With more than 13 years of experience in consulting, Kristi has managed complex,  organization-wide change initiatives that delivered multimillion-dollar benefits to her  clients. She specializes in designing operating strategies that maximize human capital  to drive long-term sustainable growth. Kristi consults closely with clients to ensure  their strategic needs are met and manages the internal project team throughout the  planning, development, implementation and support phases of each client  relationship.

As the manager of Consultants in Gallup’s Chicago office, Kristi strives to create an engaging work environment where her team has all of their workplace needs met, so they can do what they do best everyday. She also leads committees to support her team’s physical, social, financial, community, and career well-being.

Kristi has a passion for developing the next generation of women leaders and serves on the Auxiliary Board for Girls in the Game, an organization that provides leadership development for young girls through sports. She also served as the 2007-2008 President of Future Women Leaders, a community of over 200 professional women who support each other’s development.

Kristi earned her Bachelor of Science in Business Administration at the University of Colorado, Boulder and her Masters of Business Administration at the University of Chicago, Booth School of Business. She enjoys spending time with her husband, Marc and two daughters, Brooke and Rose.


Feedback: Survey Methods and How to Get Valid Insights; Lessons and Best Practices

 

Are your surveys designed to get the best insights from your respondents? Are your response rates as high as they could be?

In this presentation, Prof Shavitt will discuss ways to enhance your response rate and maximize the value of the survey for getting the information you need. She will present a framework for making decisions about survey design, highlighting the ways in which surveys represent both a social encounter and a cognitive task. Adopting this perspective provides new insights into establishing the kind of fruitful “conversations” you want to have in your surveys of students, alumni, and employers.

This presentation will address the design of survey questions, the design of the overall questionnaire and follow-ups, and issues in incentivizing respondents. It will provide illustrations from a range of organizational and business survey contexts. Our focus will be on implications for how to conduct surveys that stimulate more engagement, honesty, and reflection from your survey sample.

Sharon Shavitt is Walter H. Stellner Professor of Marketing at the University of  Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She received her Ph.D. in social psychology from  the Ohio State University and was an NIMH Postdoctoral Fellow at Indiana  University from 1985-1987.

 Sharon is a Fellow of the Society of Consumer Psychology, the Society for  Personality and Social Psychology, and the Society for Experimental Social  Psychology. She is an Associate Editor for the Journal of Consumer Research   (2014-2017 term), Associate Editor for Research Dialogues for the Journal of  Consumer Psychology, and currently serves on the editorial board of Journal of  Marketing Research and Journal of Consumer Psychology.

Sharon’s research program primarily focuses on cultural factors affecting consumer motivations and survey response behaviors. Her research in these areas has been supported by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Fetzer Institute. She has published in Psychological Review, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Psychology, Journal of Marketing Research, and Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, among other outlets. Shavitt is Past-President of the Association for Consumer Research and has served as co-Chair of the Association for Consumer Research 2008 conference, and as co-Chair of the Policy Board of the new Journal of the Association for Consumer Research.

Sharon teaches courses on consumer behavior, promotions management, and survey methods, to undergraduates, MBAs, and PhD students. She has appeared many times on the University’s List of Excellent Teachers for student ratings in numerous courses. She has also taught diverse audiences outside of the University, including executives from Norway, South Korea and the U.S. At Illinois, Sharon is also appointed in the Department of Psychology and the Survey Research Laboratory.

Round Table Topic Sessions

These small table talk discussions are meant to encourage dialogue and information gathering/sharing among Career Center professionals, vendors/affiliates/guests and employers.  Each table will be assigned a specific on-trend career topic with a facilitator leading the group discussion.  Attendees can pick the topic of their choice and jump into the conversation.

Topics Include:

• International Student Support
  Subtopics: educating employers on H1B sponsorship, managing international student psyche in this ever-changing political climate, international student preparation for an often difficult job search, career centers’ role in educating government and policy makers on the advantages and skill set of our international graduate students.
• Student Engagement Success and Challenges
  Subtopics: How do we maximize student involvement in career center activities, how do we ensure we are collecting student feedback appropriately, how do you assess student outcomes, how do you address feedback timely
• Who is the current student?
  Subtopics: What changes are you seeing in student’s interests, what challenges do you have in meeting students’ ever-changing job search needs/interests (and solutions to those changing needs/interests)
• Professional Development for YOU: (everyone is welcome)
  Subtopics: What are the pro’s and con’s in your industry, what do you see as the trends in your profession, where do you go for professional development and insight (certification, training, education), what’s it like to switch from corporate to college, how to move from school to school, what have you learned about how to manage your time in an academic calendar, what helped you the most when you started your current role, who’s been your best mentor.