Stephanie Hollis, the director of Career Services at Chattanooga State Community college, has spent nearly 20 years helping other people find the careers that suit them best. Before coming to Chattanooga State 11 years ago, she worked at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga and in Knoxville, though she started out in 1990 in recruitment and admissions and landed later in career development. Through economic boom and bust cycles, and now through a pandemic, Hollis has guided people seeking to find their footing in the constantly shifting world of work.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
At a community college, you must serve a broad range of students. Who do you work with?
Some people may not know this, but we have high school students on our campus, as well, so I serve students that are in their mid-teens who are still in high school and taking some college classes through early college program, and then I also serve people we’ve had graduate all the way up into their 80s because it’s a goal they’ve set for themselves.
There are some big differences, of course, but the underlying factors are all the same, in a way. What I do is I help people get connected with a career, and so the motions that you typically go through, the basics are helping people learn a little more about themselves, their personality type, helping them gain more insight on career matches that might be best for them, and then helping them work through the positives and negatives of their career choice, making sure the positives outweigh the negatives, and helping them decide on a major and what the next steps will be.