Career Services recognized for innovative support for students

As the Career Services team was brainstorming about the spring 2026 Career Fair in the Swetman Gymnasium, a question emerged. How could the team better equip student attendees with the knowledge and confidence they needed to approach employers?

“That was really the challenge, and I like to design a solution based on a problem,” said Kevin Bachmann, the career coach for education, public and human services. His mind jumped into action.

Before long, he came up with the idea to have an interactive booth, featuring an artificial intelligence (AI) tool named “Carl” at the Career Fair. The virtual assistant at the Career Fair he designed addressed student anxiety by analyzing the employer attendee list to match students with the top five employers based on their academic majors and interests, even generating tailored elevator pitches and where their booths were located within the gymnasium.

“The students who used it thought it was exciting,” said Bachmann, who received the Central New York Career Development Association’s Industry Innovator Award for his leadership and innovation in applying artificial intelligence to career education and student success.

“It was a surprise when I got the award, as I didn’t know I had been nominated,” Bachmann said. “It is gratifying to receive that kind of recognition from your peers. It was also affirming that since this is an award for innovation, I must be doing something right, especially with technology.”

His nominator and supervisor, Associate Director for Career Education Jackie Campbell Wallace, said that since joining SUNY Oswego in fall 2024, Bachmann has quickly expanded the reach of career education by building strong partnerships with faculty, embedding career readiness into coursework and connecting students with alumni and employers. He supports student retention through career-focused collaborations with academic departments, including developing National Association of Colleges and Employers-aligned syllabus toolkits.

“Kevin has helped bring our office into the next century when it comes to AI,” Wallace said. “He is an active member of the AI Workgroup on campus, created AI guides and gems around career education, collaborated with the [Career Services] team to host our first-ever AI Conference and hosted AI workshops in the classroom and AI pop-ups around campus. In addition to AI, Kevin is our point person for new technologies for our department and division.”

The interactive career fair booth was one element within SUNY Oswego Career Services’ “Scaling the Career Ecosystem: A Multi-Layered Approach to AI Integration” initiative, which embeds artificial intelligence into every stage of the student career journey — from exploration and résumé development to interviewing, networking and salary negotiation.

The larger initiative earned statewide recognition in June when it received the Excellence in Innovation Award at the 2026 SUNY Career Development Organization (SUNYCDO) Annual Conference held in the Thousand Islands region.

The award recognizes programs that demonstrate creative, successful and innovative uses of technology and other resources to enhance career development.

“This recognition reflects our team’s commitment to preparing students for a rapidly changing workforce,” said Gary Morris, Career Services director. “Artificial intelligence is transforming how organizations recruit, hire and operate. Our goal is not simply to introduce students to AI tools, but to teach them how to use them thoughtfully, strategically and ethically as future professionals.”

Among the initiatives recognized were AI-powered career guides that allow students to practice interviews and negotiations, a NotebookLM workflow that translates classroom assignments into career-ready skills, an AI-assisted professional audit that provides students with detailed feedback on résumés as well as the AI-powered career fair assistant known as “Carl” that helps students identify best-fit employers and prepare personalized networking pitches.

The award also recognized Career Services’ broader commitment to innovation, including using AI to streamline internal operations and launching the university’s “AI and the Future of Work” conference, which brings together students, faculty and industry professionals to explore how emerging technologies are reshaping careers.

Driven by a personal aptitude for and interest in technology, Bachmann has played a key role in developing many of Career Services’ AI initiatives, helping position SUNY Oswego as a leader among colleges and universities exploring how technology can enhance career readiness.

Still human-driven

Despite his tech-forward success, Bachmann emphasizes that his core coaching remains deeply human. He measures success through varied milestones: from guiding an administrative candidate through five rounds of mock interviews to secure a highly competitive principal position to a simple, poignant moment teaching a graduating student how to tie a donated necktie.

“AI provides the tools to help students build self-sufficiency, but my actual coaching is entirely human-driven,” Bachmann said. “At its core, it’s about people."

Bachmann credits his own SUNY Oswego education with providing the foundational knowledge to build a versatile career that can weave into new directions as it progresses. For example, Bachmann shares that his own professional path includes graphic production, earning a master's of science in teaching from SUNY Potsdam, spending five years teaching English in Japan and working in student retention before returning to his alma mater as a career services professional in September 2024.

"Oswego gives you that base level skill set that you need to be successful out there in the world,” Bachmann said. “And it's that building block that you can build your career off of, functionally. And that's what I did."

Looking to the future, Bachmann plans to lean heavily into skills-based methods to bridge the gap between the typical college experience and the workplace setting. Recognizing that employers frequently notice a deficit in foundational professional skills, the Career Services team aims to design targeted student initiatives that covers everything from everyday workplace etiquette to drafting professional emails.

-- Submitted by University Advancement