by By: Tracy Austin, Associate Director of Analytics and Initiatives, Clemson University Center for Career and Professional Development
Is your career services team looking to show added value to your institution? The Career Center at Texas A&M University is doing just that through a recently implemented data analysis project. Through predictive analytics, the Texas A&M team, seeks to improve student career readiness as well as show correlations between career center engagement and student performance.
Texas A&
M looks to open their data center in the summer of 2020 and is eager to begin analyzing & visualizing the data to inform Career Center programming. The Texas A&M Career Center Technology Team, who is heading this initiative states, “As we must serve a large population of students, we wanted to make sure the decisions we make to select and use resources, develop programs, and create new initiatives are driven by data.”
The Aggies are taking advantage of data already being collected by either the Career Center or other on-campus partners. Through this strategic collaboration, they plan to identify markers of institutional performance of students who utilized Career Center resources and compare that information to those students who had limited to no engagement. By digging deeper into career appointment and program data as well as First Destination Survey results, they will gain valuable insight on the specific ways successful students engaged with Career Center services and opportunities. Through this research, the team will not only be able to refine and develop new programs, but they will also be able to develop targeted marketing campaigns to communicate the value of specific services to students, employers, and other stakeholders.
Texas A&M will specifically utilize platforms like Symplicity and Tableau to assist with collecting, storing, and visualizing their raw data and customized reports. And while robust programs such as these certainly ease this process, institutions can still evaluate their own effectiveness through basic databases and strong institutional partnerships. As your career development team begins to plan for the upcoming academic year, consider leveraging data points that already exist within your department and university to begin showcasing the added value of your services.
