Office of Student Life
Center for the Study of Student Life

Student Employment Experience Learning Assessment (SEELA)

SEELA helps student employees recognize and track the career-ready skills they develop through on-campus employment. It also provides students with a personalized score report and encourages meaningful conversations with supervisors, called Guided Reflection on Work (GROW) conversations, to connect workplace experiences to academic and career goals.

Overview / Purpose & Scope

SEELA is a short questionnaire that measures how often students practice key transferable skills, scoring each focus area on a 0-5 frequency scale. These skills, referred to as focus areas, align with the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) Career Readiness Competencies, ensuring that SEELA measures nationally-recognized skills essential for career success.

You can read more about focus areas on the SEE program’s SEELA and GROW webpage.

Key Findings / Results

Connecting On-Campus Jobs to Future Careers

  • On-campus student employment makes a difference:
    • 92% of student employees in SEE reported gaining transferable skills for their future careers.
  • Supervisors make a difference:
    • 78% of student employees in SEE said their supervisors helped them connect work experiences to career goals.
    • 68% of student employees in SEE said their supervisors helped them connect work to academic coursework.
  • These results show how SEE supervisors play a critical role in connecting work to academics and careers.

How Students Focus on Key Skills in On-Campus Jobs

Focus areas represent the career-related skills students develop through on-campus employment at Ohio State. They show how positions connected to the SEE program support growth in core competencies. Individual experiences vary by role; for instance, a student working in Dining may practice different skills than one employed in a Residence Hall.

In the SEELA, each focus area is scored from 0 to 5, based on how often the student practices that skill:

  • 0 = Never
  • 1 = A few times a semester
  • 2 = A few times a month
  • 3 = Weekly
  • 4 = A few times a week
  • 5 = More than a few times a week.

Overall results show strong engagement across the eight focus areas. On average, students report practicing each focus area at least once a week in their on-campus employment.

Top Focus Areas

Students report the strongest engagement in professionalism and communication, both scoring above 4.0, meaning these skills are practiced a few times per week or more:

  • Professionalism: 4.05 (n = 343)
  • Communication: 4.04 (n = 343)

Opportunities to Strengthen Key Competencies

Skills such as leadership, critical thinking and career wellness score below 3.5, meaning they are still practiced at least weekly, a relatively high frequency.

  • These scores also suggest opportunities to further emphasize and intentionally integrate these competencies into on-campus employment at Ohio State

How SEELA Is Used

Supervisors use SEELA results to review student employee development and guide GROW conversations that connect on‑campus work to academics and career goals.

Staff and Administrators review aggregate SEELA data to identify trends in student skill development and use insights to inform program design, training, and continuous improvement.

Students complete the SEELA each semester, receive a personalized report with practice frequency and resume-ready language and share it with supervisors to support reflection and skill‑building during GROW conversations.

Resources / Contacts

Questions about the Student Employment Experience (SEE) Program:

SEELA resources for supervisors: https://see.osu.edu/supervisors/seela-and-grow

Questions about SEELA: cssl@osu.edu

Update Cadence

SEELA results are updated on this webpage once per year in the summer. The last data update was July 2025.

Students should complete the SEELA each semester, and supervisors should hold GROW conversations based on SEELA once per semester.