The Strategic Guide to Shaping Your Student Affairs Career

This updated practical guide invites readers to employ a personalized framework for strategically shaping their professional path in higher education and student affairs and related careers.

Drawing on five key career strategy components--lifelong learning, the job search and extending your experiences, networking or connecting, self-reflection and well-being, and planning for professional development--Ardoin provides comprehensive, applicable recommendations for career success. This second edition features a significant amount of new content including 20 distinctive stories of how higher education and student affairs and adjacent professionals are applying the five components in their own unique career trajectories. The story contributors’ broad representation of identities, experiences, institutional types, functional areas, and geographic regions showcases the enduring utility of the career strategy components.

Prospective, early-career, and seasoned practitioners will find this book a worthwhile resource as they navigate career planning, career development, and career pivots.

Sonja Ardoin is Associate Professor of Higher Education and Student Affairs at Clemson University, USA.