Program overview
The Career Center is accepting applications for faculty, staff and select graduate students to participate in the 2025 cohort of the Career Champions program at Case Western Reserve University.
The Career Champions Program will cover a variety of career-related topics including:
- helping students with making informed career choices and exploring majors
- equipping mentors to offer valuable guidance, industry insights and networking opportunities
- enhancing students’ employability, competitiveness for graduate programs and ultimately helping them bridge the gap between academic knowledge and practical career skills.
The program will also go over resources to help participants embed career into your curricula (for those who teach) and examine existing tools that could help you connect courses with career.
Why is this important?
Creating equitable access to career education is crucial because it allows educational institutions to effectively meet the diverse and evolving needs of their student populations. Weaving career services into the fabric of the institution is vital to creating equity and access to receiving career education for those who need it the most. As student bodies grow and become more diverse, providing comprehensive career support becomes increasingly challenging. Identifying career champions enables universities to reach more students, including those in various disciplines and backgrounds, offering tailored assistance to foster career development, job and experiential education search assistance, planning for advanced education, and lifelong learning.
Based on the results of the 2023 National Alumni Career Mobility survey that was shared with CWRU alumni who had graduated five and ten years ago from their undergraduate programs, we found that 80% of alumni received some form of career advice from faculty. Additionally, 48% shared that the most helpful source of career advice was from faculty. An additional 29% indicated that a staff member including an academic or career advisor was the most helpful source of career support. This means faculty and staff across campus are having career conversations already and it is important for them to feel supported and well-equipped with resources to confidently have these career conversations with our students and alumni. We want to help you with this!
Program dates and times
The Career Champions Program will offer 10 sessions between February-November of 2025 with a break during the summer to accommodate the schedules of those who are not on campus in the summer. The dates for the sessions in 2025 are:
- Friday, Feb. 7, 10-11:30 a.m.
- Friday, Feb. 21, 10-11:30 a.m.
- Friday, March 7, 10-11:30 a.m.
- Friday, March 28, 10-11:30 a.m.
- Friday, April 18, 10-11:30 a.m.
- Friday, May 9, 10-11:30 a.m.
- Friday, Aug. 29, 10-11:30 a.m.
- Friday, Sept. 12, 10-11:30 a.m.
- Friday, Oct. 10, 10-11:30 a.m.
- Friday, Nov. 7, 10-11:30 a.m.
Levels of completion
Program participants do not need to attend all sessions but are welcome to. However, to be included in the 2025 cohort, we ask that you attend at least two sessions. The five levels of Career Champion completeness will be:
- 2 completed sessions: Career Champion Beginner
- 4 completed sessions: Career Champion Intermediate
- 6 completed sessions: Career Champion Advanced
- 8 completed sessions: Career Champion Expert
- 10 completed sessions: Career Champion All-Star
Topics covered over 10 sessions:
Career exploration
- Introduction to the Career Champions Program and its importance
- The current state of students’ career needs
- Building effective communication, active listening and empathy skills
- Career assessments and exploration: assessment tools and resources such as the FOCUS
- 2 and Clifton Strengths
- Strategies for helping the exploratory student: Motivational Interviewing, Appreciative
- Inquiry, Career Construction Interview
- Developing action plans with students
Career development
- Resume building and cover letters
- Interview preparation and mock interviews
- Networking, LinkedIn and Alumni Career Network
- Understanding industry trends and labor market insights
- Aligning student career goals with industry demands
- Working through career needs of unique student populations and affinity groups:International students, neurodivergent students, and students from other historically
- marginalized communities
Internships and experiential learning
- Learning about different experiential learning opportunities (co-op, practicum, etc.)
- Identifying and promoting internship opportunities
- Ethical and legal considerations in career support
- Resources for experiential learning search
- Success stories and case studies (student and employer panels)
The deadline to apply is 5 p.m. on Monday, Jan. 27.
Hear from 2024 participants
"The Career Champions Program was a fun and engaging way to learn about various resources and topics regarding career development that will help me support the students I work with. It was also a great way to get to know some of my colleagues better!"
"As an HR professional, I felt the topics that were covered, in each session, were current, informative and relevant for CWRU students and alumni seeking career advice."
"I really liked the diversity of the group. It is hard to find activities like this that pull people from all areas of the university into one room to share how their programs handle certain things. It is so nice to have that collective learning experience. I liked the organization of the topics and the content of the sessions. There were not too many sessions and it was a great use of time."