Episode 53: Maggie Tomas on Engaging, Equitable Career Development and Career Readiness
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How can career development be better integrated with academics? How can employers better engage students instead of boring info sessions and career fairs? How can institutions and employers make recruitment equitable? We discuss these great questions with Maggie Tomas, who leads the Career Center at University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management
In the traditional landscape of higher education, the career center was often viewed as a final destination—a place students visited during their senior year to polish a resume or scan a job board. However, as the boundaries between academics and employment blur, a new model is emerging. This model positions career development not as an isolated service, but as a central pillar of the student experience.
Maggie Thomas, who leads career development at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management, knows this shift intimately. Interestingly, she admits she never set foot in her own undergrad career center. Today, she uses that perspective to ensure her students don’t meander as she did, but instead find a direct path to a career that offers both meaning and impact.
How to Define and Measure Student Success in a New Era
When we talk about student success, we often default to graduation rates. While important, Maggie Thomas argues for a more holistic view. At the Carlson School, success is measured through a triad of engagement, graduation, and employment.
True success means ensuring students know how to access the resources that support their growth throughout their journey. It’s about more than just the degree; it’s about graduating with a portfolio of options and the self-awareness to choose the right one. In a post-pandemic world, this definition has expanded to include the "re-engagement" of students who may have become accustomed to virtual isolation.
The Vital Role of Career Development in the Student Journey
Career development is the connective tissue between the classroom and the community. It starts with self-reflection—asking "Who am I?" and "What are my interests?"—and moves toward execution.
By integrating career services early, institutions help students connect their innate interests to their coursework. This alignment creates a sense of purpose. When a student sees how a statistics class directly informs an internship at a consulting firm, their academic work becomes more meaningful. Career development isn’t just about landing a job; it’s about building the confidence to navigate an entire lifetime of professional transitions.
Reshaping the Future: Emerging Trends in Higher Ed
The "siloed" model of career services is fading. One of the most significant trends is the move toward embedding career development directly into the curriculum. Whether through dedicated courses or career-focused assignments within academic departments, the goal is to make career exploration a standard part of the educational experience rather than an optional "add-on."
Furthermore, the way employers interact with students is undergoing a radical transformation. The days of boring, one-way information sessions are over. Students today demand engagement. They want to be taught—whether it’s a workshop on Excel or a case study competition. This shift toward co-creating experiences ensures that interactions are deeper, more meaningful, and less transactional.
Moving Toward Inclusive Recruiting and Equity
A profound shift is occurring in how universities manage employer relationships. There is a growing responsibility to ensure that the recruiting process is equitable and inclusive. This means moving beyond simply being "grateful" that a company is on campus and instead holding those companies to high standards of transparency and bias-reduction.
From tracking pay transparency to offering inclusive employer certifications, career centers are now acting as advocates. They are training employers on how to remove bias from job descriptions and how to create onboarding experiences that welcome diverse talent. By learning alongside students and employers, institutions can impact real systemic change.
Conclusion: Putting the Student First
The path to a connected college is paved with intentional partnerships. By focusing on the student first, career leaders can navigate the competing interests of alumni, employers, and administrators. Staying flexible, embracing creativity, and breaking down silos between advancement and academics will ensure that the career center remains a vibrant, essential hub for student success.
Episode 53 Transcript
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Elliot Felix: Welcome to the Connected College Podcast. I'm your host, Elliot Felix. I've helped more than a hundred colleges and universities change what they offer, how they operate, and how they're organized to enable student success. And if you're a leader in higher ed, and you think that the silos and separations get in the way of student success, then this podcast and my upcoming book, The Connected College, are for you. We're here to learn and work together to bust silos, question tradition, and forge partnerships so that students feel connected to their college, their community, their coursework and their careers. Maggie Thomas never set foot in her undergrad career center, but now she runs one. She leads career development at University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management, and her purpose is to help students find theirs so they can find career success in a more direct way than she did back then. We have a great conversation about career development and how it's being integrated into academics, how interactions with employers are becoming more engaging, no more boring info sessions and career fairs, and how institutions and employers alike are working to make the recruiting process more equitable. Exploring, planning for and supporting the career development process is such a critical part of student success that I'm really excited to have Maggie Thomas from Carlson School at University of Minnesota here today to talk through this. And I'm sure we're gonna have a great conversation. So welcome Maggie.
Maggie Thomas: Thank you. Happy to be here.
Elliot Felix: Tell us, tell us a little bit about yourself, how you got started in higher ed, how you found your way into career development.
Maggie Thomas: Yeah, absolutely. So, um, my current role is I manage the, Carlson Business Career Center. So, lead a team of working on employment for, Carlson business students. I've been in career services for over 20 years. So I've been in this space for a long time, but I found it kind of strangely. So I'm born and raised in Los Angeles. Not in Minnesota, I am not a cold weather native, but I have been here for a while now. So I grew up in Los Angeles and my actual first job, consistent paid job, was opening and sorting Clint Eastwood's fan mail on the Warner Brothers studio lot.
Elliot Felix: I was just gonna guess that.
Maggie Thomas: Yeah, natural first job. I grew up in Burbank, California. And one of the things that's, the big industry in Burbank is the studios. So I was 17 years old, my senior year, I'm opening and sorting his fan mail. And it was exciting for about an entire week. I was excited to maybe catch a glimpse of the ER or the Friends set. This wore off pretty quickly. And something in me knew pretty instinctively that I needed something with more meaning. I needed something with more impact. The work I was doing really had no bearing on the movie that was being made. I was his assistant's assistant's assistant. And so I proceeded to finish out that job for the summer after my senior year, and went on to undergrad and I quickly declared a major with really really little research and I was gonna be, it was elementary education. I was going to be a kindergarten teacher, and I went full force into the elementary education major. And when you're an education major, you have lots of opportunity in the classroom to see if this is something that is meant for you. And I did. And time and time again. It showed that it didn't necessarily play to my skill set at all. But I plowed through, I got my teaching credential in the state of California and I taught kindergarten for two years and I was miserable. Kindergarten teachers are amazing. I have had kindergartners myself, children of my own, but kindergartners have 15 minute attention spans. So you plan lesson plans for 15 minutes, and you are extremely detail oriented, and that is not what I was. And I was miserable, kind of akin to when I was opening and sorting Clint Eastwood's fan mail. I had low energy. It was Friday night, and I'm in my early to mid 20s, and I don't want to go out with my friends. It just, I didn't find it rewarding. And that experience awakened something in me to try to search for something that did make me feel healthy and vibrant and alive. And I did a couple of informational interviews. I talked to some friends that were in psychology programs and I ended up finding a psychology program that had an emphasis in career counseling, to help people be career counselors in college. And that is what I've been doing ever since. I have worked in variety of different higher ed spaces. I've worked in the University of California system. I've worked at art and design schools. I've worked at private Catholic higher ed institutions, and I've been at a Big Ten here for almost 12 years. And I've done the career counseling coaching side of career development. I've done the working with employers side of career development in a career center, but I usually end up kind of navigating my way to a little bit more of a broad leadership role because I have found that I love the impact of impacting the team that I work with and the broad scope of students. I like seeing trends and I like creating partnerships within higher ed. And ultimately, I love that I am hopefully leading a team that helps students find out what they want to do so they don't end up in a career that makes them a little bit miserable.
Elliot Felix: So, maybe help them meander slightly less than you did, get from A to B in a more fulfilling, meaningful way.
Maggie Thomas: I'm a person that runs a career center that an undergrad never set foot in the career center. So my goal is that that does not happen to most students.
Elliot Felix: Yeah, well, I think that certainly gives you an interesting perspective. I mean, I remember, when I was in grad school at MIT, there was this research group at the Media Lab that was trying to reinvent the car. And my pitch to them was like, I should be part of this group because I hate cars. I sold my car when I was 18. I haven't had one since. And don't just populate this team with fans. You should populate it with skeptics or people who haven't had that experience. So I can relate. And I'm to kind of build a little bit of a foundation here. There's so many different terms that are thrown around. You know, and they all tend to be two words, the first of which is career, you know, there's like career services, there's career development, there's career exploration, there's career placement. Can you make sense of that for us? Like, do those all mean basically the same thing? Or are there, are they different parts of this career enterprise?
Maggie Thomas: I think it's different parts of the career experience for students. There are definitely people that will take issue with the word placement. That's definitely something that causes a reaction in career center folks. But I think it's all in the career experience for students. So career development is really helping students figure out how and what they want to do, there's career development, career design. Career services are the ways, how do you tap into what the school offers to give to you? So that might be tapping into assessments. It might be tapping into workshops. It might be tapping into information sessions where employers are here. It might be tapping into interviews that are taking place on campus. It might be tapping into the technology that we have that supplements your career search. So that's sort of the career services piece. And the career placement or career employment is really how does the school help a) connect you to opportunities and b) track. And that is a piece that is important in the career services world. And it's tracked more stringently depending on the type of school. But that sort of tracking of where the students end up, that first destination. Career centers use it to, one, help admissions folks tell the story. When you're shopping around for a school, what would be that end result? Where would you land? What does that look like? But also the career services folks use it to again, work with employers to show them, look at here's where our students land. You might want to hire more of our students because they tend to like these types of jobs. So we use that information to help prospective students, current students and employers.
Elliot Felix: And so there's kind of like, it sounds like there's almost like a kind of a tree or like a fork where it starts with the career design and development, like what you want to do based on who you are, strengths, interests, network skills, and then you kind of support it from two sides internally with assessments and info sessions and workshops and interviews and technology, handshake, LinkedIn, whatever it might be. And then externally with these relationships with employers, where you're making these connections.
Maggie Thomas: Yeah. We talk about the career services process or our process when students come in is how do you sort of start with reflecting and ideating? Like, who am I? What are my interests? Like, really tapping in. Understanding self, understanding what's out there. The next step is sort of engaging. How do we help you sort of engage outward? That might be some of the events that we have on campus. That might be with alumni. And then the next thing is, how do we help you execute? How do we actually help you get the skills to land the job and bring those jobs and experiences to you? That's the model that we've worked with for several years. We're also playing with a model, adding a piece in there that happens throughout what we're calling grounding. Because that reflecting and ideating doesn't stop in that first page. Like that exploration and design process, we want it to happen throughout and we want students to also be able to constantly ground and do that gut check of how does this feel? As I'm engaging, how does this feel? Maybe this doesn't feel good. I got to go back to ideation and try something else, like if I go back to myself with my kindergarten model, if I had done more grounding every time I was practicing in a classroom and realizing I don't like this, I might've gone back to that ideation piece and explored that while I was in. And we hope that these skills and this process by giving them this framework while they're students, they can then take it with them throughout their career. Because this first destination job is just a first destination. And so how do they have those skills for the next time something doesn't feel right at work? Oh, let me reflect and ideate, continue to be grounded and start to network and then apply for jobs.
Elliot Felix: I like that. The active verbs that kind of tell you where to focus: reflect, ideate, engage, execute, explore. How do you define student success?
Maggie Thomas: Yeah. So I mean, for me, student success is, I really think about how are we ensuring that students know how to access the resources that support them in learning, growing, and ultimately graduating with a degree that will provide them options to post graduate opportunities. So what I look at in terms of student success is engagement, graduation, and employment. There's more things that do that, but ultimately I want students to know how to access all these things to ensure that they are continuing to learn, grow, graduate, and find opportunities for post graduation.
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Elliot Felix: And does one lead to the other, like an engaged student is then more likely to graduate, is then more likely to be employed?
Maggie Thomas: Yeah. And this is a really interesting time for you to talk to higher ed leaders because we're all coming out or living with the pandemic and what this new world is with students and what engagement looked like in 2019 pre-COVID was really different, obviously, than what engagement looked like in 2020. And then when we came back, when most schools came back fully in person in 21 and 22, engagement was, if I talk to most of my counterparts, at least in the career and student life areas, engagement was really down with students and we didn't know if this is the new normal. So how do we deal with this? Like, how are we going to get them to get involved? And is this how they engage now? And so this year we've been pretty intentional about creating more buzz. More marketing surrounding some of what we do, more engagement opportunities to increase that engagement because we actually do think that that's going to help with all those other metrics. And we're fairly early on in it, but we're seeing if we put more energy and more intention into it, the engagement's looking more like what it was in the 2019 era. And that could partly be because we're putting more effort into it, like we are putting a lot more effort into being really buzzy and marketing with our engagement, but it also could be that everyone's getting more comfortable with engaging in person too.
Elliot Felix: Right. It's a little chicken or egg, but if I'm understanding you correctly, you're saying like coming out of the pandemic, students were just less involved. They weren't participating in career development activities. They weren't going to the info session or doing the interviews or taking the workshop or doing the assessment.
Maggie Thomas: No, they weren't. And particularly last year, the engagement was really low, and it was across the board when I was talking to colleagues at other universities, but what was interesting too is the employment rates for 2022 grads was skyrocketing like nothing we'd ever seen. We were in this job market. But then when we were seeing what was happening with the interns who had not engaged, like those first years or those early, internship numbers were going down because they weren't engaged. You got to keep engaging because you can't fall back on this amazing job market because the job market is now becoming a little bit more stringent. It's not as bad as everyone says, but.
Elliot Felix: And what role does career development play? If student success is knowing about and accessing resources to learn, grow, and graduate, I'm just wondering what you see as the role of career development in student success.
Maggie Thomas: I want our office to help students, one, tap into who they are and what their interests are innately. How do we help them connect that to what they're learning in the classroom? And then how do we help them connect that to what is out there as options and possibilities outside of the classroom? So I want them to understand who they are and how they tick and what their interests and skills are. I want them to take that self-knowledge and constantly question what appeals to them in the classroom. And then I want them to utilize our services to see what is out there beyond the classroom, whether it's an internship or a job that matches those interests that you have. And hopefully through that whole process, not only are they finding a job or an internship that matches their interests internally and in the classroom, but also that grows their confidence in understanding self, understanding what's out there, and then being able to go through that whole job search cycle as an alum. And we also have to marry all that intrinsic self-awareness and classroom self-awareness with also helping them figure out what their values are and what their priorities are in terms of non-sequiturs for a job search. For some people it's location, for some people it's they need a certain pay range. For other people it's impact or industry. So also helping them marry interest versus that value piece.
Elliot Felix: That makes a ton of sense. And like the key value from career development is making these connections: connecting who you are and what you care about, what you're good at with what you're learning and how that might play out into a career. And I'm kind of a lover of alliteration. So as you were saying that I was thinking about how it starts with the person and then you're trying to connect a person who, because they're engaging, they understand themselves better. They can get in the right program, degree program, certificate, whatever it might be. And then that gives them like a path. So they can make progress along that path. And that path also gives them a sense of purpose.
Maggie Thomas: A purpose.
Elliot Felix: Like, "I'm going to take what I've learned in my stats class and I'm going to use it in my internship."
Maggie Thomas: And our hope is that, since most career centers have two sides—the student facing side, so the career coaches or advisors, and the employer facing side bringing employers to engage—hopefully along that whole path, we are able to help them with tips on how do you dig into who you are as a person? How do we help you identify programs that might match that? How do we help you with a path from both putting paths in front of you to helping you research paths? And how do we ultimately help you constantly do that check: does this align with my purpose?
Elliot Felix: I think that's really interesting. It's like I'm reframing it and saying it's more than a job. It's a purpose. What you get out of engaging with career services and career development is this sense of who you are and who you want to be. And then it makes your experiences in class more meaningful. And maybe that's how you find a sense of belonging or a sense of identity.
Maggie Thomas: Absolutely.
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Elliot Felix: What's changing about how this all works? What are the big things reshaping how career services works?
Maggie Thomas: A couple of big changes. I think we're seeing more and more schools have career in the curriculum, and that's either a dedicated career class where you learn self-exploration, research, and identification of programs, or it's embedded throughout the curriculum in different courses. We're seeing it less as an add-on and more embedded. It's not special anymore; it's just what's there. Another big change is how employers engage with students. Because of COVID, employers got really used to virtual engagement. The way schools would measure success—how many companies come to the career fair or info sessions—is a moving target because it's changing. Students are demanding that it look different. Pre-COVID, a company would do an info session with slides about who they are. Students do not want to sit and be talked at. They don't have the patience for something they could find online. So they either want quick engagement like tabling, or they want employers to actually teach them something. We're seeing more employers get involved in education—teaching how to use Excel, how to solve a case, or how to sell a new product. We're having conversations with employers that are much more about co-creating experiences with students. They're more meaningful and there’s less quantity but deeper engagement. And one more trend is the importance of inclusion and equity in recruiting. For 20 years, there was this feeling that we should feel fortunate when a company wants to recruit our students. Now, we're looking at our responsibility to ensure that the recruiting process is equitable and inclusive. We are training employers on what is inclusive in recruiting—removing bias from interviewing, what a job description should look like, what language should be in there. We're starting to track pay transparency—how many employers are posting salary ranges—to showcase that to others.
Elliot Felix: Why does it fall to the college to fill that gap?
Maggie Thomas: I don't know that it defaults to us, but I think we have an opportunity. Students are in a vulnerable position; for many, this is their first job search. Since we are connecting them to employers on campus, what is our responsibility to ensure that employer is as inclusive as possible? Employers are constantly asking us for diverse talent, and my response back is, "How inclusive is your process? How are you looking holistically at ensuring this is equitable?"
Elliot Felix: So you're looking at it as an opportunity to improve the process and help students who are vulnerable at this moment.
Maggie Thomas: 100%. And also how do we learn together with employers and students? We did focus groups with underrepresented student groups to ask what felt inclusive and what didn't. We're learning too, because we've been following standard recruiting processes for a long time. It’s exciting because we're in a space where we could potentially impact change.
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Elliot Felix: What are some examples of people who are adapting to these changes or seizing the opportunity to enable student success?
Maggie Thomas: I’ll give a couple of examples. One came from another school that we adapted. I heard from the Career Center at Miami University in Ohio. They have a DEI Career Services team that focuses just on that. They created a DEI mastermind for their employers—a six-part series on removing bias and equitable recruiting. If employers went through that, they could participate in a reverse career fair, where they walk up to student clubs and try to engage with them. It reversed the power dynamic and created a cohort of educated employers. We modeled something similar at Carlson called the Carlson Inclusive Employer. It’s a three-part series on inclusion in the job search, the onboarding experience, and intergenerational inclusion. It’s facilitated by a DEI expert and includes student experiences. Once completed, employers receive an inclusive employer certification. This showcases to students the commitment the employer has taken, which is something students repeatedly say they want to see.
Elliot Felix: Do people use the "Just" label yet?
Maggie Thomas: No, not yet, but I see them looking for labels like that. One student shared in a panel that they don't want to have to ask about a commitment to DEI; they want to see it throughout the process. Show, not tell. Even if the job market is tightening, students don't feel like they need to be "so grateful" for a job. They are interviewing the company too, asking if it's going to be safe for them. Another example of adapting is partnering with faculty to incorporate employer training into assignments. For example, could a consulting firm’s case competition take the place of an assignment in a problem-solving class? That makes the learning real-world and gets more students engaged while making the employer happy.
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Elliot Felix: What advice do you have for people that work in career development to increase their success rate?
Maggie Thomas: This goes without saying, but we have so many stakeholders—students, alumni, employers. I tell my team: if you focus on the student first and foremost, that is your directive. Our priority is to the student. If we focus on that, we will know the best next steps with all other stakeholders. Also, being flexible and creative is important. Try new things and don't be afraid to think outside the box. Higher ed can be repetitive, so refreshing and trying new things re-energizes us to be better for the students. Ensure you have partnerships and allies throughout the college—advancement, academic teams, faculty, and alumni relations. Some of the best things we’re doing bridge multiple services to feel holistic for the student. Finally, be intentional and targeted in employer outreach. Give yourself goals on how many employers you want to engage with. If we stay reactive and just let employers come to us, we're not tapping into all the potential for students. Reaching out to new employers keeps us relevant and keeps students trusting our services. If students stop engaging, it's often because they don't see value or new initiatives.
Elliot Felix: I love that. You’ve covered inclusive hiring, embedding with academics, and finding new ways to engage students through experiential learning.
Maggie Thomas: Thank you. It’s fun to talk about.
Elliot Felix: Well, thank you so much for your advice and insights. This is such an important part of how students succeed.
Maggie Thomas: Thank you, Elliot. It was a pleasure.
Elliot Felix: Thanks for listening to the Connected College Podcast. Subscribe to my Connected College Newsletter at ElliotFelix.com for insights and excerpts from my upcoming book, tools you can download, and special offers. You can also find more information about talks I've given and articles I've written there. Please support the podcast by rating and reviewing it wherever you're listening. Let's create connected colleges where students will succeed.