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 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."
We're thrilled to share that Oberlin's May Day Switchboard Celebration won a Gold CASE Circle of Excellence Award for student-alumni initiatives.
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.
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.