Thus far, I will say by implementing facebook as a means to contact graduates has been a huge success for me personally. I've been on staff as the Director of Career Services at my school for less than two years and one of my favorite things that we have in place is that I teach a required Professional Development Course. This course allows me to really get to know my students/graduates. Although we are making some curriculum changes - I am slated to be a part of several classes in the beginning of the students education, throughout, and also at the end. This too allows me to build relationships with them.
I've only just begun to scratch the surface in terms of social media and implementing strategies to move our career center (a one man show) along. I feel very behind the times in terms of what I should be doing. I have a facebook page for the sole reason of communicating with students. However, it is technically a page in "my name" - so it's a bit complicated when my personal "friends" find "me" on facebook....all the while - I really only want to keep in touch with students. What do you suggest in terms of this issue? I actually don't "post" anything - I know that I should - but again - just starting here. I mainly use the message feature which I can't access if I have an organization page. Does this make sense? Any guidance or suggestions with this?
Brent,
That is one excellent way to use social media Brent but that still puts much of the responsibility on you so let me provide some other ideas to help students help themselves. Consider also how you might teach students to use these tools as well and how you might use social media for this. For instance, you could use Youtube to publish and distribute educational information to your students or a blog to write educational articles focused on job search skills which you could distribute via social media channels and email distribution lists. You could create a Facebook "Job Club" group and encourage the students to collaborate with each other to help one another by promoting the Facebook group as a place where members are expected to post job leads, internships, etc. and help one another as the sole purpose of the group. You could run contests with prizes to incentivize the actions you are trying to drive. For instance, perhaps a prize for the first 20 group members who post at least 2 unique job leads that do not duplicate posts from other group members. Design contests that make sense for your objectives and that might appeal to your student body. Share success stories when students are successful to use word-of-mouth through social media to encourage students who are participating with the CS office. These would be ways to leverage word-of-mouth knowledge for a targeted purpose, improve collaboration, and given your lack of staff, allow you a means to get some help by having students help each other. You could ask that other departments also join the Facebook Group to post job leads so you get your colleagues to help as well. You can make the group private or public so if you decide to use Facebook, I recommend a group vs. a Fan page or profile for this purpose and get alumni involved in helping their community. These are just some other ideas to consider Brent. I hope those ideas spurs even more creative ideas from you. Of course, if you need guidance on how to execute any of these types of ideas, that's what I'm here for and would be happy to help. Given your unique situation, I think I would be thinking of ways to get students involved in helping other students since you don't have staff and rewarding them with public recognition and perhaps gift cards, etc. Simply make sure any gifts meet compliance rules and run it by the appropriate chain of command.
Robert Starks Jr.
Maybe I could leverage the social media outlet to help students' chances of gainful employment by building targeted, intentional relationships with vendors and performance shops in our industry in order to have a positive rapport with potential employers.
Brent,
Congratulations on taking on the Director role. You're in a unique position in that you are wearing so many hats while also responsible for Career Services programming to help transitions students to the workforce. Social Media provides a means to enhance current marketing efforts to increase participation with the Career Center so it acts as an additional component to overall marketing strategies. Given that you wear many hats and lead a department for a school that is new to the Career Services function, in what ways do you feel you can leverage social media to help you improve efficiency, scale your efforts while minimizing resources, and/or improve student involvement in ways that you've determined will improve their chances of gainful employment?
Thanks.
Robert Starks Jr.
I recently came on staff as the director of the school. We're pretty small so that means I'm also the career center, recruiter, planner, apparel-orderer, counselor, finance (sort of), etc. If there's a hat for it, I'm pretty much wearing it at some point throughout the day. That being said, I've taken it upon myself that while wearing the career center hat, I'm spending time one-on-one with each student that we have to help me understand what they are looking for in a career before I begin helping them search. Building the relationship with them is key. Once I've done that, I'm then beating the bushes pretty hard via online searches, social media (mainly LinkedIn), and regular networking just through people/companies we know while keeping the students apprised on what's going on. Since there has never really been anyone who has done this for our school, this is a HUGE step in the right direction for us in the area of career finding.
Mary,
Does you school have any required programs or courses for students? Here is a small sample of some I'd like to toss out for everyone and hope to see the list of interventions grow:
â— Required Career Preparation courses as part of core curriculum
â— A series of required career services seminars
â— Periodic portfolio and/or department chair/lead instructor panel reviews after so many credit hours have been completed as "career-readiness" checkpoints
â— Student school-to-work transition programs that focus on career management skills or leadership programs
â— Volunteer/service-learning programs or real-world community-based projects
â— Networking programs
â— Interdisciplinary projects where possible
â— Personal-branding camps or "Me Inc." camps to teach and practice online personal branding
â— Alumni community/mentor programs
â— Industry field trips and/or site visits
â— Success T.V. - Consider a Youtube Channel of successful alumni/students sharing their advice with other students/alumni (and promoting Career Services!)
â— Guest speaker programs/panel discussions/webinars
â— Industry-focused events to bring employers to campus for relationship-building beyond job fairs such as Best Practices in Internship Program development workshop for employers, skills-based workshops to refresh employer skills, chamber events, professional association event hosting, etc. (List is endless!)
â— Employer newsletter for constant contact with employers perhaps featuring "Top" students as a means to drive competition for student success with their benefit being they may get featured in a newsletter distributed to employers. The benefit to employers is that you are branding your CS department as the place to get the best, most talented new hires as you feature the top candidates as a marketing strategy
There are many creative ideas out there and social media can play a role in all of these interventions to enhance what career centers are already doing. This is but a small list to consider. Of course, everyone has different resources and capabilities so never will all interventions be feasible, but innovation should always be attempted!
What other types of interventions/programs can you identify?
Robert Starks Jr.
we have implemented one on one, group and panel mock interviews with employers from our graduates industries of studies, depending on what they field and preference of the interviewer is. This provides our students with practice in different types of interview situations which in turn makes them better interviewers. We have every grad sign a ROI form which allows us the access to retrieve employment, medical and continuing education verifications. we have pre-internship meeting which bring the student, the Internship Coordinator and the Program Lead together to secure a site for the intern based on thier interest and skills, in hopes of the intern securing employment at or before graduation.
Jennifer ,
Any training you would like to provide to Student Support Services would depend on your goals. I'm not familiar with what is specifically meant by "Career Services training" as this is very broad. Additionally, my suggestion would be to first establish your department's goals and how social media will specifically play a role which will then provide insight on how others can support you in those goals through social media. As an example, one may find that other departments may see social media as a waste of time which means training would first start with helping others understand the relevance and how social media will be used by your department to intervene to address some of the challenges you face. Identify where you'll need help with your goals and how you'd like Student Support Services to help you specifically with some actionable items. This may be as simple as having them curate relevant content for you to share, training them to be administrators of accounts to help you manage posts and respond to student/alumni questions, or creating a target list of employers and dividing it up to ask them to start developing relationships with target prospects via LinkedIn. There are so many actions you can have them take but it will first require you to determine your goals and your priorities and what you feel you will need help with as well as what you feel will be feasible for them to do given their own responsibilities and time constraints.
I encourage you to continue this conversation with me if you have further questions, wish to elaborate, or would like help as you think more about how you will approach this.
Robert Starks Jr.
My biggest challenge right now it our Career Services department is a one person operation. I'm rolling out career services training to our Student Support Services team (coaches) so they can support our career initiatives. I’m looking for way to incorporate social media into the training. I would love suggestions.
Ronda,
If you come up with a list, I encourage you to share your ideas in the forum so others can learn from your brainstorming session. As you create your list, always consider what your objective is - is the contest to increase one-on-one visits? Is it to review more resumes? Is it to encourage participation in a mock interview program? As you brainstorm, I encourage you to first identify the objective and then identify the tactic. This will allow you to design contests with clear intent and the activities will align with your career center objectives. It's a great way to get students excited to work with the department. I hope you consider sharing your ideas - I look forward to it!
Robert Starks Jr.
I really, really like the contest idea!! Anxious to get back to work tomorrow to discuss with my team and get a list of contest ideas that we can implement to increase the 1:1 meetings. In my opinion, this will not only increase the traffic coming into the office, but will also increase the traffic on our newly established Facebook page. I'm sure it will also generate another list of contest ideas that are student driven. Thank you!!
Stacey,
Before identifying a tool, you'd have to first identify your goal. Let me give you an example. The reason Career Services conducts workshops is to educate students. The idea is that educating students improves their career readiness, thus, increasing their likelihood of success which is a win-win.
In this example, if your goal were to improve the career-readiness of students by scaling your educational workshops (Reaching more students), you could use a few tools to help you accomplish this goal. So, you might choose to create short video snippets covering a variety of career topics and have a Youtube Channel. You could then distribute your published video onto other platforms such as a Facebook group or Fan Page. If you use multiple platforms, once you create the content, you can promote the content on multiple platforms. Youtube gives you analytics so you can actually measure your views and build subscribers to your channel expanding your reach to educate students.
If you decided to take a different approach and not use video, but prefer to share PowerPoints, you could use SlideShare.net and embed your PowerPoint slides onto other platforms and it too would give you analytics. You could decide you like sharing presentations but don't like PowerPoint and use Prezi.com which you could then embed onto other platforms.
My point is this is just one example where the goal might be that you want to improve student career readiness by scaling your educational efforts. Notice that the options are dependent upon your preferences. There are multiple tools to use to accomplish your goal so what's more important than identifying platforms is first asking yourself what you want to accomplish.
Does this example help answer your question? It really depends on what you are trying to accomplish. Great question! Please let me know if you would like to continue this discussion. I'd be happy to answer any more questions.
Thank you.
Robert Starks Jr.
I have a question-besides LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter what would you say is the most beneficial site to work with in the placement department?
Glenn,
Thank you for sharing these excellent strategies. They will benefit others reading the forums. As the course indicated, there is a correlation between increased student usage of career centers and success in gaining employment. Research also showed that the more frequently students use career services, the higher their pay tends to be upon acceptance of a job offer. Thus, using social media to increase one-on-one meetings is something to be considered.
One idea I'll share to use social media to increase student usage of your career center would be to run contests that bring them into the office. For example, have a contest for a "resume review" week and the best resumes will get a tour of an employer's work place or a mock interview with an employer and some recognition on the Facebook wall for being the "Champion!"
The reward can be anything you can think of that would be perceived as valuable to the students and that align with your career development goals. The idea is that such a contest that leverages social media increases actual face-to-face visits, something that is important to a career center. This is merely one idea but I encourage you to think of other such ideas that increase one-on-one meetings and if you come up with any, please share so the rest of us may benefit.
Thanks Glenn!
I use the one on one meetings to get to know what the students are seeking as far as their internship and what their long term plans are. I hope that the use of social media will help to keep them in touch with our school, career services and myself personally.
I maintain the network by being involved in events that they participate in and bringing students to assist at some of these events also.We try to post daily pictures of our students in action so they can also see what the students are doing while at school.
Engaging the employers is easy when we bring students to assist. We also try to engage the employers by posting some of their info and projects on our page and website
Glenn,
When you say you meet with students one-on-one - What challenge(s) do you use this intervention to overcome? If one-on-one meetings with students is important to their success, how might you use social media to increase the one-on-one meetings you have?
You say you "maintain" a network of industry professionals - how do you maintain your relationships and keep employers engaged with you and the school?
How will you use social media to enhance your employer outreach strategy as well as your employer engagement strategy? Often times career professionals talk about outreach without talking about engagement. Advisory boards are one way to keep employers involved (engaged) in your school which is a great relationship building tool in addition to being an intervention to address curriculum enhancement. What other ways can you keep employers engaged using social media?
We are a small school so I am able to get to know many of the students one on one which is a big help to start with. I also maintain a network of industry professionals along with our advisory board which helps us in the placement of students. I am working on getting a career center section on our Facebook page along with asking graduates to tell us where they are and what they are doing. After finishing the last section I realize that I need to reach out to the alumni to have them help brand us. When our students see success that has occurred before them I hope to have that help inspire them
