Stakeholder Advisory
Provided individualized career guidance to 200+ students on goals, strategies, resumes, cover letters, and available resources.
Professional Experience · Service Delivery · Operations · Change Adoption
Wake Forest University Office of Personal & Career Development
Advisory, research, platform adoption, and records operations inside a university career development office.
Project Delivery · Stakeholder Support · Change Adoption · Research & Decision Support · Operations
The case in brief
Key insight
Service quality depended as much on clean records and confident users as on advising time itself — the platform work and the advising work were the same problem.
- The challenge
- Serve a large student population well while the office was asking that same community to adopt Handshake as its day-to-day platform.
- My role
- Career Advisor — I carried the advising caseload, ran the English Department research, shaped and delivered Handshake onboarding, and administered records operations.
- Approach
- Individualized advising for 200+ students, department-specific research into career paths, employers, skills, and graduate programs, onboarding built around the questions students kept asking, and records work for 1,000+ students in Handshake.
- Recommendation
- Design the onboarding around recurring points of confusion, and build a department-specific resource students and faculty could use without an appointment.
- Outcome
- 200+ students advised, a standing resource delivered to the English Department, and records administered for 1,000+ students.
- What I took from it
- Adoption is a service design problem. People use a system when it answers the question they actually walked in with.
- Service Delivery
- Change Adoption
- Decision-Support Research
- Operations & Data
Research & Decision Support
Partnered with the English Department to better understand student career pathways and identify opportunities to strengthen career-search support. Researched career paths, employers, skills, and graduate programs and synthesized findings into a department-specific resource for students and faculty.
Handshake Training & Adoption
Helped develop and deliver Handshake onboarding for incoming students, using recurring student questions and points of confusion to shape training around profile setup, career resources, opportunity discovery, appointment scheduling, and engagement with OPCD services.
Operations & Data
Supported data entry and records management for 1,000+ students in Handshake, along with scheduling, administrative workflows, and resource management.
External Engagement
Represented OPCD at a Diversity Matters conference involving local universities.
Resource design · English Department
- 01
Stakeholder need
Identify what students and faculty were asking for.
- 02
Clarify question
Define what the resource had to answer.
- 03
Conduct research
Career paths, employers, skills, and graduate programs.
- 04
Synthesize findings
Reduce the research into usable guidance.
- 05
Develop deliverable
Build and deliver a department-specific resource.
Scale of the work
Skills & Functions
Primary Function
Service Delivery, Operations & Change Adoption
Core Skills Demonstrated
- Stakeholder Advisory
- Research & Synthesis
- User Training & Support
- Records Management
- Cross-Functional Coordination
Tools & Methods Applied
- Handshake
- Career Pathway Research
- Decision-Support Resource Design
- Scheduling & Administrative Workflows