From alumni speaker series to alumni networking communities, programs that bridge the gap between career centers and alumni relations offices are proliferating. At Yeshiva University's Career Center, Executive Director Marc Goldman has focused on that synergy for years.
We asked him why it's important for career centers and alumni relations teams to work together, how he accomplishes that at Yeshiva, and what his team's metrics for success are.
This guest post was adapted from the 2016 NACE Conference presentation, "Leveraging Alumni and Parent Engagement to Advance Institutional Goals."
In today’s market, colleges and universities must demonstrate success in preparing and launching their students into the professional world. Although not the sole metric, these indicators are key factors in how institutions are perceived by prospective families, the federal government, college rankings, recruiters, admissions committees, and the media. The career services team is central to this success; leveraging alumni and parent engagement is a prime factor in this equation.
Higher ed professionals face increasing pressure to collect data on the performance of our work, and to use that data to calculate their return on investment. Our directive these days seems to be "All data are good data."
That may be true. But not all data are the right data.
We discussed the topic with some of our customer schools last week at a roundtable hosted by Andy Shaindlin, founder of Alumni Futures and Vice President at GG&A. Andy raised the issue as a cautionary note about our growing obsession with performance metrics.
At Switchboard, we believe that alumni are career services' biggest allies, and we're not alone. Thousands of career services offices collaborate with their colleagues in alumni relations and connect students with alumni to further their careers.
Binghamton University has made that interdisciplinary approach one of its specialties. Binghamton's Fleishman Center for Career and Professional Development works with the Office of Alumni Engagement to hold dozens of events with alumni speakers every year. Their Cool Alumni, Hot Connections speaker series provides career advice and connections for hundreds of students.
We asked Dr. Kelli Smith, Director of the Fleishman Center, to tell us about the event series.
There are dozens of platforms that cater to the needs of alumni relations and career services offices. In talking with schools who use these platforms, I’ve learned that most of them share the same set of flaws. If you’re considering signing on with a company that sells one of these platforms, make sure that they don’t receive these six common complaints.
"Young alumni" is a buzzphrase in higher ed right now, and for good reason. Young alumni represent the future of their alma maters, and reaching and engaging them requires new programming and new strategies.
But what happens when our young alumni aren't so young anymore? What kind of programming and strategy do we have then?
At the University of Guelph-Humber, Marlene Scheel is already looking ahead to the transition from young to established alumna. We asked her to share how she and her team think about the issue.