How One University is Creating Career Pathways for 55,000 Students

Students are clear about desiring more career services. Thirty-four percent of students surveyed in 2022 wanted more career planning, up from 29 percent in 2021, according to the global survey.

Students vary, of course, in the services they are seeking. In the report, 40 percent of students said they were interested in job-specific workshops; 38 percent said they wanted their university to have strong connections with the corporate world, and 35 percent wanted face-to-face, one-on-one advising. 

At the University of Minnesota, career services departments are just getting started in using data to enhance their services. Rebecca Hall, the director of career services administration at the university, would like to eventually use data to show students that career-related experiences, such as internships, undergraduate research, and community service, result in job offers. Hard data, she hopes, will encourage the students to seek out work-related experience. She also hopes there will be ways to use data to help students who may have fewer social connections or less relevant experience than other students to land internships more easily.

The institution recognizes that helping students prepare for careers goes far beyond getting an internship, learning to write a resume, or knowing how to perform well in a job interview. The university’s College of Liberal Arts, in particular, has won national recognition for the way its faculty have embraced career preparation in the classroom and helped students to acquire and leverage the “core competencies” they get in their liberal arts education. Those competencies include digital literacy, communication and leadership skills, critical and analytical thinking, and ethical reasoning and decision making. Many of those competencies align with what analysts predict for the “future of work,” such as “digital dexterity” and the ability to continuously learn. Other colleges within the institution are considering adopting the same approach.

Newberg says that empowering faculty members to support the students they know with careers advice will help personalize assistance and share the workload of career centers, which can’t always provide detailed, one-on-one services to each and every student.

Students’ initial contacts with university administration are key. The global survey found a powerful connection between the student’s first experiences with the university—onboarding—and their overall perception of their university experience. The University of Minnesota seeks to engage students early and often, and build awareness of career services starting at orientation.  But students, says Hall, “don't necessarily hear the message until they're ready to hear the message.” 

The institution’s goal, says Newberg, is to touch every student with the most important careers-related content: “We’re trying to be a little smarter and more systemic about how we approach career development.”

Behind the scenes of the new analyses in the University of Minnesota’s career services offices is a post-graduation survey, the largest career services project completed by an internal CRM-oriented team. The project was more than just a question-and-answer survey but also harvested data from many other sources, such as the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center and from individual sources, such as university graduates’ LinkedIn profiles. Once the data was assembled, it was included in dashboards powered by Tableau, the visual analytics platform that is helping administrators analyze the data. 

Career services will be able to slice and dice the data by the academic divisions that students were based, or zoom in on a category of students they are interested in, such as athletes or first-generation students. 

The University of Minnesota’s business school, the Curtis L. Carlson School of Management is pioneering ways of using data to connect students, the school, and employers. The goal is “How do we make sure that we're finding the right jobs for those students and that we have enough jobs for them,” says Nick Lindberg, senior Salesforce business analyst at the Carlson School. The school is tracking calls and emails between university employees and corporate recruiters. It is tracking events, job postings, interviews, and job offers.  Lindberg describes the analysis of the data collected as toggling back and forth between looking at the needs of the school’s students and needs of employers and trying to keep the two aligned. 

The data helps the employer relations team to assist companies in having a productive footprint at the school—both online and at in-campus events. In the next iteration of data collection and analysis, Lindberg hopes to be able to target job opportunities in specific locations so that if, for example, a student is looking for a job in Phoenix in finance, the university could help that student. The university is monitoring the business school’s employer relations practices and ultimately wants to apply them system-wide. 

The University of Minnesota’s push into data-driven services began with its One Stop center - a single place that integrates student services, like registering for courses, paying bills, and getting financial aid and veteran’s benefits. Powering the One Stop is a sophisticated technological management of student records. 

A core group of highly trained staff in the One Stop center help the students from start to finish with their questions and each interaction that they have with students or parents is tracked in the One Stop CRM.  

“There was a lot of rigor that the staff had to get used to,” says Carrie Otto, director of enterprise constituent relationship management at the university. Eventually, she says, staff members saw how the data could help make students’ lives easier and help make staff more productive. 

In the future, The University of Minnesota hopes to use data management to create more satisfied employers, graduates with high job satisfaction who view their alma mater with respect and leverage the work of the university staff members who support students in their career journeys. 

The university’s own journey in achieving that goal has just begun, but already it is becoming a great example for other institutions: If a highly complex system like this  can take the trillions of data points generated by tens of thousands of students and create useful, actionable insights, then other higher education institutions should be able to do the same.