What role do career prospects play during prospective students’ decision making process?
That was the central question during this webinar, a collaboration between Asia Careers Group, Unibuddy and me.
Panel members
Louise Nicol
Founder, Asia Careers Group
How to collect reliable careers data about your alumni, and what can it tell you about your institution’s personality?
Ian Pierson
Customer success manager, Unibuddy
What questions do prospective students really ask student ambassadors about employability? Ian shares insights from Unibuddy’s enormous (and growing) store of anonymised conversations between prospective students and student ambassadors.
Guus Goorts
Online education marketer
How do you communicate your institution’s unique employability profile in a way that resonates with prospective students?
The link between student recruitment & employability
Students care about their employment prospects, and this impacts all aspects of the recruitment process (this model is further fleshed out in my book). In this webinar we covered three areas.
Strategy: If you know the sectors and organisations in which your graduates have a strong showing, you can double up on those strenghts by building partnerships and further focusing your programme offerings
Analytics: What are the key questions you should be asking around employability, and what are some ways to get reliable insights into your institutions employability?
Education: How to communicate effectively about employability with prospective students?
Below are a few short fragments from the webinar. You’ll find the full slides and recording at the bottom of this post.
Shift towards Asian employers
It’s expected that Asian based employers will be taking up a growing share of returning University graduates. These include names such as Huawei, HSBC, DBS Bank and Petronas. You may not know these employers, but realise that the same thing is true in the reverse: these employers are only aware of the top few Universities. If you’re not among those, you do have some awareness building to do.
Clustering
Some employers and Universities are born for each other, due to the kinds of people (students/employees) they attract, values they hold and skills they build and require. If you’re aware of the types of companies in which your graduates end up being employed more than graduates of your peer Universities, there is an opportunity to build long term University-employer relationships that can be highly mutually beneficial.
Questions prospective students ask about employability
The questions prospective students most frequently ask about careers fall in 3 categories:
- Placements and internships
- Employment opportunities after obtaining the degree
- Career support the institution provides
Are your student ambassadors equipped to answer these types of questions? Do they have access to things like the top-5 graduate employers by country?
Integrating information about employability into your marketing communications
When you have a clear picture of your University’s graduate profile, it allows you to weave it into your messaging.
For example, you can deliberately choose which graduate case studies to feature. In this fragment, I cover a testimonial video by TIAS School of Business and Society, that was especially well done.
