Make Gains: Prepare Your Student Employees to Reflect on Their Work

Set your student employees on track for long, successful careers by having early conversations about performance, growth, goals, skill-development and promotion.

Student Employment encourages student supervisors to provide their students with a space for reflection on skill-development, goals, and individual growth within their role. Performance review and goal-planning opportunities are integral to connecting students' work opportunities to IC's commitment to fostering a space for experiential learning.

Performance review and goal-planning, completed each semester, provides student employees and student supervisors with the opportunity to clarify student job descriptions (and departmental student workforce structuring), to provide (or ask for) feedback, to make suggestions, and to recognize student achievement and success. Additionally, these conversations create a constructive space for students, early in their employment journey, to receive valuable feedback on their relationship to work.

We encourage departments to evaluate their student employees each semester that they work. Information is forthcoming regarding the use of IC HR Cloud for student performance evaluation and goal-planning.

Establish a Consistent Timeline for Performance Feedback and Evaluation

During conversations with your student employees, be sure to:

  • Develop a communication forum/schedule for holding open dialogue throughout the semester;
  • Review the student’s job description, identifying areas for growth, and new opportunities within your department for your students to hone and master new skills;
  • Discuss goals for the future, as well as opportunities for continued student employment, and—if applicable—promotion, in coming semesters;
  • Discuss a timeline for following up, reviewing, and revising goals in the future; and
  • Develop learning targets to relate the student’s academic goals to the student employment opportunity.

Please see here for sample conversation starters.

Please see here for a template for Student Employee Performance Review.

Student Employee Performance Review
Develop Goals for Today and Beyond!

Goal-setting conversations can be an effective practice for establishing direction for student work each academic semester.