Challenges
What are your career center's top challenges?
i work in the placement department so i would have to say placing the students and obtaining employment verification.
Lesli,
"Placing" students is certainly a challenge. However, in this overall challenge, there are certain barriers that hinder career professionals. Can you please be more specific on what challenges you to achieve your placement goals? Some people might say their challenges are that students are not motivated or the local economy isn't producing enough jobs to sustain the amount of graduates coming out of the school in a particular field, etc. These would be specific challenges that hinder placement. What are some of your specific challenges? What are the specific obstacles you face when trying to obtain employment verification?
Robert Starks Jr.
Robert,
Unfortunately Yes! students having lack of motivation, has a huge impact on us. We give our students professional orientation while in class and before they come out. They love it the problem is when they complete the program most of them give up looking right away because even though we call, email and send letters they always have excused for not complying with the school. Theirs only so much we can do for them. I think that lack of motivation comes from our hispanic community unfortunatly parents, and family members can be of great impact to someone’s self-esteem. What? are the obsticles we have obtaining employment verifications. Well a huge part of it is clinics not having time to fill out this form and not being comfortable sharing their employees pay rate...thankfully the school is working on getting a thrid party envolved
Lesli,
Have you considered how monitoring social media can provide insight on student interests and behaviors and how their interests can be leveraged in your communication strategies with them to help them get back on track? You mention calls, emails, and letters as tools used to reach out to students to "comply with the school." What if you changed your approach to use student-preferred communication tools (Social Media) not to get them to "comply with the school," but to build close relationships and trust over time? How might they respond differently if the relationship is improved?
Moreover, how might improved affinity prove to be a more effective long-term strategy to influence student behaviors? Would they more likely partner with career services if they had a closer, stronger relationship or if they saw communications with career services as an attempt by the school to get them to "comply" to instructions? This isn't to say you don't already have strong relationships but as you know, there never is any "magic" solution to achieving one's goals in Career Services so I'm wondering if you are starting to see how a cohesive social media strategy can enhance what you are already doing to overcome some of your obstacles. Given social media is so new, as the course mentions, this may represent a paradigm shift which makes it challenging.
I would love to see your thoughts as you ponder some of these questions/ideas.
Well Robert,
One of our centers top challenges would be the remote students. We have students all over the U.S. and assisting in job searching and motivation is more difficult when we've never physically met the student. It becomes to easy to "blow us off." We do our best to stay in contact over the phone, email, webcam (Skype), and other methods; however, at our physical campus, we don't experience some of the problems that our remote office experiences.
Marcus,
That definitely presents a challenge. Tell me, with your online students, do you also serve a more non-traditional adult learner, or do you serve a traditional learner? I ask because I am curious if you have found that the demographic of students you serve changes their social media interactions based on your observations. You already employ a number of mediums through which to encourage continued relationships - have you found some to be more effective than others? I think your experience can benefit the learners participating in this course and this forum so I'd love to hear what you've learned from your experience thus far dealing with your remote students/graduates.
Thanks for your post Marcus.
Robert Starks Jr.
Our biggest challenges are lack of motivation from the students and losing contact with them (or lack of communication from the student). Sometimes, the students become too dependent on us to find them employment, rather than job searching on their end as well or they think that applying to three jobs per week is enough.
Angela,
The challenges you describe are begging for a social media strategy! As you already know, there is never a magic solution to the types of challenges career professionals face but a social media strategy as outlined in the course can help provide yet another intervention strategy to address your challenges. Forming stronger partnerships from day one with students using platforms and channels they are on can help but it is a long-term strategy. Hopefully, some of the skip tracing tools can help you be an even better researcher to track down students who lose contact. Pay particular attention to the part of the course that discusses improving engagement strategies through data mining and behavior monitoring. I have used those methods many times and they worked like a charm for me. As always, I'm here to answer questions and help. Thanks for your post Angela.
Robert Starks Jr.
i guess my biggest challenge is tools for the students. we are a non-for profit school and some students do not have computers to use for social networking.
alexander,
I'm confused on how the non-for profit status of your school impacts the availability of technology for students. Can you elaborate? Does your institution provide library resources for the students of which, computers and internet access are a component? Lack of access to critical and necessary educational tools is certainly a challenge that goes far beyond use of social media. Have you been advocating for improved access to computers and internet? These are critical skills students must use in the workplace.
Robert Starks Jr.
Our top challenges are 1) generating more job leads for certain programs and 2) getting in touch with and motivating students who go MIA after graduating.
Paul,
What are the programs you reference when you say "certain" programs? These challenges are pretty universal with career professionals - do you have any methods you would like to share that others may find helpful? Are you thinking of some new techniques/methods to employ from what you've learned from the course?
Thanks!
Robert Starks Jr.
Well some of our programs are more saturated than others (many other schools in the area have the same programs) so it's a bit more difficult to generate leads for those. We definitely want to utilize LinkedIn and Facebook to develop better relationships with employers and students.
Paul,
Saturation is definitely a challenge. I'm sure you already do this but something else I used to do, for our particularly challenging programs, was create events that engaged the local industry. In fact, we ended up having a pretty large annual conference for the local game industry in Arizona that attracted companies from outside of the local market. A video of the event can be seen here: http://youtu.be/qz3Q6-rXVtE. We marketed the event through grassroots efforts using social media, email, and even built a website using a free website building tool known as www.wix.com.
What we did was hosted a large conference with several keynote speakers (all volunteered through relationships I had developed via LinkedIn over time). This offered a great learning opportunity for the employers we wanted to get to know better. We held a morning session for students and a night session for industry-only, had it catered and had a bartender. We captured over 120 new employer emails and expanded our employer reach and relationships with the first event. The event is still an annual event at the college I no longer work at but it was an idea that started with a few solid relationships formed via LinkedIn. The Conference allowed us to meet more employers and strengthen existing relationships. I just wanted to provide you with a real-world example of what can be done to stand out above the other schools in your area. If you can be seen as a resource not only for potential new hires, but also a close partner in contributing value to your local industry through professional networking events that offer learning opportunities, you may have an advantage. It's all part of a robust employer engagement strategy.
Thanks Paul for your forum participation.
Robert Starks Jr.
For my department the most difficult challenge is to keep the graduate engaged and continue ongoing communication.
Carren,
Thank you for sharing your challenge. I am wondering what specific strategies you currently employ to help you overcome these challenges. You shared that social media is a plan to help you in the future but I think other learners taking this course could benefit from you sharing some of the ways you have already attempted to overcome these challenges. I would appreciate hearing some of the things you have done thus far and think it would add value to the learners taking this course.
Thank you.
Robert Starks Jr.
we are having a very hard time placing our students because they want a minimum of one year experience in most of the jobs we find. How can social media help this?
Not only is it hard to keep in contact with our students with phones being disconnected and addresses changing, but it has been hard to obtain the proof that the student is furthering their education. Per our accreditation if the graduate is furthering their education they need to provide us with proof they are enrolled in another school. I will get en e-mail or a verbal that they are enrolled but can never get my hands on their proof of enrollment and without that it impacts our placement negatively.
Hello Stacey,
This is a big question that requires a thorough response – so, here it is for you:
The challenge you present is how can one intervene with a robust plan that helps students get experience before they graduate and how does social media play a role in that overall plan?
A number of intervention strategies I’m sure you’ve already identified are developing programs such as internships, externships, service learning programs, volunteering opportunities, etc. that encourage students to get experience while they are in school. The ideal situation is when you can make experience a required part of the program. Such programs require employer participation.
So, my point here is first, don’t think of how social media can help get students more experience – it can’t. First, think of what your strategies are going to be to address the challenge faced. Once you identify the interventions you believe make the most sense for your particular situation, given your resources, your challenges, etc., then, ask “how can I leverage social media to aid me in this strategy?†Now that we’ve framed this in this manner, let me give you some things to think about regarding how social media can help us overcome such an obstacle.
1. Getting experience requires relationships with employers who will offer students the opportunity to get experience. If you are developing programs such as the ones mentioned above, how can social media help you in your employer outreach efforts to build a network of employers who are willing and able to partner with you on your plan? Consider LinkedIn as a database of employers who can be searched with very specific filters so that you can pinpoint your targets to help you build your employer partner network. Use the advanced search settings of LinkedIn and pinpoint the industry and even the distance of those you want to reach out to for your employer relations strategy. Find people you already know and tap into their network (Your 2nd and 3rd connections) so that you are not cold calling employers, you are warm calling with an introduction from a mutual connection. This doesn’t mean you only communicate with potential employers via social media. You could even host a luncheon/mixer where you use LinkedIn to invite guests. The idea is you can use social media to take your online relationships offline as another strategy to continue nurturing your relationship to get buy in for your partnership ideas. This would be one practical example of how social media could help you in your efforts.
2. This is a long-term concept, but imagine that you have been using social media to build a community of alumni in a LinkedIn or Facebook group. How might the community you build over time be a source to expand your employer relations strategy? Imagine the alumni working in their field who are a part of your social media community. You could then target alumni to help other alumni by using their influence with an employer they work for to get the employer involved with the school. Leveraging mutual connections to penetrate organizations and expand your employer relationships is something social media can help with tremendously.
3. Imagine setting goals for each of your staff members to increase their LinkedIn network by targeted connections with employers in the health industry. Remember, LinkedIn allows you to be very specific in how you target the people with whom you want to connect. A Career Advisor who has strategically engineered their network with 300 connections of which 80% are in the health industry within a 25 mile radius has the ability to use his/her network as a means to market your programs. Building affinity with employers over time and having a focused network allows you to be more effective with establishing employer partnerships because you know someone at the company. Again, relationship building is a long-term strategy but the very fact social media allows us to target people we need to connect with is a fundamental shift in how we approach our employer relations strategies. Now, imagine you have several staff who all have a similar goal – how large of a focused network do you think 7 people could achieve vs. 1? This cumulative effect means your department(s) can have a very targeted network of employers which can be leveraged to help you accomplish your goals.
I hope that helps frame the challenge and puts you on a path of how you would approach the problem considering how social media can help you implement your interventions and be leveraged to help you overcome your obstacles.
Take care!
