Careers services Linking CRM to data sources
The Power of Data Innovation
The news that parents in Scotland are now able to see more information than ever before on their child’s school made Katy Gordon, Careers Service and Employability Manager, University of Strathclyde Careers Service, start thinking about destination statistics. As Katy says, it is a common source of frustration to university careers services that their effectiveness is often judged by the single overall positive destination figure for their institution (commonly known as the DLHE). Here she explains how work at the University of Strathclyde might just change this…
employment ‘league’, and demand comment on what has happened if any university has dropped down the list. But the margins of difference are often barely more than 0.5%. A single number can rarely explain the true picture as it takes no account of contextual data.
T A range of websites have
sprung up over recent years, catering for the growing demand from prospective students to know more about the job prospects of each course.
A far more useful comparison is to look at course statistics, which can tell you much more about how your university is actually doing. At the University of Strathclyde, the Careers Service works closely with academics to identify which universities they consider as their competition at departmental level. When the DLHE results are published, our staff review the comparator
figures with each department. This has been really helpful in identifying
gaps in employability provision or a need for increased engagement with certain courses.
A range of websites have sprung up over recent years, catering for the growing demand from prospective students to know more about the job prospects of each course. These are a useful addition to the range of information each university publishes, because they also highlight other aspects of university provision, from social life to facilities available.
he media publish tables showing this or that university has moved up or down the graduate
However, even course destination statistics have their limitations from a Careers Service point of view. In the era of portfolio careers, many students have not settled into their professional career just six months after they have graduated.
Taking action At Strathclyde, I wanted to see if we could identify what it is about the careers and employability provision we offer that makes the difference between sending out students out into successful graduate careers or finds them making more faltering steps into their first job after graduation. At the same time, I wanted to gain more systematic feedback on whether our service was meeting our students and graduates’ needs.
I worked with our in house IT team to design a CRM system that linked to the university student records system, our Scotland wide shared vacancy system and the DLHE data. It has taken time to get right and some of the linkages will not be fully operational until the summer. But by the start of the new academic year, we should be able to link how students have engaged with us to their graduate destinations, broken down by gender, nationality, widening access data and so on.
It means we should now be able to identify what interventions make the most difference in students’ eventual
destinations, or whether we need to target interventions differently according to gender, nationality or other characteristics to increase their effectiveness. My vision is then to link how students engage with careers and employability provision with what they thought about this engagement. We currently seek electronic feedback after each student intervention, comparing feedback by type of intervention on a regular basis but the data is anonymised.
Work in progress However, what I would really like to do is match feedback data to each individual student record of engagement and then to their destination. This could provide really powerful evidence of what works. Technology allowing, this could have the potential to radically transform how a service is delivered. No longer would a university careers service be judged by a single figure, but would instead offer contextual data to provide a more rounded picture of effectiveness.
We are in the early days of such impact measurement, and clearly there are data protection issues to consider, but this has the potential to radically transform our understanding of what works. This should in turn lead to increasing effectiveness in service delivery to our students and graduates and for our graduate employers. n
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00 Graduate Recruiter |
www.agr.org.uk
www.strath.ac.uk/careers
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