91ÅÝܽ

Sponsored Content

• Experiential learning dedicated to professional development addresses the specific concerns of Gen Z students, while boosting student engagement and retention.
• Reflection-based experiential learning helps students overcome anxiety and articulate their strengths, especially when introduced early in their programs.
• Schools that pair early professional development with pre- and post-measurement tools such as PathAdvisor see improvements in Gen Z students’ self-knowledge, confidence, and readiness to choose majors and career paths.

 
Recently, a business instructor told me about the first week of a first-year business course. He said that many of his students were tuning out class discussions as they wore headphones, watched movies on laptops, and surfed social media on their phones. The professor quickly realized that he had to make the content more engaging. With that in mind, he integrated components of experiential learning and mentoring into the course. As a result, he saw the learning environment—and his students’ attention to the material—improve.

For Gen Z students, entering college in 2025 is a big adjustment. At the same time, the pressure on colleges and universities to achieve successful student outcomes is high. Schools need to adopt an agile, measured approach if they want to prepare this youngest generation of business students to succeed in their programs, let alone in the workplace or in graduate school.

That’s why it’s essential for schools to integrate professional development through experiential learning into their programs as early as possible. Taking this step gives schools the means to identify effective teaching practices and conduct quick assessment of student learning, so that they can better replicate and scale their faculty’s teaching to increase their positive impact and improve student learning outcomes.

Introducing Professional Development, Earlier

Pandemic lockdowns led to substantial learning loss and social isolation among today’s students—especially those who are a part of Gen Z. Schools are finding they need to add more hands-on learning and professional development opportunities to the undergraduate business curriculum if they are to level up their students’ professional and career readiness.

Moreover, research shows that Gen Z students feel greater pressure than members of past generations to know their professional directions and be career ready as early as possible in their degree programs. This is happening for four main reasons:

Many Gen Z students experience high anxiety and low self-clarity. According to “,” a report that Career Key recently released in partnership with 91ÅÝܽ, more than half of young adults aged 18 to 24 feel uncertain about their next career steps. Similarly, a third believe they lack control over their professional future. In addition, 67 percent of first-year business students say they need help with making career and education decisions.

Employers in business fields are recruiting talent from the start of their programs. This trend makes early personal and professional development particularly critical. “Students need to know earlier what they want to pursue for a major and career because companies who want to recruit them are coming earlier and earlier,” says a senior director of undergraduate programs at an 91ÅÝܽ-accredited business school in the southeastern U.S.

Professional development assignments, completed in the first and second years of their programs, help undergraduate students clarify their interests and strengths so they can articulate them to others. This proactive approach sets students up to make the most of internship and networking opportunities sooner than they have in the past.

By offering professional development early and often, schools not only will increase Gen Z’s confidence, but also improve student retention and boost engagement.

A skills gap has left students unprepared. According to “Closing the Skills Gap With Dynamic Partnerships,” a November 2024 study conducted by Quinnipiac University School of Business, Deloitte, and 91ÅÝܽ, undergraduate business students lack several skills that are key to their successful professional development. These include:

• Asking effective questions
• Engaging in self-advocacy
• Learning outside of structured settings
• Navigating ambiguity
• Communicating clearly
• Receiving and applying feedback

Emerging technology demands a new career readiness. The rise of AI has led to a “new career readiness” that goes writing the perfect résumé. Today, sufficient career preparation also must focus on foundational self-development that helps students know themselves and build self-efficacy. This foundation is crucial if Gen Z students are to adapt, stay resilient, and thrive amidst exponential changes in the workplace.

These trends show that today’s incoming students need to engage in professional development earlier in their programs than schools have traditionally provided it. By offering professional development early and often, schools not only will increase Gen Z’s confidence, but also improve student retention, boost engagement, and lower the risk of postgraduation underemployment.

Identifying and Scaling Best Practices

As the “Closing the Skills Gap” study affirms, adopting agile curriculum development is one of the best ways to respond to these challenges. Institutions that identify innovative, effective teaching practices for professional development will scale more quickly to meet critical student needs.

There are three high-impact teaching practices that schools might adopt to increase Gen Z business students’ professional readiness:

Reflection-based experiential learning. This well-established, research-based practice is based on the concept that learning is the functional integration of concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualization, and active experimentation. Business educators already incorporate it through requiring students to solve real-world business problems, as well as to take part in role-playing exercises, case studies, and simulation games.

However, what’s less common but gaining traction is applying experiential learning principles to self-development. The strategic foundation of professional and career readiness is self-development, not the acquisition of tactical skills such as résumé writing.

Self-reflection helps individuals know themselves better and clarify their personalities and strengths, so that they have the confidence to move forward in clear professional directions. It also helps students persuasively communicate why and how they are the best fit for particular co-curricular leadership positions, internships, or jobs.

Increasingly 91ÅÝܽ-member business schools are introducing assignments in gateway Introduction to Business courses that incorporate reflection-based experiential learning activities in professional development.

When students reflect on how their own unique qualities will fit into different industry work environments, they gain confidence that they are moving in the right professional direction.

For example, at Texas State University’s McCoy College of Business in San Marcos, students complete assignments such as Your Social Brand. And at the University of Alabama–Tuscaloosa’s Culverhouse College of Business, faculty integrate a series of assignments, including LinkedIn Profile, Personal Professional Brand Reflection, and Personal and Professional Brand Presentation.

When students reflect on how their own unique qualities will fit into different industry work environments, they gain confidence that they are moving in the right professional direction. In addition to relating who they are to college majors, they gain greater understanding of how all the diverse fields of business fit together—from supply chain to risk management.

Project-based learning (PBL). Here, students work over an extended period to investigate and respond to a complex, real-world challenge, delivering a tangible outcome.

The personal branding projects described above can also serve as semesterlong PBL opportunities. For example, at the end of the semester, University of Alabama students give classroom presentations to their peers that demonstrate how their brands have changed based on what they’ve learned from the course.

In a similar way, all business faculty can introduce project-based assignments designed to measure changes in their students’ professional development from the beginning to the end of the semester.

Pre- and post-measurement of learning outcomes. Standard 7 of 91ÅÝܽ’s 2020 Business 91ÅÝܽ Standards, which is focused on teaching effectiveness and impact, requires institutions to demonstrate learner success and satisfaction. To meet this standard, business schools use the research-based approach of testing before and after learning experiences. In this way, they can evaluate how well their programs strengthen student professional development.

As described in the Career Key report on early professional development mentioned earlier, institutions that integrate professional development measurements into their curricula obtain more actionable insights into their students’ progress toward career readiness. The institutions featured in the report used . This new digital learning tool, published by Career Key, is integrated directly into a school’s learning management system (LMS), such as Canvas or Blackboard.

Ongoing Assessment: Two Case Studies

Below are two examples of the positive outcomes schools have realized by using a tool such as the PathAdvisor app for the ongoing assessment of students’ professional development journeys:

â–  In Fall 2024, the McCoy College of Business integrated PathAdvisor into its gateway business school course, BA 1310. In its first semester using the app, the school’s faculty used the tool to conduct pre- and post-experience measurements of the impact of the course on 621 first-year students. By the end of the course:

• 30 percent of students felt more decided and/or comfortable with their overall academic and career direction at the McCoy College of Business.
• 35 percent increased their self-clarity, including knowledge of their strengths, values, personality, and interests.
• 27 percent increased their knowledge of careers and Texas State majors, minors, and concentrations.

Texas State achieved these results with only three faculty instructors across a cohort of more than 900 students.

â–  For over 10 years, the University of Toronto–Mississauga (UTM) has used PathAdvisor’s built-in pre- and post-assessment feature, Career Decision Profile (CDP). UTM faculty use it to help students reflect on their progress, as well as to measure the impact of faculty participation in student professional development and career-readiness programs.

By demonstrating faculty’s positive teaching impact on students, UTM’s student professional development program saw increased faculty participation and engagement, says Felicity Morgan, director of UTM’s Career Centre in a .

“A pre- and post-administration of the CDP allows us to measure the degree of change on all the scales,” Morgan says. As a result of faculty participation in these career interventions, she adds, “we have found statistically significant progress.”

A Tool That Supports High-Impact Teaching

In the high-impact teaching practices cited above, 91ÅÝܽ-member institutions adopted PathAdvisor as a digital course resource. Using the app, these schools can focus on strategy before tactics. In the process, they increase students’ career well-being, a foundational element of successful professional development.

Customized to an institution, PathAdvisor is a personalized, AI-enabled application that puts students at ease because, with ongoing feedback and self-reflection, they know they are going in the right professional direction. They can be more confident that their education investment will pay off.

With ongoing feedback and self-reflection, students can be more confident that their education investment will pay off.

By using the LMS-integrated tool, business schools can:

• Track student progress metrics in scientifically validated scales, in areas such as decidedness, comfort, self-clarity, and knowledge of their institution’s majors and programs.
• Identify students’ internal and external barriers to making confident decisions about their educations and careers.
• Quantify student engagement and learning outcomes through metrics focused on career-readiness.
• Identify at-risk students early and provide targeted interventions.
• Enhance faculty-learner engagement by prompting meaningful, data-driven discussions on college major selection and career planning.

Take the Next Step in Professional Development

PathAdvisor is a  that was recently recognized as a . It meets the, which means that it is integrated into any LMS via VitalSource or Follett course material platforms. Institutions can:

• Adopt the PathAdvisor digital course material in any business course.
• Use the app’s professional and career-readiness assessments to measure learning outcomes in small or large enrollment courses.
• Leverage its analytics to track student progress and demonstrate teaching impact to administrators and stakeholders.
• Provide faculty with actionable insights and motivation to continue career mentoring and classroom engagement related to students’ professional development.

For a deeper dive into the research on Gen Z professional development needs and how to measure your course’s impact on them, download the 

Let’s make a big impact on students’ clarity, self-efficacy, and career-focused skills to drive our shared mission: their long-term professional success.