Last month my consulting business quietly passed its third anniversary. Three years is long enough to accumulate a lot of stakeholder interviews, a lot of airport coffee, and a surprising number of job titles. Consultant, strategist, facilitator… and, depending on the day, also my own IT department, marketing team, and tech support.
But the real milestone isn’t the calendar.
It’s perspective.
When you spend three years walking onto different campuses, interviewing hundreds of people, and listening closely to how career preparation actually works, patterns start to emerge — patterns that are surprisingly hard to see when you’re living inside the system every day.
Consulting turns out to be less about giving advice and more about listening carefully enough to notice those patterns.
And sometimes, it’s about improvising when your laptop hinge snaps on the first morning of interviews and you suddenly can’t access your carefully prepared questions.
Fortunately, after enough interviews you learn that the best questions are usually the simplest ones anyway.
The moment a president saw the system
One of the moments that has stayed with me over the past few years happened during a conversation with a college president. She was thoughtful, curious, and clearly committed to helping students succeed. We had just finished a round of stakeholder interviews across campus and were discussing what we were hearing.
A pattern had started to emerge. Students were receiving excellent support, but not consistently. Depending on who their professor happened to be. Depending on whether a course happened to touch on career preparation. Depending on whether they crossed paths with the right mentor at the right moment.
Career preparation, in other words, was happening in pockets.
Good pockets, even. There were faculty doing extraordinary work and programs producing impressive outcomes. But the distribution of those opportunities was uneven, and access often depended on circumstance.
When I repeated that pattern back to her, there was a pause.
Then she leaned back and said something that shifted the entire conversation.
Most of the internships our students get, she reflected, come through family connections.
Suddenly the issue wasn’t programming.
It was access.
That was the moment when the idea of a career ecosystem began to click—not as a collection of initiatives, but as a structure designed to ensure students have more consistent access to preparation, relationships, and opportunity.
Not more programs.
Better design.
The conversation no consultant enjoys
Not every conversation feels quite that hopeful.
At another institution, I had to tell a vice president something difficult. The career center team, I explained carefully, was too dysfunctional to be trusted with executing the institution’s strategic plan.
This wasn’t a conclusion reached lightly. Over time, small signals had surfaced during interviews: comments from faculty, concerns from staff, inconsistencies that suggested deeper issues.
Then one interview made the situation impossible to ignore.
A group of student staff members—without any prompting—began describing behavior they had experienced from career center staff that they considered unprofessional. We hadn’t even asked about quality. The question had simply been, “Is there anything else we should know?”
Apparently there was.
The vice president suspected there were issues, but he hadn’t realized how serious they had become. And when execution capacity inside an organization breaks down, the consequences ripple outward quickly. Strategy stalls. Trust erodes. Partnerships become fragile.
It’s a reminder that strategy doesn’t succeed because it’s written down.
It succeeds because the organization responsible for carrying it out is healthy enough to execute it.
The history professor carrying the work
Then there was the history professor.
Every campus seems to have one: the faculty member who has quietly taken it upon themselves to help students figure out what comes next. This particular professor had built a career course that students were begging to take. He mentors students constantly, connects them with opportunities, and spends far more time thinking about their futures than his job description technically requires.
When we spoke, he told me, with a mix of pride and exhaustion, that he has accumulated a number of scars from trying to build career structures within the liberal arts.
Why does he keep doing it?
Because students keep asking for help.
Over time, that commitment pulled him further into the issue. He contacted the president. He joined strategic planning discussions. He decided that if the system didn’t exist, he would try to build parts of it himself.
Faculty like this exist everywhere.
Sometimes their work reflects enthusiasm. But sometimes it reflects something else: a belief that the institutional system isn’t fully serving students.
And when that happens, passionate faculty step in to fill the gap.
What three years of consulting has made clear
After hundreds of conversations across campuses, a few patterns have become impossible to ignore.
First, the demand for career preparation across institutions is enormous. Presidents want stronger outcomes. Admissions teams want clearer value propositions. Employers want graduates who are better prepared. Alumni want to help students succeed.
Yet the responsibility for coordinating all of that often lands on one small unit.
Career centers are frequently asked to solve a system-level challenge with unit-level authority.
Second, strategy collapses when execution capacity is weak. Institutions often assume that once a strategic priority is named—career outcomes, experiential learning, workforce readiness—the work will naturally move forward. But if the team responsible for executing that strategy lacks stability, clarity, or trust, progress slows dramatically.
And third, when systems lose credibility, people step in to compensate. Faculty build their own courses. Advisors create their own guidance. Individual champions do heroic work.
The intention is generous.
But heroism doesn’t scale.
Final thought
One of the privileges of running a consulting practice is the vantage point it creates. You spend your days listening to how different campuses approach the same challenges. Over time, the patterns become hard to ignore.
Across institutions, people care deeply about helping students succeed. Faculty step in. Advisors do what they can. Career center teams stretch limited resources as far as possible.
The challenge is rarely commitment.
It’s design.
And once institutions begin to see the system clearly, the conversation changes.
That’s when real progress becomes possible.
And that’s what keeps the work interesting—even on the days when your laptop breaks, your shoe decides to retire mid-dash to your next meeting, and you’re reminded that consulting involves a lot more improvisation than most people realize.
Early Talent Competition with Crocs
April 13th - 27th
A brand that needs no formal introduction.
The next Early Talent Competition features Crocs — the globally recognized brand behind its signature clogs, bold collaborations, and a culture built on comfort, creativity, and standing out.
Iconic with students. And now, inviting them to help shape what’s next. Short. Virtual. Employer-led. Open to all majors. Free.
Students will take on a real Crocs brand challenge. Not just a case competition, but a chance to step into the role of builder, maker, or designer and bring a little disruption.
Participants will have the chance to build something portfolio-ready, gain recognition, and compete for some of the biggest prizes we’ve seen yet— with the Top 3 submissions announced on social.
Easy to share. Trusted brand experience.
Make sure your institution is on the list! Email Lindsey Rosenbluth (lindsey.rosenbluth@podiumeducation.com) to enable your students to RSVP. Read more about why I think these Early Talent Competitions are worth it.
Warmly,
P.S. Just a heads up. No newsletter next week! I'm off for vacation.
