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Maximizing the Supervisee's Growth and Development

Below are tips and techniques to support your student's growth and development.

Identify the Supervisee's Strengths | Incorporate Professional Development | Encourage Relationship Building | Promote SEEC | Discuss Next Steps & Goals | Incorporate Ongoing Feedback

Identify the Supervisee's Strengths

Focusing on strengths is a great way to keep students engaged, productive, and happy. Often we begin discovering our strengths in our first experiential learning opportunities, so we encourage you to actively incorporate discussions and reflections about students’ strengths into your supervision.

While you can certainly use paid or unpaid strengths assessments (see “your strengths," you can also build in times in supervision for students to do the following check-in:

  • Thinking about the last week, what tasks or activities left you feeling energized? What tasks or activities left you feeling drained?
  • Incorporate periodic check-ins about reflecting on their overall progress with their goals and the learning agreement, and consider revising these goals as they explore and discover their strengths.

Having these conversations on a regular basis can help to better tailor their experience, ensure students are making meaning of the experience, and also prioritizes their growth and development, a key goal of transformative experiential learning opportunities.

Incorporate Professional Development

Consider your students as professional members of your team and invite them to the professional development opportunities you regularly schedule for the team. 

Encourage students to utilize their work hours for continuing professional development. For example, you can decide with your student a specific amount of time each month that they can use to attend workshops or trainings.

UCSC pays for access to two free, extensive learning platforms with a wide variety of professional development topics:

Access a recording of our professional development session here.

Encourage Relationship Building

One of the most beneficial aspects of engaging in experiential learning is the chance to build meaningful relationships. Think about potential meetings or opportunities to introduce your student to others, especially individuals in areas of interest to the student. 

  • Practice introductions and talk through any potential areas of anxiety the student may experience in approaching a networking event.
  • Consider doing an informational interview with the student where you share about your own journey and career pathway as a way to introduce them to the process
  • Discuss potential individuals at or outside of your organization who would be a great fit for an informational interview. You can help prepare the student for the informational interview utilizing our guides for students. We highly encourage you to allow students to conduct informational interviews as a part of their hours with you.

Promote the Student Employee Excellence Certificate (SEEC) Program

In addition to the already excellent professional development happening across campus, Career Success is launching a certificate program designed to help students make meaning of their opportunity and contribute to their professional development.

The certificate will feature 8 professional development trainings, 6 required for all students, and 2 electives depending on the needs of the student.

This program is being beta tested for student employees within the Division of Student Affairs & Success during the 2023-2024 academic year. We plan to expand this to all student employees for the 2024-2025 academic year.

Discuss Next Steps and Goals

We encourage you to incorporate discussions of the students’ next steps and goals throughout your experience. Some sample activities you could incorporate include:

  • Reviewing their resume, discussing their new bullets from the opportunity
  • Reviewing their LinkedIn profile
  • Practicing potential interview questions
  • Discussing potential future opportunities
  • Encouraging them to attend a graduate school info session or webinar
  • Requiring them to meet with a career coach or utilize some of the new 24/7 resources as a part of their experience

Incorporate Ongoing Feedback

While feedback should be provided on a routine basis, we highly recommend incorporating at least three formal times for evaluation and feedback:

  1. An initial learning agreement conversation. This also ideally incorporates a pre-assessment of their NACE career readiness competencies.
  2. A mid-experience evaluation, including a self-assessment and a supervisor assessment. We recommend providing ample time to discuss the results during a supervision session. While these templates are optional, we do highly recommend incorporating the NACE career readiness competencies into your evaluation process.
  3. An end-of-experience evaluation, including a self-assessment, supervisor assessment, and a site/supervisor evaluation. We recommend providing ample time to discuss these results during a supervision session. While these templates are optional, we do highly recommend incorporating the NACE career readiness competencies into your evaluation process.