Which? University

If you want to compare courses at different universities and you haven't checked out Which? University yet, you really should. It works off the same data sets as Unistats but is less clunky and more user-friendly. Here's a quick screencast I did to demo it at our Employability Summit last week (no audio)...

Progress review presenation from today's #empysummit

Prezi from my progress review at our third Employability Summit

Quick NACE reflections (part two)

The NACE conference is now over so I'm just jotting down a few more thoughts. The sessions I attended since the last post were:

1. Mobile Career Services: The Next Frontier in Student Engagement
2. Keynote Address: Anna Deavere Smith “Snapshots: Glimpses of America in Change”
3. Keynote Address: David Spector “Recruitment and Technology—The Journey So Far”

The mobile session (or 'mobul' as they say here) was useful. The take home for me was that whilst at Leicester we have given a lot of thought to our communications and use of social media in the past we need to revisit it. We could certainly do more to deliver useful and engaging content via mobile.

The other really useful thing about the last few days has been meeting people, both from employers and college sides. Some really useful connections have been made and I'm looking forward to keeping up with them on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Tomorrow and Tuesday we're visiting NYU and Penn univerity careers services. Having met some of their staff at the conference I'm really looking forward to finding out more about them and sharing ideas. Lucky me :)

Quick NACE reflections (part one)

Well it's day 3 of the NACE 2013 conference and I've got a bit of reflection time. This is more of a 'note to self' than for anyone else's benefit as I need more time to reflect, but just so I capture a few thoughts...

The sessions I've been to so far are:

1. Keynote Address: Jeremy Gutsche “Exploiting Chaos”
2. Motivating Your Students to Get on the Ball
3. Limitless Opportunities for Student Engagement
4. The Future of Career Services: Challenges and Opportunities

The keynote was loads better than I expected. Jeremy Gutsche's message was very apposite given the current context in which careers services are operating in, both in the UK and US. The importance of an engaging,cwell connected message that links specifically to 'what exactly are you trying to do' was helpful.

The Limitless Opportunities for Student Engagement session was very useful. The careers service at NYU has clearly made a big impact in terms of student engagement with their #iamlimitless campaign. It was a great example of people relatively new to social media just getting on and doing it without any 'expert' help. The trick will be though to translate engagement into results. Something I'm looking forward to talking to with them about when we visit NYU on Monday.

The most fascinating session was the Future of Careers Services. It was clearly a popular session with, I reckon, at least 500 people attending. The really interesting thing for me was that the US are battling with exactly the same issues as us - student engagement, scalability, hard measures, flexibility of service delivery and institutional responsibility. I'm pleased to say we're in the process of addressing all of these at Leicester, but we have much to learn from our US colleagues. 

Systems thinking report

Kim Smith has been working with us since the end of January on, amongst other things, our systems thinking project. Below is the Prezi she used at our team meeting yesterday to explain some of the findings and the key learning points.

Our systems thinking journey so far hasn't been straight forward (as I've expressed in a couple of previous posts, e.g. this one) but I think we are getting there (slowly). We are now focusing on a narrower aspect of what we do, so rather than looking at the whole system (the purpose of which we defined as 'help me get the graduate job or further study that I want') we are now focusing on the support we offer students in applying for jobs or study ('help me get to the next stage of the application process').

More to follow, but progress...