How Career Centers Can Leverage Alumni and Parent Engagement to Advance Institutional Goals

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. 

 

Building a Culture of Diversity and Inclusion Into Career Services

Higher ed might traditionally approach diversity as an admissions issue, but Shelagh Saénz, Director of Career Development at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, argues that it's also an issue for career centers to take on.

Career centers, she argues, are uniquely positioned to be advocates for diversity because of the role they play as intermediaries between students and employers.

We asked Shelagh to give us a recap of her session at the NACE Conference in Chicago, "Building a Culture of Diversity and Inclusion Into Career Services."

NACE 2016 Preview: “We’re All Technologists: Successfully Realizing the Power of Your Team’s New Technology"

Platforms and software hold a lot of promise for career centers, but implementing them is seldom as easy as we want it to be. Launching a new piece of technology isn't just a technical project, but also a human one. Every new tool requires training, feedback, and consensus building to work smoothly.

Fortunately for us, Shannon Conklin, Associate Director of Assessment and Technology at the Temple University Career Center, and Kevin Grubb, Associate Director of Digital Media and Assessment at the Villanova University Career Center, are presenting on the subject at this year's NACE conference in Chicago.

We asked them to give us a preview of their session, “We’re All Technologists: Successfully Realizing the Power of Your Team’s New Technology." Find details on their session here.

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Inputs vs. Outcomes: Are You Using the Right Data to Measure ROI?

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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.

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How Binghamton's Fleishman Center Works with Alumni to Bolster Career Services

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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.

"It is not from ourselves that we learn to be better than we are." —Wendell Berry