Best in Class

Yaritza Peña ’15 started using Bentley’s Pulsifer Career Development Center before she even began her first year. As part of STEP, the university’s summer program designed to help first-generation students transition from high school to college, Peña was paired with Janet Ehl, the center’s assistant vice president, as a mentor. “Right from the beginning, I had a vision of what was possible for me after graduation, and the opportunities available to students with backgrounds and interests similar to mine,” says Peña, who today works as assistant director of project management at Takeda Pharmaceuticals.

Participating in career services events and offerings became a regular part of her first year of college, and was important in helping refine her path. “I was faced with, ‘If I’m not an Accounting and Finance major, what am I? If I don’t want to work for one of the Big Four, what do I want to do?’” says the Managerial Economics major. “The center had so many different types of events for different types of interests. They gave me the tools to help me make my own decision in a way I’m not sure I would have been able to otherwise.”

This fall, for the third year in a row, the Princeton Review ranked Bentley No. 1 in the country for “Best Career Services” in its 2026 Best Colleges guide. It was Bentley’s 13th consecutive year ranked among the top five. Recent data from the Class of 2024 shows that 99% of graduates are employed or attending graduate school within six months of graduation; those employed have a median starting salary of $72,000. The success, no doubt, can be attributed to a combination of impressive factors, many of which have been part of Bentley’s DNA since its founding, including classes that align with the changing marketplace, access to speakers and visiting professors who are influential in their industries, career services programming, and a focus on internships.

Ehl recounts a time when students at Bentley hardly used career services at all. Back in the early 2000s, she says, the center was running programs and workshops twice a week on topics that included resume building and writing cover letters. That’s when students in a business consulting class selected the career center as their “client” for a project. One of the group’s suggestions was to align the center’s career coaches with specific majors so the coaches would become more specialized. It was a suggestion the center put in place that still exists today: For example, Melissa Sawyer, a 25-year vet of the center and its senior associate director and operations manager, works primarily with juniors and seniors in accounting and math-related majors. “Having the coaches be a little bit more tailored to the majors that they’re working with lets us take a deeper dive into making connections with some of those employers that really want our students, get to know the industry better, and really focus our programming,” she says.

And in 2011, student government leaders and the center began talking about bringing career development offerings into a class format. Once again, the center responded, and in spring 2013, Career Design Introduction 101 (CDI 101), a seminar class offered in the second semester of a student’s first year, debuted.

The timing is purposeful, Ehl says: “We want them to spend the first semester getting used to being a college student, figuring out what classes they want to take and what groups they want to join, and not being stressed out about a career.” The class helps students identify their strengths, build their brand and professional collateral, create a LinkedIn profile, hone their elevator pitch, and practice interviewing. “It’s not mandatory and the class has no academic credit, but more than 90% of every single class has enrolled in it since the spring of 2013,” says Ehl, who notes that any first-years and any new transfer students are guaranteed a spot.

CDI 101 was so successful that Bentley went on to develop follow-up career design seminars for sophomores, juniors and seniors. CDI 201 is geared toward students who are still undecided on a major and includes a deeper dive into self-assessment. CDI 301 is tailored to juniors and seniors with specific majors. “For example,” Sawyer says, “depending on a student’s major, we can give very specific, specialized feedback. Take building a resume, for example. For one student that might mean adding an actuarial exams section and for another it might be adding their 150-academic-hour plan for pursuing a CPA.”

Despite these changes, Ehl gives significant credit for the success of career services to the students themselves. “The students who come to Bentley are motivated to be successful and they want to be engaged with us,” she says. “These changes were really just a way to help get to a lot of students in a very functional and efficient manner.”

The success is also a credit to the university, which, for over a century, has been adapting teaching and curricula for a changing marketplace. Take, for instance, the 2023 founding of the Center for Health and Business to prepare students for the increasing number of jobs in the fast-growing health care industry. Or the newly launched FinTech and AI majors, as well as a STEM MBA program, all of which equip future business leaders with the skills to excel in today’s data- and technology-driven environment. In addition, Bentley places a strong emphasis on internships, with 90% of undergraduates completing one or more internships and 39% of those internships leading to full-time employment. And the university cultivates close ties with employers, as do the faculty, many of whom have significant real-world job experience.

“We offer experiential learning to build bridges between theory and practice,” says Jahangir Sultan, chair of the Finance Department and founding director of the Hughey Center for Financial Services/Trading Room. “Many of our professors bring to the classroom industry experience and best practices in their respective fields.” Sultan also highlights facilities on campus that provide real-world learning opportunities, like Bentley’s Trading Room, a teaching and research center that offers firsthand exposure to financial concepts such as valuation of financial instruments like stocks, bonds and currencies; trading; portfolio construction; and risk management; and is equipped with four ticker tapes displaying market information, news headlines, and real-time and historical data. “The Trading Room is like a biology lab where we dissect financial frogs to learn about the building blocks,” he says. “We build valuation models in the Trading Room instead of taking someone else’s models as given. Students practice finance in the Trading Room in addition to learning finance in the classroom.”

Jim Pouliopoulos, director of Bentley’s Professional Sales program, a lecturer in Marketing and coauthor of How to Be a Well Being, also ensures the reality of the job market is discussed openly in class. “I spend time talking about how not to pick the wrong job when you get out of school,” he says. “I think students want a very clear path from where they are to where they’re being told they have to go, career-wise. I really want them not to think that way, because most careers are not so linear.”

And of course, Bentley’s active alumni base plays a critical role in job placement success and career exploration. John McDonough ’86, CEO of Veterinary Practice Partners, a nationwide network of vet hospitals, admits he didn’t use the center much as a student, but has been eager to take part in alumni events designed to help foster a new generation of graduates. As part of a recent panel he led on veterinary medicine along with his COO, Rich Pacheco ’96, McDonough helped connect several students with career contacts. “As I got to the later parts of my career,” he says, “I started to wonder: How can I give back to the school that gave me so much at the start of my career?”

Amanda (Sibley) McGoldrick ’12 says Bentley students make themselves easy to hire. As the former senior director of marketing for CRM platform HubSpot, McGoldrick recruited employees out of Bentley. “Students from Bentley were incredibly well-prepared — from the application process where I would see strong resumes and interviews, to a solid business-focused skill set during their time in internships and associate roles. Bentley students really set themselves apart,” she says. “As a first-year student, you’re already encouraged to attend career events and develop skills needed in the workplace. What’s more, students have the support throughout their journey to find a job and career. Staff and faculty are ingrained in students’ experience from the beginning, which shows on the professional side.”

“Way back when, we didn’t work with first- and second-year students. That’s changed,” says Kristine Vidic, the center’s senior associate director and career equity and access specialist. “Now anyone can come in, at any point in their college career. We’re embedded into the classroom, so students don’t have to look at career services as being something else they need to fit in.”