Career and Professional Development at the University of Virginia and 2024 winner of the NACE Mackes Leadership Award. Longtime listeners may recognize him from Season 1 of the podcast, when he led career services at the University of Miami. He also hosts UVA's "Living Room on the Lawn" video interview series.

Resources from the episode:

• Christian’s LinkedIn profile
• Nicole’s LinkedIn profile
• NACE Job Outlook 2026 (referenced for AI adoption data among employers)
• Business-Higher Education Forum internship demand/supply survey
• Christian’s previous Career Everywhere Podcast appearance (episode 14)

Continue the conversation in the Career Everywhere Community! Join 2,000 other higher ed career services leaders today: careereverywhere.com/community

In this second bonus episode recorded live at the uConnect booth at NACE 2026 in Denver, host Meredith Metsker puts a twist on the "Answer-a-Question/Leave-a-Question" segment from the regular show. Each guest answered a question left by the person before them, then left a new question of their own—resulting in a fun, unpredictable chain of career-focused insights and lighthearted personal stories.

Here were a few themes:

• Career services wish lists. Guests floated ideas for improving the field, from more seamless resume upload tools to better support for adult learners building online portfolios that translate previous work experience into new career paths.
• Supporting students who need it most. Several answers focused on equity and access—covering funding support for students in unpaid internships, and coaching strategies to help students with disabilities navigate disclosure and self-advocacy in the workplace.
• Mentorship as a throughline. More than one guest credited a mentor—sometimes an unofficial one—for shaping their own career path, reinforcing a theme that's come up throughout the podcast: mentorship can come from anywhere.
• AI and the human touch. One guest's piece of advice to students: don't let AI replace the personality and human element that make you stand out in a job search.
• Lighter moments, too. True to the "no rules" nature of the segment, guests also shared favorite (or hated) first jobs, childhood dream careers, go-to road trip snacks, sports loyalties, and more—showing off the personalities behind the profession.

Tune in to hear the full chain of questions and answers, live from the NACE conference floor. (Apologies for any less-than-ideal audio issues!)

Continue the conversation in the Career Everywhere Community! Join 2,000 other higher ed career services leaders today: careereverywhere.com/community

If you haven't listened to part one yet, start there first. In that episode, Dr. Barbara Blake walks through the origin story of ODU's Monarch Internship & Co-Op Office—why it was created, how it's structured, and how four distinct pathways are making work-based learning accessible to every student regardless of major, background, or circumstance.

In part two, the conversation goes deeper. Host Meredith Metsker and Barbara dig into what the office has accomplished in its first three years, how Barbara secured $8.5 million in funding from more than 20 sources, and what it looks like to turn a $5 million Mellon Foundation gift into 75 brand-new internships that never existed before. Barbara also takes on one of the field's thorniest issues—unpaid internships—and makes a compelling case for why career services leaders need to stop accepting the status quo and start advocating for change.

She closes with some of the most practical advice in the two-part series: how to find your people on campus, how to think small when it comes to grants, and why doubling down on what you do best is the right move for any career office that's stretched too thin.

Key topics covered in this episode:

• Why myth-busting is mission-critical for first-gen students—and how assumptions about unpaid internships, year-long commitments, and eligibility requirements are keeping students from pursuing opportunities that are actually available to them.
• How ODU's $5 million Mellon Foundation grant funds the Monarch Humanities Internship Academy, which pays humanities students $20 an hour—including at nonprofits that previously couldn't host interns because they couldn't afford to pay them. Since early 2024, the academy has created over 75 brand-new internships.
• Why unpaid internships deserve real advocacy, not just workarounds—and what career services leaders can do right now at the institutional level to push for change, from reaching out to faculty and departments to challenging accrediting bodies to explain and revisit policies that prohibit pay.
• What the office's biggest win actually looks like—not a funding milestone or an engagement metric, but a student who submitted 50 applications with help from the team, landed a life-changing national internship, and a student whose Congressional internship led her to write that her whole world had changed.
• How ODU's virtual internship office, powered by uConnect, launched in fall 2025 and already boasts the highest engagement rate among comparable R1 institutions in Virginia—and how the office has struck the right balance between high-touch counseling and scalable technology.
• Barbara's top advice for career leaders who want to do something non-traditional: look for the helpers, think small when it comes to grants, and double down on what your office does best instead of trying to do everything.

About the guest:
Dr. Barbara Blake is the Chief Internship Officer and Executive Director of the Monarch Internship & Co-Op Office at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. An economist by training, she has taught economics for over 20 years, conducted economic research for NATO, worked in the corporate world for companies like Hanes Mexico, and owned her own consulting business. Since launching the Monarch Internship & Co-Op Office in July 2023, her team has secured $8.5 million in funding from more than 20 funders and built one of the most distinctive experiential learning models in higher education. Dr. Blake holds a master’s degree from the University of Leeds and has published and presented original economic research in the United States and the United Kingdom.

Resources from the episode:

• Dr. Blake's LinkedIn profile
• Dr. Blake's email: [email protected]
• Monarch Internship & Co-Op Virtual Office (powered by uConnect)
• Part one of this conversation

Continue the conversation in the Career Everywhere Community! Join 2,000 other higher ed career services leaders today: careereverywhere.com/community

In this special bonus episode, host Meredith Metsker brings listeners inside the NACE 2026 conference in Denver, where she did live mini-podcast interviews at the uConnect booth and asked career services professionals from across the country the question at the heart of this show: What does Career Everywhere mean to you?

The result is a fast-moving montage of voices—more than 20 higher ed professionals, from front-line advisors to executive directors—each offering their own take in just a sentence or two.

While every answer is personal, a few clear themes emerge:

• It's not confined to one office or one appointment. Guest after guest described Career Everywhere as something that has to live outside the career center—in classrooms, dorms, student orgs, and everyday conversations with faculty and staff.
• It's a whole-institution effort. Many guests emphasized partnership: faculty sending students their way, employers showing up for more than recruiting, and every corner of campus rowing in the same direction.
• It spans a student's entire journey—and beyond. Several answers pushed back on the idea of career readiness as a single milestone (like a capstone course or a first job), framing it instead as something that starts on day one and extends well past graduation.
• Equity is central. A number of guests connected Career Everywhere directly to access—making sure career support reaches first-gen students, students without existing networks or cultural capital, and anyone who might otherwise be left out.
• Mentorship shows up everywhere. From coaches to professors to fellow students, guests pointed to the wide range of people who shape someone's career journey, not just formal career staff.

Tune in to hear the full range of answers, in guests' own words, recorded live amid the energy (and noise!) of the NACE conference hall.

Continue the conversation in the Career Everywhere Community! Join 2,000 other higher ed career services leaders today: careereverywhere.com/community

What would it look like if every college student—not just the ones who knew to ask, or had the time, or could afford to go unpaid—actually got a meaningful work-based learning experience before graduation?

That's not a hypothetical at ODU. It's the mandate.

In this episode of the Career Everywhere Podcast, host Meredith Metsker sits down with Dr. Barbara Blake, Chief Internship Officer and Executive Director of the Monarch Internship & Co-Op Office at Old Dominion University, for the first installment of a two-part conversation.

The Monarch Internship & Co-Op Office doesn't run career fairs. It doesn't do resume workshops. It has one job: make sure every ODU student—regardless of major, college, or background—has a work-based learning experience before they walk across the stage. That singular focus is what sets it apart from ODU's traditional career center, and from most career services models entirely.

That focus is also by design. ODU is a minority-serving institution with high Pell and first-gen populations and a large military-connected community—students who are statistically less likely to complete internships and who face real barriers to access, from transportation to professional attire to the simple reality of not being able to afford to work for free. Barbara built her office around the belief that those barriers are solvable, and that solving them requires dedicated infrastructure, not just good intentions.

In part one, Barbara and Meredith dig into how the office came to be, how it sits within ODU's broader ecosystem alongside the Center for Career and Leadership Development, and how four distinct pathways—for-credit internship courses, a free zero-credit co-curricular course, prior learning assessment, and prior internship recognition—are making sure work-based learning is accessible, documented, and on the transcript where employers can see it.

Stay tuned for part two, dropping later in July, where Barbara and Meredith get into the office's biggest wins so far, what their funding strategy looks like, how they address challenges around unpaid internships, and what’s next for the office. 

Key takeaways:

• Placing internships in Academic Affairs changes everything. The Monarch Internship & Co-Op Office reports to the Provost—a deliberate choice that signals internships are part of the learning journey, not an optional add-on. Barbara says she wouldn't have taken the job if it had been placed anywhere else.
• One focus. One job. Unlike traditional career centers, which carry a wide range of responsibilities, the Monarch Internship & Co-Op Office has a single mandate: help every ODU student get a meaningful work-based learning experience. That clarity of purpose is both a strategy and a cultural statement.
• Four pathways make work-based learning accessible to more students. For-credit internship courses, a free zero-credit co-curricular course, prior learning assessment, and prior internship recognition give students multiple ways to have their experiences acknowledged.
• Getting it on the transcript is the goal. Barbara's office treats the transcript as the primary deliverable. When graduates send transcripts to employers, having an internship listed there becomes a conversation starter—and a differentiator. Several ODU graduates have already reported that their transcript note was the first thing an interviewer brought up.
• You have to change the culture before you can change the numbers. The office's first priority wasn't programming—it was shifting campus-wide language from "if" students do an internship to "when." That required buy-in from the president, the provost, faculty, and staff, and Barbara credits top-down institutional commitment as foundational to the office's early success.
• Capturing invisible internships matters. Many students are already doing internships that their institutions don't know about. ODU's free co-curricular course has documented over 500 internships that would otherwise have gone unrecognized—along with the employers and students behind them.
• High touch isn't just a nice-to-have for this population. ODU serves high Pell, high first-gen, and military-connected students who need real guidance, not just a job board. Barbara describes an approach that feels more like a human resources office than a traditional career center—open Monday through Friday, no remote work, and ready to help students think through the actual logistics of getting an internship, from financial constraints to geography to timing.

About the guest:

Dr. Barbara Blake is the Chief Internship Officer and Executive Director of the Monarch Internship & Co-Op Office at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. An economist by training, she has taught economics for over 20 years, conducted economic research for NATO, worked in the corporate world for companies like Hanes Mexico, and owned her own consulting business. Since launching the Monarch Internship & Co-Op Office in July 2023, her team has secured $8.5 million in funding from more than 20 funders and built one of the most distinctive experiential learning models in higher education. Dr. Blake holds a master's degree from the University of Leeds and has published and presented original economic research in the United States and the United Kingdom.

Resources from the episode:

• Dr. Blake's LinkedIn profile
• Monarch Internship & Co-Op Office at ODU
• Stay tuned for part two of this conversation, dropping later in July, for more on the internship office’s biggest wins so far, what their funding strategy looks like, how they address challenges around unpaid internships, and what’s next for the office. 

Continue the conversation in the Career Everywhere Community! Join 2,000 other higher ed career services leaders today: careereverywhere.com/community

What does it actually take to make career services a campus-wide strategic priority—not just in name, but in budget, staff, and institutional structure?

In this episode, host Meredith Metsker sits down with Barbara Zerillo, Senior Director of the Career Development Center at Post University, to talk about how she turned career readiness into one of the institution's five official strategic pillars.

When Barbara arrived at Post about a year and a half ago, the career center was a team of three serving a large and diverse student population—including a significant online learner community. Within less than a year, she had secured approval to hire 10 new staff members, build out a comprehensive technology stack, and restructure career services as a formal institutional pillar with its own project manager, dedicated time with the president, and multiple strategic initiatives underneath it.

Barbara walks through the full journey: how she benchmarked Post against peer institutions in New England, what she included in her "Why" document for the president, how she made the case that career is not just important but that not investing is a risk, and what it looked like when the institution said yes.

She also covers the practical realities of scaling a team quickly, the role project management principles played throughout, and her honest advice for career leaders who want to do something similar.

Key topics covered:

• Stop saying "career development is important" and reframe around institutional risk
• Bring leadership into the research process through site visits, not just reports
• Mine both external benchmarking data and internal persistence data to tell the full story
• Know what keeps your president up at night and align your case to those priorities
• Why staggering your hires matters more than you think

Resources from the episode:

• Barbara's LinkedIn profile
• Post University Career Hub (powered by uConnect)
• uConnect—the virtual career center platform Post University uses, referenced by Barbara as a key part of their tech stack. Three other career centers mentioned in this episode (Bentley University, Suffolk University, and Boston University) also use uConnect.
• Career Everywhere Community—free network for higher ed career services professionals; mentioned by Meredith during the episode
• Recent episode with Josh Domitrovich of PennWest—Barbara cited Josh's persistence data research as an influence on her own internal data strategy. Other episodes featuring Josh are here and here.
• Episode with Joe Catrino of Dartmouth—another example of presidential buy-in for career services, referenced by Meredith

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