How Northwestern's Mentorship Program Goes Beyond Buzzwords

Mentorship may be today's biggest buzzword in alumni relations and career services, and hundreds of schools across the globe are jumping on that bandwagon by implementing new mentorship programs.

But not every mentorship program is an automatic success.

We spoke to Laura Wayland, Executive Director of the Northwestern Alumni Association, about the steps Northwestern University has taken to ensure that its new mentorship program stands up to the hype. In the seven months since it launched, the Northwestern Alumni Association's program has led to hundreds of new relationships between students and alumni and alumni and alumni.

In our interview, Wayland explained how Northwestern is making their mentorship program a success.

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How Not to Measure the Success of Your Shop's New Engagement Platform

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When your institution is shopping around for a new platform for its students and alumni, the first question on your mind is, "Will this work?"

That question is harder to answer than you might think. It can be tricky to define what the success of your new platform should look like, and to decide which data are relevant when measuring that success.

It's not uncommon for shops to pick the wrong data to evaluate the success of their new platform. Thinking that the platform is performing better than it is, they lock themselves into ongoing contracts that don't actually deliver the results they expect.

In this post we highlight four common mistakes that shops make when evaluating the performance of their platforms and how to avoid making them.

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5 Reasons Advancement Offices Should Care About Career Services

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We just returned from the CASE Summit for Leaders in Advancement in New York, where we were struck most by one session—"Colgate Professional Networks: Alumni Affinity Groups Reimagined for Maximum ROI."

The gist: positive career outcomes aren't just good for students and alumni, it's also good for your institution's advancement office.

In their presentation, Michael Sciola (Associate Vice President of Institutional Advancement) and Jennifer Stone (Director of Annual Giving and Director of Colgate Professional Networks) explained how Colgate's investment in professional networks help students and alumni achieve career success.

We thought we'd take a moment to revisit why investing more in constituent career outcomes is a good idea for advancement.

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Marc Goldman of Yeshiva University on the Synergy Between Career Services and Alumni Affairs

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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.

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."

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