How much of an impact can a one-credit course have on student confidence about their future job search? If it’s Business 301: Career and Professional Development, the impact is significant.

“There’s a huge experiential learning component to this class,” said Katybeth Lee, Ph.D., who co-created the course, “and we know from the research that when students do something instead of just learning theory and content, their confidence increases.”

Lee is the VCU School of Business assistant dean for student success and Business Essentials Unit head. She developed the course with a former colleague and then teamed with VCU School of Education’s Kaitlyn J. Hinchey and Kristen Tuxbury, then a Ph.D. student, to evaluate the course’s impact.

“I’m a pracademic,” Lee said. “At heart, I’m a practitioner but I want to do it from a data-informed lens. There’s not a lot of research like this,” she added, “because practitioners aren’t necessarily researchers, and researchers usually aren’t teaching something like career skills.”

The class launched in 2021. At the time, Lee was working on her Ph.D. part time while leading the business school’s career center full time. “I thought, ‘Oh, I could use these research skills I just gained in my Ph.D. and apply them to my day job,’” she said. “So we built an assessment into the class called the career search efficacy scale.”

At the start of the course, students rate their self-efficacy, or confidence, about developing the job-search skills that will be covered. Those skills encompass four categories: networking, job search, personal exploration and interviewing. As the course progresses, “Students create a resume,” Lee said. “They make a LinkedIn profile. They craft an elevator pitch and research an employer who will be at the career fair. Then they go to the fair to practice their elevator pitch. They ask questions and reflect on their findings.”

Lee said students also choose two internships or jobs they want to apply for and analyze the required skills to determine if they already possess them. If not, “They go on LinkedIn Learning and pick a course that will help them fill one of their gaps,” she said.

After completing the course, students rate their self-efficacy a second time. “The pre- and post-class measurements are required,” Lee said, “but in the post, they can opt into our research study. About 800 students have elected to join the study over the past five years, which is a robust sample.”

The two measurements are compared to determine if student confidence increased. “We found the class does, in fact, increase career search self-efficacy, and I’m not surprised it does because it’s experiential learning,” Lee said. “What I do find particularly interesting is that we saw gains regardless of term, modality and instructor.”

“We’ve taught the class in three- and five-week iterations and in multiple modalities — asynchronous online, synchronous online, a hybrid of these two with in-person components and fully in-person,” she said. “And we’ve had more than 10 different instructors who each bring their own style.”

Lee noted that for VCU Business students, Business 301 is a requirement. “Yes, we have a career center,” she said. “But utilizing it is optional, and we know the students who need it most are the least likely to do optional things. By embedding this class into the curriculum, we’ve created a much more equitable learning environment. We can guarantee that all our business undergraduates have been exposed to these concepts and have been given the opportunity to develop these [job search] tools.”

“What they do with these tools is their choice, but we know we’ve delivered them to everyone,” Lee said, “which I believe is really important. If universities want to significantly move the needle on student outcomes, every department needs a class like this.”

The study findings are detailed in “Empowering Employability: Enhancing Career Search Self-Efficacy Through a Required Professional Development Course,” which was published in the Journal of Student Affairs, Inquiry, Improvement, and Impact. Additionally, Lee will present on this topic in June at the National Career Development Association Global Conference in Minneapolis.