IU Framework for Academic Advising & Career Development
Core Outcomes and Expectations
August 2024
Core Outcomes and Expectations
August 2024
The "IU Framework for Academic Advising and Career Development" outlines Indiana University's commitment to delivering high-quality, equitable academic advising and career services to all students across its campuses. This framework applies to all professionals in the Academic Advisor and Career Services Consultant roles within the IU Job Framework and is designed to ensure that students receive consistent, comprehensive support as they navigate their educational and career paths.
The task force, initiated on April 11, 2024, by Vice President for Student Success Julie Payne-Kirchmeier, PhD, aims to establish common core student learning outcomes and professional expectations to enhance advising and career development. The framework integrates evidence-based strategies, promotes cross-functional collaboration, and centers equity to address the needs of historically underserved and excluded students.
Key components of the framework include:
The framework also highlights the importance of dismantling hidden curricula, integrating career planning with academic advising, and promoting work-based learning. By adopting these practices, IU endeavors to ensure all students are well-prepared for their academic and professional journeys, helping ensure their long-term success.
This framework outlines Indiana University's commitment to high quality academic advising and career services for all IU students, regardless of their major or campus of study. Applicable to all professionals in the Academic Advisor and Career Services Consultant role descriptors within the IU Job Framework, this document provides a guide to the expected core outcomes and expectations associated with the strategically important work of these educators. It also includes the institutional responsibilities that unit-, campus-, and university-level leaders should fulfill to empower these educators to accomplish the work described here. By integrating evidence-based strategies, encouraging cross-functional collaboration, and centering equity, this framework is designed to ensure all IU students are supported to navigate their education and career preparation experiences with confidence and clarity.
We envision a future where all IU students are equitably informed and empowered to engage with academic advising and career services professionals to achieve their academic and professional goals.
We endeavor to center equity in our work by prioritizing the experiences of students whom IU has historically underserved or excluded. These students bring immense cultural wealth, talent, and professional promise to IU’s campuses, which the institution often squanders by failing to remove structural barriers to information, to academic and professional pathways, and to resources and opportunities.
Dismantling inequities and creating equity is the responsibility of every Indiana University employee. Academic advisors and career services professionals are uniquely positioned to play a role in addressing these barriers by prioritizing historically underserved and excluded students in proactive, early outreach based in asset-minded approaches and by working to educate students about the hidden curricula. The Assessment Recommendations section includes examples of these priority populations of students whose experiences will be centered in evaluation of our work.
The hidden curricula of higher education and the world of work are great impediments to an equitable university experience, particularly for students who have been historically underserved or excluded, broadly defined. The "hidden curriculum" refers to the unspoken, implicit rules and norms within formal education and workplace institutions that advantage those familiar with them, while disadvantaging those who lack prior knowledge and awareness (Margolis, 2001). Academic advisors and career services professionals can work to demystify and help eliminate hidden curricula when they:
IU has adopted a university-wide expectation that all staff in the Academic Advising and Career Services job framework families will be trained on and employ a coaching-based approach in their work. This is in recognition of the strong empirical evidence that personalized, coaching-based, holistic, and proactive approaches improve student goal-attainment (Institute for Education Sciences, 2021).
The Coaching Conversations training, provided for all IU advising and career services staff by the IU Office of the Vice President for Student Success, informs the core of our approach by emphasizing holistic, student-centered engagements that go beyond transactional interactions. This method focuses on empowering students, nurturing motivation, and supporting growth through intentional, safe and brave spaces for reflection and brainstorming. The foundational belief is that students are the experts and leaders in their own lives, and the role of educators is to help them uncover their strengths, strategies, priorities, and values. IU’s Coaching Conversations program allows educators in various roles to develop coaching competencies such as asking powerful questions, engaged listening, non-judgmental observation, and cultural humility. These approaches support student agency, reflection, action, and growth, allowing students to feel more ownership over their college and career experiences, become skilled problem solvers, and feel holistically and personally supported.
Regarding the notion of being proactive, we believe that academic advisors and career services professionals should initiate contact with strategically-identified students (either through one on one or group strategies) in coordinated and intentional ways designed to anticipate potential barriers to students’ academic and professional goals and to provide timely interventions based in the student’s strengths and identities.
Where staff have capacity and training, they are welcome to utilize additional, complementary approaches that are strengths-based, that emphasize intentional interactions, and that honor students’ multifaceted identities (e.g., trait and factor career development theories, appreciative advising, developmental advising, etc.). This framework merely ensures that all staff will have coaching competencies as a core approach in their suite of skills for working with students.
We view collaboration between academic advising and career services as integral to embedding academic and career planning throughout the student experience. This collaboration is best facilitated through strategies such as cross-training, shared and integrated technologies, regular and intentional joint meetings of these practitioners, shared communication channels, integration of career development milestones within academic planning tools and experiences, and utilization of data on jointly valued metrics. These strategies undergird the expectations section below.
There is a particularly important opportunity for professionals in academic advising and career services to jointly promote work-based learning, in collaboration with disciplinary faculty and employer partners. Work-based learning includes those experiences that integrate academic learning with practical experiences in a work environment. At IU, this includes internships, cooperative education (co-ops), practicum experiences, clinicals, student teaching, and related experiences that allow students to apply theoretical knowledge in real-world settings. These experiences help students clarify career goals, explore preferred work settings, and develop skills and networks that will enhance their readiness for post-graduation careers. These experiences are valuable for all students, regardless of career trajectory, and regardless of whether the students came to IU having already completed part-time or full-time work experience. By collaborating to ensure these experiences are listed and explained within academic planning tools, easily accessible within the IU career services management platform, offered in a variety of inclusive formats to include high quality on-campus employment, and clearly understood in terms of their value, professionals in academic advising and career services can help ensure students do not miss out on these important career milestones.
*Applicable to people leaders in addition to individual contributors
Upon initial consideration, the Task Force believes some aspects of the student learning outcomes described in this document can be indirectly assessed using the relevant NSSE modules on academic advising and on career and workforce preparation. However, most of the SLOs will require a uniquely developed survey instrument or focus group protocol. We recommend IU OVPSS present a report on the already collected NSSE data and conduct some pilot focus groups in the initial year of implementation of this Framework. This will inform development of a student-facing survey in the second year of implementation. We also recommend that OVPSS administer a staff-facing survey in the first year of implementation.
The Task Force believes that it is possible to track key metrics related to the expectations of academic advisors and career services professionals. However, there is a poor track record at IU of maintaining transparent, integrated, actionable dashboards that communicate key metrics such as meetings between students and these professionals, student enrollment patterns, student attendance at career fairs, student completion of internships, retention, graduation, and first destination outcomes. Assessing and communicating these metrics will require investments into infrastructure to create and maintain such dashboards and ensure they are equally accessible to unit-, school- and campus-, and institution-level leaders.
In the first year of implementing this framework, we recommend that IU OVPSS partner with the IU Office of Institutional Analytics on the development of a dashboard or report that tracks, at minimum:
The Template below is a suggestion of milestones that are likely to be applicable to most IU undergraduates through a four-year journey, with adjustment needed for transfer students. milestones in red with asterisks are viewed as critical milestones which should be included in all undergraduate degree maps. The suggested milestones below are not meant to be rigidly followed but rather to inform conversations among academic advising and career services professionals on each campus or in each academic school. Many of these suggestions will necessarily need to be tailored to campus-, community-, discipline-, and industry-specific cultures and resources.
* Indicates a critical milestone which should be included in all undergraduate degree maps (pathways in Stellic).
Career:
Career:
Career:
Career:
On April 11, 2024, Vice President Julie Payne-Kirchmeier, PhD welcomed and charged those individuals who accepted the nominations from their campus leaders in academic advising and career services to join the IU-Wide Outcomes for Academic Advising and Career Development Task Force.
Dear Task Force Member:
Thank you for agreeing to join the Task Force on IU-Wide Outcomes for Academic Advising and Career Development. You are joining an Indiana University effort to ensure all IU students are equitably informed and empowered to navigate to their educational and professional goals, irrespective of their major or campus. I applaud your willingness to commit your time and expertise to this important work.
In support of this effort, my office has realigned support for academic advising and career services within the Student Navigation and Support area, led by Associate Vice President Matthew Rust, alongside Kate Goldstein, Tim O’Malley, Emily McCord, and the upcoming University Director of Career Development and Work-Based Learning. This initiative builds on IU’s existing strengths in coaching conversations training, integrated academic and career advising (e.g., EDGE), and technology adoption while incorporating new data-informed insights into the student experience. We envision a future where all IU students have a quality common experience in advising and career development in addition to the unique benefits they enjoy from their major- and campus-specific experiences.
Indiana University’s strategic plan has a specific goal in the student success pillar to “Guarantee robust and equitable access to career preparation and academic advising for all IU students, including the significant expansion of high-impact experiential and career-related student experiences.” Achieving this goal requires establishment of common student outcomes and associated expectations of advisors and career services professionals. Establishing an IU-wide framework for advising and career development will form the basis for:
The task force is charged with:
Throughout your work, I encourage you to engage with the following questions:
Again, thank you for agreeing to participate and share your insights in this task force which will be facilitated by Matthew Rust and include representatives from academic advising and career services throughout Indiana University. The work of the task force will take place during April and May 2024 with a significant reporting out and feedback collection to occur at the IU EDGE conference on May 21, 2024. The taskforce will incorporate feedback from EDGE and conclude its work by June 30, 2024.
Laura Acchiardo, IU Online
Eric Beckstrom, Bloomington
Mimi Bergman, Kokomo
C.J. Brooks, Bloomington
Ryan Cook, Indianapolis
Doug Davee, Bloomington
Kimberly Ecenbarger, Bloomington
Erin Erwin, Bloomington
Dillon Frechen, Bloomington
Rachel Gerber, Bloomington
Carleigh Hannon, Bloomington
Matthew Hoagland, Bloomington
Kim Jenkins, Bloomington
Misti Jones, Southeast
Lee Kahan, South Bend
Eella Kemper, Kokomo
Joshua Killey, Indianapolis
Amy Kleinert, Columbus
Daniel Lersch, Bloomington
Amy Maidi, Indianapolis
Laura Masterson, Indianapolis
Emily McCord, IU Student Success
David Ogden, South Bend
Chris Ralston, Southeast
Kori Renn, Bloomington
Matthew Rust, IU Student Success
Jennifer Schepers, Bloomington
Kristine Schuster, Indianapolis
Elizabeth Smith, Bloomington
Kathy Spicer, Northwest
Tracy Springer, Kokomo
Kari Spurgeon, Columbus
Emily Stratton, Bloomington
Carly Traynor, Indianapolis
Rebecca Turner, Southeast
Cassandra VanDevender, East
Natalie Vega-Finn, Northwest
Erin Vincent, Indianapolis
Kristina Walker, IU Online
Carlin Way, Bloomington
Myc Wiatrowski, Bloomington
Ruthie Williamson, Bloomington
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Indiana University
Office of the Vice President for Student Success