GCU site of 2025 Arizona Statewide Career Services Conference
Chris Murphy threw out a creative way to transition his students into jobs: Have them run their own design agency and produce marketing campaigns, social media campaigns, podcasts and the like for real clients.
It’s what the associate professor in Grand Canyon University’s College of Arts and Media is doing with Canyon Creative, the university’s student-run design agency – a work-for-credit experience in which students can substitute classes in the last semester of their senior year for internship credit.
The work-for-credit experience was one of the job-focused ideas the university’s faculty shared with attendees of the Arizona Statewide Career Services Conference.
GCU’s Career Services hosted the conference this year in collaboration with the Arizona Statewide Conference Committee, which included representatives from Grand Canyon, Arizona State and Northern Arizona universities, the University of Arizona and Gateway Community College.
It was the second time in the conference’s 30-plus years that GCU hosted the event for career services professionals from higher education institutions around the state.
About 100 attended the conference Tuesday and Wednesday from more than 15 colleges and universities.
“Hosting the conference at GCU this year is such an honor,” said Aysha Bell, GCU’s executive director of Career Services. “We are truly grateful to be able to bring our peers from across the state to this campus. We wanted this to be an enlightening and uplifting experience for each attendee.”
Conference guests not only had the chance to listen to speakers’ innovations when it comes to transitioning students from college to the post-college job world, but they attended breakout sessions that touched on everything from connecting students with alumni mentors to how career services professionals can leverage the university ecosystem.
Attendees also had a chance to tour companies, such as USAA and Curbell Plastics.
“This is an opportunity for them to learn best practices from their peers and to network and get re-invigorated,” Bell said.
Murphy, one of the conference’s two keynote speakers, emphasized in his talk how going to college “is not about the career; education is actually all about the experience … which better informs students to pursue a career.”
“One of the cruelest things happens to a high school student – somebody says to them, ‘Pick your major,’” Murphy said.
He asked, “How do you bridge that gap between academics and the real world, right?”
For Murphy, that meant proposing a new classroom experience through Canyon Creative, in which clients visit with students and students get to understand the audiences they’re targeting.
One of those experiences: creating podcasting videos for former professional baseball outfielder Chris Singleton, a special assistant with the Major League Baseball Players Association.
“What this experience starts to do for the student, it sort of demystifies people,” something you can’t teach in the classroom, Murphy said. It also demystifies what lies ahead in the real world when it comes to their careers.
Keynote speaker Greg Lucas, faculty chair in GCU’s Colangelo College of Business, himself demystified the role of artificial intelligence in the metaverse and how universities can use that technology to help students connect with potential employers or even interview people they admire in the career fields they want to enter.
Lucas pointed to an event in the spring in which GCU Career Services and the College of Engineering and Technology hosted an industry meet-and-greet for students with IT leaders from Hawaiian Airlines, Discount Tire and Western Alliance Bank. The event was held in the metaverse – a virtual world in which users represented by avatars interact with one another.
The metaverse, he said, is the new “third place” – a concept referring to a public space, outside of home and work, where people gather to interact and build community. Students are already hanging out with each other in virtual universes, like in online gaming platform Roblox.
“A static website is no longer the gold standard when it comes to getting students’ attention. And career services, and most services, must shift from a transactional, advising (model) to a transformational experience approach,” Lucas said. “ … The students of today, they’re AI-native students. They’re used to immersive technology, they’re used to this personalized experience and they want access 24 hours a day, seven days a week."
He added that AI is reshaping the workforce, and “We must equip students for jobs that don’t even exist."
Lucas gave another example of how he has used AI in his introduction to business technology class.
Students were given an assignment to pick a business leader to interview using AI. They prompted AI to answer questions based on how that business leader would answer, according to their known opinions.
Many students chose to “interview” Apple founder Steve Jobs.
“This is an example of conversational learning through AI. … They can now have impossible conversations anytime using conversational learning,” he said of students getting answers to their questions, via AI, from career idols such as Jobs, who passed away in 2011.
The conference wrapped up with the panel session, “Emerging Industry: Economic Development in Our State.” It covered economic trends and the outlook on jobs that might be waiting for students when they graduate.
One of the trends: the move to industrial and manufacturing jobs, transportation, logistics and data centers.
“That’s been a huge shift for us in what we look at in terms of how we’re attracting companies and also how we’re working with our workforce partners to build the training that those companies are going to need,” said Susan Dumon, chief economic development officer for the Chamber of Southern Arizona.
About 30% of the projects her office saw prepandemic were office-related, which have since evaporated, she said, and before the current administration, about 40% of the jobs in the pipeline was clean energy-related.
“What I’ve seen in the last five months have been zero of those types of projects,” she said of office-related work, while energy-related projects have decreased, as well.
LaSetta Hogans, deputy economic development director for the city of Phoenix, said another trend is the comeback of data centers – facilities where networked computers, storage systems and other IT infrastructure is housed.
In 2024, metro Phoenix ranked fourth among North American data center markets in total inventory, according to CBRE.
She also noted how the city of Phoenix has focused on attracting companies that bring in high-growth, high-wage jobs. Over the last eight years, she has seen employees’ wages go from $38,000-$42,000 annually on average to, now, upward of $83,000.
The panelists also discussed how they keep companies in Arizona.
“The workforce, that’s really what keeps our businesses here,” said Hogans, adding how working with education partners plays an important role in retention, and that she’s seeing talent staying in Arizona and the Phoenix area.
“Workforce used to be at the tail end of the conversation,” added Brian Wright, economic development business manager for Buckeye, one of the fastest growing cities in the nation. He said employers are asking, “Do you have the workforce?” early in the conversation, and if cities are connected to universities that can help them fill positions.
The panelists also shared some of their challenges.
“Housing is a big issue … not just housing, but affordable housing,” Wright said.
In Flagstaff, the high minimum wage has put a strain on companies, and for employees, the lack of day care, said Laura Rosensweet, senior community impact manager, Northern Arizona.
Haley Fagerlie, assistant vice president of industry relations and strategic partnerships at GCU, said one challenge is helping companies change their outlook when it comes to engaging with the future workforce.
“What are businesses going to do to fully engage with those individuals directly?” said Fagerlie, who added that today’s college students want to be known and be a part of something.
They “don’t really care about the name of the company -- they care about what the company is going to offer them and how they’re going to be a part of the company. … They (companies) think that people are going to run to them, but there’s a lot of options, especially in Arizona.”
Another challenge, Fagerlie said, is making sure students have the skills that will be relevant when they graduate, since technology and the job market are changing so quickly.
The panel also addressed the uncertainty in the economy and how the loss of federal jobs, for example, has had a ripple effect.
“Companies can’t make decisions because they don’t understand what’s going to happen next,” Dumon said.
Said Bell about the conference, “It’s really beautiful that we all are getting together from the different institutions for the singular goal of, ‘How can we better serve our students? How can we better serve industry? How can we better serve our colleges or universities?' We all have that same goal.”
Internal Communications Manager Lana Sweeten-Shults can be reached at [email protected] or at 602-639-7901.
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