Stop Wasting Your MVP Skills: Why Student-Athletes Aren’t Using Campus Career Services
Student-athletes are the ultimate multitaskers, balancing grueling practice schedules, travel, and demanding coursework. Yet, despite possessing highly sought-after traits like discipline, teamwork, and resilience, many are leaving college unprepared for the professional world. The culprit? A massive awareness and accessibility gap between student-athletes and the campus career services designed to help them.
The Schedule Wall: Why Career Services Is Too Often “Off-Limits”
The biggest hurdle isn’t lack of interest; it’s lack of time. According to the NCAA, athletes dedicate up to 20 hours per week to their sport, not counting travel. This leaves almost no window for crucial career development.
The Conflict of the Calendar
Career Services often operates on a 9-to-5 schedule, perfectly coinciding with afternoon practices, training sessions, and mandatory team travel.
- Workshops and Fairs: Most networking events and career fairs are scheduled during times athletes are required to be with their teams. This scheduling conflict effectively locks them out of critical opportunities.
- The Perception of Irrelevance: When resources are promoted via general campus emails, athletes often disregard them, assuming the standard offerings aren’t tailored for their unique demands, leading to a feeling that the services are “for everyone else.”
The Awareness Breakdown
Simply put, many athletes don’t know what they’re missing. General campus communication often fails to penetrate the highly structured and often isolated world of the athletic department. A study by NACE highlights a broader problem: while 81% of students value career services, only 29% actually use them—a gap likely wider among athletes due to their isolated schedules.
The Tailoring Problem: Speaking the Athlete’s Languag
Even if an athlete walks into the Career Services office, standard support may not address their unique needs.
Translating the Jargon
Student-athletes gain exceptional real-world skills: leadership (team captain), accountability (showing up every day), and perseverance (overcoming injury). But they often need help translating “I’m a hard worker” into marketable professional value on a resume or in an interview.
- Standard resume help may not provide the specialized support needed to articulate how winning a conference championship directly translates into high-performance sales or project management.
- The fact that 48% of student-athletes feel unprepared for life after college, according to an NCAA survey, underscores this need for specialized, tailored guidance.
The Fix: Integration and Flexible Support
Bridging this gap requires collaboration and a serious overhaul of service delivery, championed by both the university and the athletic department.
1. Athletic Department Buy-In
Athletic departments must stop viewing career development as a secondary concern. They should actively collaborate with Career Services to dedicate time during the athletic week for career development.
- Mandatory Team Workshops: Schedule career workshops during the early morning, evenings, or weekends, utilizing team meeting slots.
- Alumni Mentorship: Systematically connect current athletes with successful alumni who were also athletes, providing relatable mentors and networking opportunities.
2. Flexible, Targeted Delivery
Career Services offices must evolve their operating model to serve their busiest population.
- Virtual and On-Demand Resources: Offer virtual career counseling sessions and workshops that athletes can access during travel or outside of business hours. This flexibility is non-negotiable for improving accessibility.
- Targeted Communication: Use direct channels like team meetings, athletic department newsletters, and team social media to ensure messages break through the noise.
Successful institutions like the University of Michigan (with its Athlete Career Track (ACT) program) and the University of North Carolina (through the Richard A. Baddour Carolina Leadership Academy) demonstrate that integration works.
By implementing these strategic changes, universities can ensure that student-athletes—who arrive on campus already possessing the drive and skills of top talent—are properly equipped to transition their success from the playing field to a thriving professional career.