(13 minutes read-time)

Have you ever met someone who just radiates purpose? Someone who seems like they were born to be doing what they’re doing?

You might be familiar with the 8 career readiness core competencies defined by NACE: career & self-development, communication, critical thinking, equity & inclusion, leadership, professionalism, teamwork, and technology. There’s some buzz in the Career Readiness community lately about a hidden ninth competency: meaning and purpose.

According to career advisors and recruiters, young professionals who can articulate their sense of meaning and purpose are better prepared to develop direction, evaluate choices, and discover personal fulfillment in their careers.

I sat down with someone I admire for their sense of purpose, Jim McAtee, to learn more.

Of course, I asked the hardest question first.

Tell us who you are?

I’m Jim McAtee, and I serve as Assistant Vice President for Career and Professional Development here at Ball State.

I’m super passionate about helping industry and students connect in even the larger scope of things, thinking about workforce development in the state, and our responsibility as higher education institution, to help bring students and industry together in a meaningful way.

What attracted you to that area of work?

So that started a long time ago. I have a background in industry. And I was a non-traditional student trying to find my way. And through a series of events I ended up in higher education in a career center. And so, I remember very vividly the first time I helped a student get a job, and how meaningful that was. And that I was actually whooping and hollering in the Career Center lobby with this person. It was just an exciting moment. And I guess I kind of caught the bug there. And then, because I come from industry, and was working in higher education and understanding that someday there would be a big question around return on investment of higher education, I found myself really in that space of thinking about how do I organize my experiences and my education so that I can make a broader impact someday?

What sparked that passion for you like, it’s a specific way to geek out, right?

So, I guess a couple of things. I’ll point back to a conversation I had with a mentor. When I left industry, and went into higher education, I was working on my MBA, and I was a career coach at a university. And I was frustrated because I had just left industry and went into higher ed. And I was frustrated with the red tape or things I wanted to do that were just moving too slowly, and I couldn’t do it. And my mentor asked me a couple of really important questions. He asked me, Jim, do you think that the way you approach career coaching is different than everyone you see around you? And my answer was yes. And he asked me if I thought that made a difference for students. And I said, Yeah, I think it does. And he said, What if you could take your impact and multiply it by 10? Would you want to do that? I said, Yeah, that would be awesome. And he said, That’s why you need to be in higher ed, and that’s why you need to try and become a director of a career center someday.

So, he was kind of telling you to listen to your gut. Between what excited you in general and those specific moments where you were genuinely excited for a student, whooping and hollering?

Right, those are signs. And then also, because of my background in sales, and business to business sales, in particular, maybe I had a different way of looking at tracking success.

I had all kinds of spreadsheets and charts and graphs and things to fill my director about how it was making an impact in the areas I was responsible for. And that was a little different than the way some others did it – not better not worse, just different than the way others were tracking impact. And there was a moment in time where I looked around and I said, you know, I see a lot of folks around me coming up through Student Affairs, through counseling into career centers, and that’s great. But we’re lacking a little diversity in thought, I didn’t see a whole lot of business acumen around me. And I really did, I felt like someday this discussion of return on investment with higher education should be critical. And I thought if I could position myself in the middle, in that gray space, where they call the gray space in between industry in higher education, I can make an impact in that space. I love it.

I’m curious about that transition from industry to education. What motivated that?

Yeah, so I was in industry. And I was serving as I served as president of the North Carolina Cooperative Education Association. And my vice president for that organization, worked at East Carolina University. And he called me one day, he said, Jim, what are you doing these days, I was doing consulting work at the time in banking. And I said, Well, I’m traveling the country, I’m making a lot of money. But I don’t know that this is my calling, interested. Oh, and he said, I’m glad to hear that because we were wondering if you’d be interested in

taking a pay cut, and coming to work in higher ed as a career coach, because we have an opening and asked him two important questions.

And I knew him well enough, I could do this. I asked him, Do you have tuition remission? And I asked him, How was your MBA program ranked? And I like both of those answers. So I applied. And that’s how I ended up at a large university and a career coach position. I was career coach to both the College of Business and the College of Fine Arts at the same time. And so that’s where I started as a career coach. And so I was working on my MBA in the evening, while I was working full time,

Were those assigned to you, or did you pick those out? Or?

Actually, when I was interviewed, they said, you can have the School of Nursing. Or you can have fine arts, okay, this was added later. And I asked a question, I said, Well, what’s graduation like for your nursing students? And they said, they all walk across the stage, and they announce where they’re going to work.

So what’s your graduation rate for fine arts? And they said, that’s very different. I was like, Well, I think that my business background in what I bring to the table, I could really help fine art students more than I could help nursing students. That’s great. So that’s why I went to fine arts,

You saw where you can have an impact, right?

Bingo.

I love it. Okay. So the theme of this series of interviews is Finding Meaning and Purpose. And I’m feeling kind of two narratives are kind of emerging, where one is that you had good mentors, you had friends that you stayed connected with who gave you advice. And the other is that you listened to your gut. It felt right.

It felt right, right. Yeah, it wasn’t always like that.

So a little background. I grew up in Northwest Pennsylvania in the country on a dirt road. Dad left when I was young. I was one of four kids.

So I saw mom’s struggle trying to provide for us, until I was old enough where I could actually work on a farm down the road, bale hay in the summer, do the things that needed to be done. And what I knew of the world of work was the metal fabrication shop where my dad worked. And Perkins where my mom works. That’s what I knew about the world.

One other thing that happened that I think was influential and kind of influences how I operate now is I grew up in a college town. Edinboro University is right there in Edinboro.

And I remember I was junior or senior in high school and thinking about what I was going to do, I thought, well, maybe I’ll go to college. So I hopped on my bicycle. And I rode to the college, and I thought, I’m gonna talk to somebody.

Edinboro University is not a big university. But to me, it was huge. So I remember walking in his building, I didn’t know what the building was, I just kind of walked in hoping to find somebody who can help me. And I remember walking in and talking to somebody and saying, I want to go to college, I need to figure out how I do that.

I remember the person being like, Well, you’re in the wrong building, you need to go to the building by the thing which is called this building…

That is the classic university experience.

Yeah. And I remember leaving and I was like, this place place is – I’m not ready for this. This place is too big for me. Never pursued it. And then I proceeded to go into industry after, and climbed up, climbed the ladder, did all the things. But part of my mission today is that there are students like that, that come here. Students who are first generation college students who are just trying to navigate the system, let alone thinking about what industry am I interested in? And I want to help Ball State as a university rally around those those folks, I wanted to help first generation college students, I want to help Pell Grant – I was a Pell Grant student – help Pell Grant students figure out how to maybe not only just college, but how do I get connected? How do I build social capital? You know, how do I meet the people that are going to help me grow?

Yeah, I think that’s really interesting – to contrast like your experience going to university and being like “this. I don’t get it” and leaving. For me, that was never an option. It was you’re going to college, just pick one. So I think that’s really fascinating. Like, just thinking about what role does the not just the culture but the institution itself play in picking up the first generation students who don’t have that impetus in their life, you know?

I’ll give you an example, maybe. So when I was working on my MBA at East Carolina University, I had to put together a portfolio that showed whether I knew what I was doing in finance. And so Zimmer ended up in my portfolio. And so I researched them and got to know a lot about them. And then, throughout my journey, I landed in Indiana, and I found out Zimmer was just up the road in Warsaw, Indiana.

I was excited. I was like I know about this company. They’re amazing. So I started talking to people about Zimmer, do you know about Zimmer? And people were like Zimmer who? And I remember being so frustrated, because I was like, there is this international center of orthopedics and all of the surrounding industry right here in our backyard. And people don’t know about it, but then it struck me. Students don’t have hip replacements. Why would they know about Zimmer Biomet? And whose responsibility is it to make sure they know about it? It’s ours.

With over 90% in-state students coming into Ball State, and then this year 80% of students staying in state postgraduation. We need to make sure they know what opportunities are available to them.

The values for the Career Center are Connect, Integrate and Empower. And I know you had a lot to do with that vision. I’ve always been curious: how closely those align with your personal values, like, how would you describe them?

Well, I think it’s important to understand where this came from. So there’s two things about our Career Center, there’s the mission – connect integrate and empower. And then there’s our workplace culture statement, which is empowerment, assessment, accountability, and fun.

I came here 12 years ago, and said, I don’t – I’m not a micromanager. I don’t tell people how to do things. But there’s one thing we’re all gonna get behind. This is the one thing I’m telling you we’ll do, we’ll model empowerment, assessment, accountability, and fun. That’s the base. That’s the culture. If we get the culture, right, we’ll figure everything else out. We have to create a place where people want to be where people want to work. So we did that. And then we got the team together. And we took a long time, it must have been about six months, we took kicking this around, going back and forth thinking about all of these things where we landed on our mission. And those three key words are connect, integrate and empower a lot of it because of our unique strengths. And, you know, where Ball State sits in the ecosystem of Indiana higher education.

But also, what I thought might be the future of career services now in the industry, in Indiana, right, and that future is one of being able to not only provide students with awesome career coaching, and great tools that we do with that, but also helping them connect the dots so that they can leverage that higher education. Integrate their curricular and co-curricular experiences and articulate those, and empowering them for post-graduation success.

I was a hiring manager, and I remember being frustrated because there could be someone across the table from me that I knew could do the job. But they weren’t telling me what I needed to hear. They weren’t articulating to me what was in their resume or what wasn’t in their resume, for me to know that they could do the job. Any one of our students can be in that situation. That’s why we lean into the NACE competencies quite a bit. And why we’re working on the learner experience record why we have Skills Infusion and Faculty Externships. And in all of those things.

I was wondering if you could tell me about a time when you like, really felt that you were struggling with meaning and purpose?

Yeah. I’ve got one. This was actually the moment in time where I learned the most about myself. But at the time, it felt like it was the hardest thing I’ve ever dealt with. So I was in university, it was East Carolina University. I walked in the building one day and my director said, we’re having a department meeting here in a little bit. I said yeah, I know, okay. And she said, well, I’m gonna announce that you’re going to be the interim director, and then I’ve got to go over to this other building because I’ve been appointed to lead this. See, in five minutes. I’m like, Okay.

And the challenge with that was that there are people there that had been there longer than I had. Yeah. They had student affairs degrees, I had undergraduate business degree. I mean, I’m MBA. And yet, I’m gonna be the interim director. I saw what was coming.

Yeah. You felt like you deserved it, but the student affairs people would feel they might maybe have deserved it more…

I felt like I could do it. But that was an interesting way to set that up. Yeah.

Well, luckily, though, my director believed in me enough to give me that opportunity. And that is what led me here. But I had to go through what I went through. That is during the time when I almost left higher ed, when I had that conversation with my mentor. Because I was having very difficult time, I was trying to move things forward, I was trying to be innovative, I was trying to show I could do the job, that job would have changed my life and it would have put me on this trajectory, the direction I wanted to go. We’ll skip over a lot of the details. The politics got in the way. Politics were heavy. And it’s hard. And through a series of events that I won’t dive into, but I applied, the search committee chose me. It was stopped by an incoming Provost, the search reconstituted. I applied again, was chosen by a completely different search committee, and then it was stopped again.

So at that point, you’re feeling really skeptical.

I was feeling very skeptical about my future and my purpose – and is this really what I should do? Or should I do what I had always thought I would do, which is move to Wall Street, be a trader make a lot of money and retire at 30?

So that was a really hard time. But luckily, I had, I had a good person that I had no idea – I didn’t seek this person out, it just kind of happened. That they were there to have that conversation with me. And they helped me stick with it, and helped me realize no, this is what you’re good at. You should stay the course.

Do you want to emulate that? And in the future?

Oh, of course. Yeah. I try to do that now! There are a handful of people that I stay in close touch with. And I have really great conversations, I feel like I’m fulfilling that mission for myself. Because I’ve been here at Ball State for 12 years, I’ve had time to develop relationships. Over that time, you’re gonna have employees that come in, and then employees that leave. And I think that’s a good thing, because they’re off doing better things for their family, you know, but I stay in touch with them. And when there’s something to talk about, they’ll pick up the phone or they’ll send me a text, Hey, are you available to have a chat? And not only do I feel an obligation to pay back, I guess pay it back for what my mentor did for me, but also to pay it forward to them so that then they will go and do that for other people.

What advice would you have for students who maybe are struggling with meaning and purpose? They haven’t gotten. They haven’t left school yet, they’re thinking about their futures. And they are just not sure.

Yeah.

It’s not easy, but seek people outside of your current circle of influence, meet some new people try and develop some new relationships. So my mentor came to me.

However, here at Ball State, we do have a formal mentor program people can engage with. So certainly take advantage of that, it’s called the Cardinals Connect, they can get there on the website. But also connect with your career coach, because one of the things that we do is we we think about – not necessarily career pathways, per se, but – what’s your unique value that you bring to the table that maybe you haven’t uncovered yet? What are the competencies that you have that you’re really good at, that you really enjoy doing?

And then who can we connect you with to have further conversations about that? That’s what I would encourage students to do who are struggling with purpose and meaning. It kind of begins with Know thyself, you have to know yourself. And to explore that is part of what college is about. And the other part of it of course is to skill up.

There’s always going to be a period of time where you’re not sure, right? You have to just keep going and try to figure it out. Listen to that little voice that cheers when somebody else succeeds.

Exactly.

I love it. Thank you, Jim.

Thank you. It’s been great talking to you.

 

Want to learn more about career competencies, or how to develop your own sense of meaning and purpose? Call or e-mail the Career Center to connect with a Career Coach: 765 285 1522 or careercenter@bsu.edu.