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The Collective is the place to connect and collaborate with peers who are all working toward a singular goal – to reimagine the working learner experience. You can leverage expert guidance and ready-to-use tools while engaging with a variety of individuals and groups. Search and explore topics that will guide you to helpful themes and related materials. You will find valuable presentations and resources that can be customized for your use. Then you can share your version to the Collective library. Start your transformation today!

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User personas are crucial tools for understanding target audiences effectively. This article provides a guide on creating user personas. It emphasizes the importance of research, including gathering demographic data and behavioral patterns. It discusses the significance of empathy in persona creation, encouraging designers to step into the shoes of their users. By following these guidelines, you can develop accurate, insightful user personas that enhance your work moving forward.  

This resource outlines how to create and use "How Might We" questions as part of the design thinking process. Particularly, it will define How Might We questions, discuss how to gather themes from empathy interviews and produce problem statements that then become How Might We statements that drive your design thinking process forward. 

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Empathy Mapping

This resource outlines the empathy mapping process by overviewing what empathy mapping is, the steps to conduct empathy mapping, sharing tips and tricks to mapping, an overview of benefits, how to use the data from empathy mapping, and some differing templates of empathy maps.

This blog style resource outlines the benefits of successful institutional change, 5 strategies to go about successful institutional change, and 3 models outlining theories to approach change and institutional innovation.

This resource can be used as a guide for organization of an empathy interview with information on what an empathy interview is, why to conduct one, how to conduct one, sample questions, and next steps after the interviews.

This resource outlines what design thinking is, how it works, a step by step guide to what it looks like in action, and how it can benefit reimagining of student employment with helpful links to additional resources.

Design thinking, a human-centered approach to problem-solving, can help program designers understand the unique challenges and opportunities faced by student employees.  By empathizing with students, defining the problem, ideating potential solutions, prototyping ideas, and testing them with students and student employee supervisors, program designers can create a program that is innovative, effective, and sustainable. The following resource details a number of idea generation activities that can be leveraged as part of the design thinking process.

Performance appraisals for student employees working on a college campus are crucial for a number of reasons. They provide a structured way to provide feedback, helping students understand their strengths and areas for improvement. This feedback is essential for their personal and professional growth. Secondly, performance appraisals allow supervisors to set clear expectations and goals, which can improve the student's focus and motivation. Northern Arizona University (NAU) has implemented a structured performance appraisal process, centered around the evaluation of the NACE Career Competencies to ensure that students receive the necessary feedback and support to enhance their skills. NAU understands performance appraisals play a vital role in managing student employee performance, promoting their development, and ensuring their engagement and success on campus.

We all know student employees play a crucial role in the functioning of a college campus, often serving in various capacities such as library assistants, research aides, or student ambassadors. Their contributions often go beyond their job descriptions; they enhance the campus experience for all students, faculty, and visitors. Recognizing their efforts and the efforts of those staff that supervise them, is vital to the ongoing success of student employment. Northern Arizona University has leveraged their yearly student employee and supervisor of the year awards to ensure acknowledgement of this hard work and dedication to their campus. Their campus has seen many benefits from this campus-wide recognition effort -  it fosters a sense of belonging and loyalty among student employees and their supervisors, encouraging them to remain engaged with their work and the campus community. NAU understands recognizing student employees sets a positive example for others, highlighting the value of their contributions and encouraging a culture of appreciation and respect.  NAU has shared a variety of resources that can inform the build out of your own campus awards, help you think through structure and how to successfully facilitate this effort.

Virginia Commonwealth University is committed to incorporating reflection into all experiential learning including student employment.  Supervisors regularly discuss REAL opportunities (relevant, experiential and applied learning).  This resource was adapted to specifically support supervisors to facilitate reflection throughout the student employment experience.  This example resource serves as a guide that can be adapted and leveraged at any institution. 

For many college campuses, incorporating the student employment posting and application process into their current career management system allows for a more accessible and streamlined process for their students. Additionally, it comes with the added benefit of engaging students into this vital career platform much earlier in their college journey. The following presentation was created by the University of Illinois Chicago and was facilitated as an information session for their students. It serves as a great example of the kind of information, process and details you may want to share with your students in order to get prepared to find and apply for on-campus student employment roles.

This resource gives working learners an overview on what professional development is and ideas on what to do during their professional development time. This is not an extensive list, but a good place for working learners to start with.

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