Current Career-Related Research Projects

We do have some more research projects focused on technology that are brewing, but in the meantime, we’re asking your help to spread the news about career-related research projects in which we are involved. Would you consider participating if you’re eligible? Or perhaps spread the news if you know someone who is? Each are either approved by Florida State University’s IRB or have informed consent waived. If you have questions about any research on this page, please email Dr. Osborn. Click on the links to participate. Thanks for the consideration and help!

Virtual Card Sort

Who can participate: Open to all.

What is required: Sort 36 cards with occupational titles into “would choose, might choose, and would not choose” categories. 

What you can gain: Users receive a summary report and suggested next steps.

Examination of Childhood Trauma, Dysfunctional Career Thoughts, and Career Adaptability

Who can participate: Any adult age 21 or older to participate.

What is required: Complete a demographic form and three questionnaires on the topics above. What you can gain: Eligible for $30 Amazon gift card if provide email. 

College Career Courses and Vocational Identity Achievement: An Investigation of Mediators and Moderators

Who can participate: Undergraduates from any college or university

What is required: Complete two surveys, one now, and one later. 

What you can gain: Eligible for $50 Amazon gift card for every 50 participants, if provide email. 

NCDA Tech-Related Presentations

Getting excited for NCDA’s conference. There are several tech-related presentations for attendees to check out. Hope to see you there!!!

Distance Career Coaching and Training: The Asian Narrative
The cultural differences among countries from South Asia to East Asia are immense, yet all agree that career planning is vitally important. The pandemic requires that coaching and training be provided remotely and practitioners have been forced to develop new skills for addressing cultural differences. Learn from these practitioners to effectively deliver career services to culturally diverse Asians.
Presenters: Marilyn Maze, Asia Pacific Career Development Association; Hector Lin, Job Kred; Allan Gatenby, ACPi-Aus; Shujiro Mizuno, Japan Industrial Counseling Association

Grow Your Career Development Practice with Instagram
200+ million lnstagrammers visit at least one business profile a day. Whether you’re an entrepreneur or a career services center or agency, Instagram is an effective marketing tool for building brand awareness.  Come learn the ins and outs of a business profile and strategies to leverage IG in your business.
Presenters: Mary Edwin, University of Missouri-St Louis

Counselor Educator Influencers: Social Media as a Mentorship Opportunity
Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. continue to rise in popularity throughout the world. In this presentation, attendees will discuss various ways counselor educators can use social media to provide mentorship and professional development to counselors of all backgrounds.
Presenters: Autumn Cabell, DePaul University

Engage and Inspire! Tips and Tricks That Take Your Online Classes to the Next Level
Looking for new ways to interact with your students online? Join the Technology Twins for a demonstration of features and strategies you can use during live meetings. Whether you are teaching a class, presenting a webinar, or meeting with students one-on-one, this session will prepare you to connect at a distance.
Presenters: Melissa Venable, BestColleges.com; Debra Osborn, Florida State University

Delivering Distance Career Services
In the wake of COVID-19, delivering career services via technology is a rapidly growing practice. Practitioners may lack distance services knowledge, training, and confidence. Attendees will learn key elements from distance literature and ethical codes, and engage in a reflective exercise on their personal readiness to provide distance services.
Presenters: Heather Robertson, St. John’s University

Technology and Career Development: Integrating the Past, the Present Pandemic, and Future Possibilities
The pandemic provides career practitioners opportunities to review our use of technology. This session provides a historical review of technology in career development, positions the pandemic as a challenge to re-examine this relationship, and identifies key opportunities for practitioners and the NCDA to adapt and expand to serve our constituents.
Presenters: Dirk Matthews, Columbia College Chicago; Kathyy Batee-Freeman, University of Illinois Springfield; Richard Pyle; Janet Wall, Career Planning Academy; Marilyn Maze, Asia Pacific Career Development Association 

Achieve Career Readiness Programming for Students in the Era of 100% Virtual Services
Come learn how we turned traditionally face-to-face career readiness programs into virtual ones. Through this effort, we still maximized student engagement and access to meet the needs of our campus and virtual learning populations.
Presenters: Keyara Stevenson, North Carolina A&T State University

Innovative Tools and Techniques for Facilitating Virtual Career Workshops with Students
Remote service delivery isn’t going anywhere. In this interactive session, we will use a trauma-informed lens to examine benefits and challenges of engaging groups virtually and then share a variety of tips, tools, and techniques to facilitate engaging and impactful groups in a virtual space.
Presenters: Sarah Zakerski, Realizing Aptitudes; Ashley Flynn, Realizing Aptitudes

Targeting Tall Tales vs. Tangible Tools: Online Career Branding for Both our Clients and for Ourselves
We say: “Target your resume every time” and “Networking is key”.. Clients hear “Waste of time” and “Talk to strangers”. Avoid getting lost in translation with tangible resume and online branding strategies that work in reality, for our busy, complex lives.
Presenters: Ali Breen, Ali Breen Career Coaching and Digital Consulting; Lena Stewart, Modern Resume

Practical Career Development Resources: A Colorful Tour of the NEW NCDA Website
How easy is it to integrate practical resources into daily work? NCDA offers practical resources that can assist you in inspiring and empowering your clients/students. The only problem might be identifying these resources when you need them. Here is your expert guide to NCDA resources, specially the newly updated NCDA website.
Presenter: Melanie Reinersman, NCDA Website & Web Magazine Editor

Navigating Resource Creation and Digitization in the Time of Virtual Learning for International Students and Practitioners
The International Student Services Committee (ISSC) has fostered learning and growth for the international community and practitioners by adapting to the times of uncertainty and creating virtual spaces where learning can continue in non-traditional ways. Come learn innovative learning opportunities that ISCC has created through social media engagement, career resource digitization, and research dissemination.
Presenters: Ivette Mekdessi, Rice University: Center for Career Development; Arame Mbodj, Stanford University; Gaeun Seo, Princeton University, Center for Career Development

Undercover Bosses: A Competency-Based Recruitment Program and its Virtual Transformation
Have you imagined competency-driven recruitment programs where student-employer engagements are made based on skills employers value instead of companies’ names? Our “Undercover Bosses”event has brought diverse students and employers together based on skill matches instead of students’ educational credentials, and we transformed it successfully into an interactive virtual affair.
Presenters: Gaeun Seo, Princeton University; Xiaotang Huang, Princeton University

Embracing Sustainable Innovation from Within: Creating Virtual Practices with Multiple Benefits
We share how our student staff initiated the development of a homegrown online document review process and how it inadvertently allowed us to seamlessly transition our services to a virtual setting. We also examine how this experience provided student staff opportunities to build essential career development competencies.
Presenters: Emma Andruczyk, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Michael Valadez, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Using an Online Career Development Course to Prepare Life Science Students
This presentation will share results from a research study involving an online career course designed specifically for life science students.  The course was based on the cognitive information processing (CIP) theory. This presentation will show the effectiveness of a discipline-specific career development course, especially for schools.
Presenters: Serena Christianson, Arizona State University; Robert Reardon, Florida State University

Summer Career Academy: A Programmatic Approach to Career Development During a Global Pandemic
An extension of the article, “Summer Career Academy: A Programmatic Approach to Career Development During a Global Pandemic,”published in NCDA’s Career Developments Magazine, this presentation will investigate the development and implementation of the University of New Hampshire’s Summer Career Academy – a virtual, cost-free career intervention aimed at helping participants cultivate in-demand skills and prepare for the application process.
Presenters: Jonathan Constable, University of New Hampshire; Cayce Jones, University of New Hampshire; Lauren Rhodes, University of New Hampshire

A Plan of Action! Current Crisis-Driven Strategies to Effectively Transition Interactive Career Courses Online
This presentation will explore the challenges faced when transitioning a comprehensive, variable credit, college-level career development course to a virtual format in addition to resources, programs, and strategies for navigating those challenges. Specifically, this presentation will draw upon experiences from an empirically supported career course at Florida State University.
Presenters: Ivey Burbrink, Florida State University; Carley Peace, Florida State University

Can You Hear Me Now? The Practical and Persistent Influence of Technology in K-12 Career Interventions
In many ways, COVID-19 has upended the conventional mechanisms and tools on which career and workforce development practitioners rely. This presentation will explore the possibilities of using technology to create robust delivery systems of career interventions with a specific focus on the development of authentic work-based learning experiences for youth.
Presenters: Steven Myers, Fairfax County Public Schools; Andrew Knoblich, City of Charlotte, NC

Social Media -Have Things Changed Since Last Year?

According to the Pew Research Center, nope, not by much.

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Can you guess what’s hip with the young’uns (18-24)? If you said Snapchat and Instagram, you are on your game!

Other questions this article answers:

  • How often do adults visit social media sites?
  • Does that differ from frequency of young adults?
  • Who uses P*interest?
  • Does site preference vary by education level?
  • Are there racial/ethnic preferences for social media?

Why is this important? From both a counseling and marketing perspective, knowledge of what SM our clients or potential clients are using regularly is incredibly helpful, in that we can tailor our interventions as well as our advertising and outreach to the mediums that are most often used by the individuals we are seeking to help.

For access to the full article, click here.

Explore 200 Top Tech Tools

If you aren’t already aware of the “Top Tools for Learning” project from Jane Hart at the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies, this post is for you!

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This year’s list includes the top 200 tools for learning this year, as reported by 2,174 learning professionals from 52 countries. This is the 11th year of the study, which tracks the movement of popular tools, such as YouTube and Dropbox, up and down the list.

What can you do with this list as a career practitioner?

  • Search the top 100 tools for workplace learning to find out what your students and clients may be using in their current or future employment settings.
  • Search the top 100 tools for personal and professional learning for ideas to inspire your own professional development or professional development opportunities you would like to offer your students and clients.
  • Search the 200 tools by category to find possible solutions for problems you are trying to solve, (e.g., forms and survey tools, web and video meeting tools, mind mapping tools, screencapture tools, online course platforms, and many more).

Also … new on the list this year – more than 50 tools that haven’t appeared before. Typeform for surveys and forms, Microsoft Teams for collaboration, and ActEXS a productivity app are just a few of these to explore.

Which tech tools are you currently using in your career office or practice? How do they compare to those in this study? Share your favorites!

The Future of Jobs – Report Review

I’m still pouring over research discovered several months ago during a collaborative writing project with Lynn Atanasoff, a distance career counselor at Penn State World Campus. Lynn and I were reading about the effects of technology on not only the work we do, but also our health. Terms like technostress and telepressure filled our fall and spring, and we are proud to have a related article in press with Career Development Quarterly, but I digress …

Future of Jobs

A 2016 report from the World Economic Forum (WEF), The Future of Jobs: Employment, Skills, and Workforce Strategy for the Fourth Industrial Revolution [PDF], takes a global look at “… developments in genetics, 3D printing and biotechnology, … [which] are all building on and amplifying one another.” As the authors state, “While the impending change holds great promise, the patterns of consumption, production and employment created by it also pose major challenges requiring proactive adaptation by corporations, governments and individuals.”

What is the potential role for career practitioners in this revolution? “By evaluating the future labor market from the perspective of some of the world’s largest employers [WEF] hopes to improve the current stock of knowledge around anticipated skills needs, recruitment patterns and occupational requirements.” Having a better awareness of the future of jobs, and the dynamic nature of technology-related changes, is a good place to start.

This report is long (167 pages), but well organized including helpful data visualization elements throughout. I encourage you to browse WEF’s findings through a survey of senior human resources and strategy executives representing nine industry sectors and 15 regional economic areas.

A few highlights…

Top-rated demographic and socio-economic drivers of change:

  • Changing work environments and flexible working arrangements (44%)
  • Rise of the middle class in emerging markets (23%)
  • Climate change, natural resource constraints and the transition to a greener economy (23%)

Top-rated technological drivers of change:

  • Mobile internet and cloud technology (34%)
  • Advances in computing power and big data (26%)
  • New energy supplies and technologies (22%)

Top-growing in-demand skills across industries:

  • Cognitive abilities – e.g., creativity, logical reasoning, visualization
  • Systems skills – e.g., judgement, decision-making, analysis
  • Complex problem solving – e.g., solving ill-defined problems in real-world settings
  • Content skills – e.g., active learning, communication, computer literacy

See page 21 for more information and a helpful graphic – based on O*Net – that breaks down abilities, basic skills and cross-functional skill sets into categories, e.g., social, systems, complex problem solving, resource management, technical.

Explore the report in more detail to discover implications specific to the industries and clients you may serve, and consider sharing with colleagues in your career center or office.

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