5 Career Advantages You Can Only Get at JWU

Johnson & Wales has always been a leader in experiential, career-focused education. We have a unique approach to how we prepare students to achieve their career aspirations, and it starts on day one. How we teach in the classroom, nurture your goals and connect you with employers have all been thoughtfully planned to help you get the most out of your time here. 

We call them Career Advantages because that’s exactly what they are — experiences, methods and resources that will give you a leg up in the job market. Here are five Career Advantages you’ll experience as a JWU student.

1. Career planning development starts on day one. 

Starting in your first year as a JWU student, you’ll work closely with a career adviser and a faculty mentor to build and refine a career plan for after graduation. In that first year, you’ll learn what career plans are and how they work so that even if you aren’t exactly sure what career you’d like to pursue, you can still begin thinking about potential long-term goals and what a plan to support them will look like. 

You’ll build and maintain this plan on a platform called Handshake using a template that is based on the SMART goals technique: setting goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time bound. In addition to setting these goals, you’ll also have a career readiness checklist to guide you and to help keep track of the skills you’re acquiring and the ones you want to work on. 

For three-year degree students, your career advisor and faculty mentor will check in with you each semester to provide feedback on your plan and answer questions you may have. At the end of each year, you will also complete a required annual reflection to mark your progress and see how your plan may have changed over the course of the academic year. These meetings and reflections are also recommended for four-year degree students but not required.

As you progress through each year at JWU, you’ll continue this process of refining your plan; the final product will be a detailed career plan that outlines where you’d like to be in three to five years after graduation. 

The career plan is a relatively new offering for students, but it formalizes a practice that has always been in place at JWU – making sure students are prepared for their career when they graduate.    

2. Career topics are embedded into courses. 

In addition to the career building resources available at our Experiential Education & Career Service office, we have also built key career topics like résumé building and interview skills into several English course curriculums.  

For example, students in the ENG1030 Communication Skills course spend time honing their interview skills by using an AI tool called BigInterview. Among other features, this tool allows students to record mock interview responses to get feedback on their pace of speech, vocabulary, eye contact and more. 

Plans are already in place to continue expanding the inclusion of career topics into other course curriculums throughout the student experience for more industry-specific preparation. However, many professors have already been covering career topics in their courses.  

Sunil Atreya, a professor and College of Hospitality & Business chair at the Charlotte Campus, has embedded a “Build Your Own Brand” initiative into hospitality courses. This includes résumé and LinkedIn workshops in the Introduction to Hospitality course and mock interview sessions with alumni employers in the Human Resources course.  

3. REAL learning and hands-on experiences are part of every course. 

Our Reimagining Experiential & Applied Learning (REAL) approach brings active learning and experiential components into every course. We have expanded beyond traditional lectures to offer classroom experiences that center on simulation, gamification, research and field work, studios, labs, field trips, service learning, industry projects, role-playing, debates and other exercises. This fundamentally changes your learning experience and puts you in the driver’s seat as an active learner. 

“It's a teaching method that ensures students are not only reflecting on the course content, but also reflecting on their own learning,” says Sheri Young, assistant provost for experiential education & industry relations. She has led the creation and rollout of the REAL approach, which is based on David Kolb’s Model for Experiential Learning theory. 

The model describes learning as a cyclical process of experiencing a learning activity, reflecting on what was learned, thinking critically about the lesson to reach conclusions or theories, and acting by directly applying the conclusions or theories to another experience. 

Reflection is a key part of the approach, prompting students to ask themselves what they learned from the experience, what surprised them, how they can use the information or even how it made them feel. “The more a student is embedded in their own learning, the more their engagement, accountability and self-awareness increases,” Young says. 

JWU is one of the only universities in the country that has scaled up this approach across all of its colleges and programs. 

4. We leverage the expertise of employers to shape our programs. 

Cultivating strong relationships with employers has always been beneficial to our students. It has brought companies such as Disney, Marriott, Amazon and more to our campus for career fairs and classroom presentations to offer internship or job shadowing opportunities to our students. 

But we also bring their expertise into the classroom in other ways. Each college has its own advisory council comprised of industry leaders (many of whom are also JWU alumni). They meet regularly with the dean to advise on program and policy planning. This ensures that every program teaches students the most relevant and needed skills in their industry and prepares them to succeed. 

Since they have helped shape the student experience, these employers actively seek to hire or provide opportunities for JWU students and alumni because they know they’ll be getting an employee with the right skills. 

A perfect example is the recent College of Food Innovation & Technology (CFIT) collaboration with Flavor & The Menu, a popular culinary magazine. The editor-in-chief of the magazine, Cathy Holley, serves on the CFIT Advisory Council. Because of this connection, she pitched the idea of partnering with JWU on “Generation Next,” a collaborative series of installments featuring profiles of JWU students written by JWU students. 

This not only introduced four of our up-and-coming culinary students to the foodie community but also gave four students the chance to have their writing published on a major platform. It was an amazing opportunity for students that came from having employers engaged in what is happening at JWU. 

5. Our Career Outcomes Rate is higher than the national average. 

The numbers don’t lie – our Career Advantages are proven to help students find success after graduation. We track our Career Outcomes Rate, a figure that represents the percentage of graduates who, within six months of earning their undergraduate degree, are employed, continuing their education, serving in the military or performing voluntary service. Our rate has historically been higher than the national average; this year our rate is 92%, while the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) has the current national average at 85%. 

This data is an advantage in itself, because it gives our students confidence that a JWU education is proven to lead to success. 

The JWU advantage is clear — will you be our next success story? 

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