Closing the "Quiet Divide": Scaling Personalized Career Readiness at Denison University

Melanie Murphy, Executive Director of the Knowlton Center for Career Exploration at Denison University, shared her insights on navigating the shifting expectations of Gen Z during an exclusive panel webinar with Kaplan. Key takeaways center on the importance of curated experiences, embracing authenticity, designing programs that meet student needs as well as the impact of free test prep on student success. The following excerpts are taken from the interview.

Share with us a high-level overview of Denison University and your role there along with what most excites you right now in the higher education field.

Melanie Murphy: I am the Executive Director of the Knowlton Center for Career Exploration at Denison University, a residential, private liberal arts institution in Granville, Ohio. About 30 minutes from our capital, Columbus, we serve approximately 2,400 students.

I've been at Denison for 11 years, and prior to that I worked in the nonprofit sector. What excites me right now about higher education is the level of personalization we're really getting into with career pathways for Gen Z.

How is Gen Z behavior different from millennials and Gen X?

Melanie Murphy: Gen Z are entrepreneurial and they are craving independence. They're already coming to college with side hustles, and they want that flexible path to success. It may not look as linear as it has in the past.

Translating how that looks on our campus, this year we saw a record number of students applying and coming to Denison who already had their own businesses on the side. Everything from small little jobs to big dreams that they want to pursue after. It's going to be really interesting to watch that trend over the years.

How can universities adapt to Gen Z’s need for practical career focused education?

Melanie Murphy: Going back to the characteristics with Gen Z, they've grown up with this concept of personalization. Everything from Spotify playlists to skincare routines that are tuned to their specific DNA to Netflix recommendations. They've been curating everything. Everything is so carefully personalized to them and that's become an expectation then from their college and career journey.

They're craving pathways that are prescribed for them, but they also want to be able to curate and personalize that pathway specifically to them. We've been playing with some really fun things on our campus about how to do that, how to guide them through something that feels structured. Because they crave the structure and the instruction on “what do I do next”, but in a way where they can make it uniquely their own.

It goes back to authenticity. Gen Z wants things to feel authentically like them. We've designed a journey program, which is meant to be completed by the end of your sophomore year, that helps students explore careers on purpose. Many people may have fallen into a career based on interactions, and that's always going to happen. This is about spending some time intentionally exploring and finding different career paths that might be interesting to you. Then finding ways to make it your own curated experience along that pathway, and that could be by taking additional skill-building courses or earning credentials through Kaplan. This is really resonating with Gen Z right now.

Denison University offers free test prep to students through Kaplan’s All Access License®. Why did you choose to offer this program?

For context, Kaplan’s All Access License is an umbrella program where institutions have the opportunity to offer students industry-leading test preparation for graduate admissions exams, licensure, credentials, as well as skills development courses all for one flat fee. With zero out of pocket costs to students, this solution removes cost barriers and unlocks new opportunities as they take high stakes exams such as for the MCAT®, LSAT®, or GMAT™ or career readiness programs such as Critical Thinking or Confident New Hire, among others.

Melanie Murphy: We started working with Kaplan a few years ago and said we want to try this small. We want to start offering some MCAT, GRE, and LSAT test prep to students. We know there's this quiet divide between those who can afford extra test prep and those who can't. Asking for that help requires some people to put themselves out there in a way that might be uncomfortable, to say, “I'm a student who can't afford this, maybe my peers can, but I can't.”

We started with those three course offerings with a certain number of spots. Within about 12 hours every spot we had offered was gone. We thought, “wow, there's a demand here, and we need to dig into it more.” Then we spent a lot of time talking with students and we learned more about the various opportunities within Kaplan’s All Access License. We learned about how students really wanted to take, for example, their history major and add a project management credential, and gain very specific skills in another area.

It really made sense to us to be able to offer something that would be free to all students, take a major source of stress off of the table for them, and be able to help them with that flexibility of customization. We've been talking a lot about this generation wanting to have flexible, customizable things where their path feels slightly different from their roommate's path. This has allowed us to do it.

Students have noticed, they've really taken to it, and they feel seen and supported. Not just because it's free, but because we saw and we listened. We heard that there was a need, they didn't want to have to be the one to raise their hand and say, “I can't afford this and my roommate does and she's getting into better grad schools than I am.” That's been a really awesome way for us to empower our students.

How do you scale career advising, empowering staff to discuss personalized paths without information overload?

Melanie Murphy: Some schools have a generalist model, where all of your career coaches are talking to students who may be interested in marketing, followed by a student who wants to go into law, followed by someone who's in the arts, and it can get really hard to know a lot about all of the different careers. We were in that place several years ago, and we moved to a career communities model. Now, all of our work is done in six very broad-based career communities. For example, financial services, consulting, and business are all one career community. It is still very large, but the coach that's in that career community has a peer career fellow who's also working with them to learn and find internships and opportunities and also has an assigned employer and alumni relations person to help develop the relationship with our employer partners. It's really interesting.

We've been looking at the data and from the moment that we switched to this career communities model we saw engagement skyrocket as soon as we personalized everything to what the students wanted. They didn't have to wade through their newsletters and their emails, as content was again, personalized to them.

Our charts are fun to look at because literally everything skyrockets. Now that takes financial resources, because often you will need more people. But if we go back to what Gen Z is craving and wanting, it is that personalized relationship, high touch moments, and it's hard to do that with a slim staff. Where you can advocate for more Career Center resources, this is the way to go.

How are you preparing Gen Z to navigate professional workplaces’ cultural norms?

Melanie Murphy: This is a fine line. A lot of Gen Z are entering workplaces that need to evolve and those Gen Z people entering that workplace know it. But we need to help them understand where and how they can initiate change.

Sometimes we have conversations with students about “what are deal breakers for you about an organization?” There are certain things you're not going to know from the outside, until you're in. But when you are looking, what are the deal breakers? And then having to decide for yourself is there something about my identity or my values or my personality that I am willing to bend or shape or change to fit into a new culture or an existing culture.

Then once in, how can I encourage the change from within? Or do they need to find the place where they can come in and feel that fit immediately? A lot of this is building cultural agility for our students, helping them understand how to flex their skills and abilities across different, intergenerational teams. They are going to be working across multiple generations and how do they stay grounded in who they are?

We know this is a group that is socially conscious, and they want to make an impact. Several years ago, there was a big story about some interns who immediately came in and wanted to change the dress code and all of the interns were promptly fired because they approached it the wrong way. And so it’s about how do you have the conversations that say, “this is something that I'd love to have changed,” and approach it in the appropriate professional way?

What are students saying about the impact receiving free test prep has on their lives?

Melanie Murphy: Something that our university president says often that I really love is, that he doesn't want students to see the four years of college as the best four years of their life, but he wants them to be able to look back in 50 years and say, because of that college experience, I've had the most amazing 50 years I could possibly imagine.

I think offerings like Kaplan’s All Access License are game changers in the moment. A 10-point increase on a test can mean the difference between admissions to different schools that might offer more comprehensive packages, rides, or all kinds of things. That is life-changing. You may not even see it until 30 years down the road how that one test prep offered you new opportunities. Maybe you didn't think law school was for you, but the test prep was there and free so you gave it a whirl, and here you are in a place you never imagined. That's pretty powerful.

Equip your students with the industry-leading tools they need to ace their exams and take their next big step after graduation through Kaplan’s All Access License.