Top of Mind with Tambellini Group
Top of Mind with Tambellini Group
Merging Career Services and Advancement
By combining career services and advancement, Northampton Community College has created a community of student, alumni, and employers that better facilitates engagement, relationship building, and outreach. Modeling itself after the four-year model, hear from Northampton’s Sharon Beales, Vice President of Institutional Advancement, and Dr. Deb Noble Burak, Associate Vice President and CIO, as they discuss implementation, staffing impacts, and technologies like Razor’s Edge, Handshake, Hubspot, Graduway, and LiveAlumni. They offer advice for other two-year institutions thinking about rolling out this model, including the importance of career support and systems for community college students.
Hello and welcome to our Top of Mind Podcast. In this program, we will sit down with two higher education thought leaders and discuss the innovative projects they are working on now and into the future. I'm your host, Katelyn Ilkani, vice president of client services and cybersecurity research at The Tambellini Group. I'm joined today by Sharon Beales who serves as the vice president for institutional advancement at Northhampton Community College as well as Dr Deb Nobel Burak, the associate vice president and chief information officer at the college. Over the next few minutes, we are going to hear how they are combining career services with advancement. Let's get started. Welcome to the program, Sharon and Deb.
Speaker 2:Hi, I'm Sharon Beales. I've been at the college for about five years now. But have been in institutional advancement for over 20 years at this point.
Speaker 3:And I'm Deb Noble Burak. I've been at North Hampton for seven and a half years and prior to that, worked at another community college for 17 years.
Speaker 1:Thank you both for joining us today. To start, I'd like to understand why did you decide to combine career services with advancement?
Speaker 2:Well, it really started a few years ago when we received the Department of Labor grant and what we did was form a group across campus of coordinating all the corporate interactions and rating those companies based on the level of engagement we had with them. Career services was a very traditional office. They dealt mostly with students and not with a lot with employers. And we had identified that as a weak link to this group. So as we started to look at kind of what models were out there, some of the top four years, it started combining their career area and their alumni area together. And so we really modeled it after that four year model. And it started from this group of coordinating companies and identifying it as a weaker link and we needed to improve because a lot of companies when our students, and so there needs to be engagement there.
Speaker 1:When did you actually make the decision? How long did it take from decision to implementation?[inaudible].
Speaker 2:We talked about it last summer, so it's really taken about a year full circle. We made the shift to career services reporting to me in November. Um, and then started working through with the group what that was going to look like. Changes not easy so you can imagine, you know, they need to understand better why we combined these two. And it was basically to leverage the experience of our alumni to the benefit of our students. Um, and we'll talk about a couple of platforms we've developed in order to allow that to happen. We hear from our younger alumni who we haven't had engaged that they really want to help our students, they want an experience with our students. And this provided it.
Speaker 1:Is the institution seeing benefits from this decision and if so, what types?
Speaker 2:We're seeing some early, um, wins, I guess you would say. Um, companies, the group that coordinates, all of the corporate activity. We're starting to see how we can leverage maybe an employment relationship with getting our center for business and industry, who does job training, through the doors. So what we're actually doing is the different areas that have touches with corporations. How do we leverage it to benefit other areas within the college? So we're starting to see some initial quick wins. Some of the people, fundraisers in the foundation who go into companies to ask them for scholarships support. They always want a connection with our career services office for internships and employers. And now we're able to give that being all one department.
Speaker 1:I'd love to hear more about what kind of feedback you're receiving from students and employers.
Speaker 2:This will be the first semester that students will actually benefit from this. Um, so it's a little early to tell there with employers we reorganize the staff somewhat. There was career counselors, but there was no kind of employee side. So we hired a person to do employer engagement, um, which I think will be a great benefit to the students because we'll, we'll have doors into internships and experiential learning and jobs that we didn't have before. And so it's a little early. I think the employer's like a one point of contact within the career and alumni services to go to.
Speaker 1:So what types of technology are you using?
Speaker 3:So we've been starting down a path using a variety of newer technologies in the last five, six years. Um, one of our largest projects is removing our ERP system to Workday for the student, finance and HR areas. But prior to that, as part of this project, we moved our advancement system to the Razor's Edge platform—their cloud platform. So this was important to provide, you know, additional tools for the folks. And Sharon, we'll talk a little bit about how they're, you know, adding access in order to provide good information to these folks as they support this new, we're also getting ready to launch a project with Handshake as well. Um, and that'll give students a tool in order to help with their careers and career search and things as well with that. Um, and marketing areas use in a number of, uh, tools as well to, to help with communications and outreach to the students. Hubspot's one that we're using right now for our applicants, but we'll be also exploring that, this piece of it as we moved for our next steps with the ERP system. So a lot of, we're looking at a lot of the newer and emerging tools out there, um, to provide support in this area and technologies that students will need to help, you know, navigate through different parts of their career here at the college versus a student. And along the way is think I'm ready to transfer or reach out to employers for their careers. I mentioned Razor's Edge and Handshake and I know there's others that you're using as well. Sharon.
Speaker 2:We also have Graduway, which is a networking platform for our alumni with our students, um, where students can get advice online, they can ask for a mentor online. And so it's really in a space where students are most of the time. Um, in addition, we've purchased the database called LiveAlumni, which allows us to look at how many of our alumni are within a company, um, locally, which also helps us get in the door, leverage those relationships, and really understand what the employer, how many of our alumni they have within the institution, which a lot of times they don't know.
Speaker 1:Have you noticed any unique challenges as you're implementing these solutions with being a two year public institution versus how these might be implemented in a four year institution? I know you mentioned at the beginning that you were modeling off of what some four year institutions have done.
Speaker 2:Well, we um, organized ourself with guided pathways, which is clustering our programs into nine different pathways so that students can get into a pathway early and have graders do success and completion. And if you, when we looked at the four year models, a lot of them have started to reveal, develop career clusters. Like one might be health sciences, another one may be technology. Um, so even though they didn't have the guided pathways, they did have these career clusters. So it was easy to model after them. I think some of the challenges are, this is the first time Handshake has gone into the community college space. And so we had to kind of be a little bit persistent with them. It's the best system out there. It's one employers want to use, um, and our persistence paid off that they were willing to pilot and shake with us. Um, and I think that will be an easy platform to get up and running. Graduway similar situation they were in the four year space. Um, the two year space. I think the biggest difference is we're only 50 years old. A lot of these institutions are much older and so they have greater affinity. Not to say that we're not gonna develop that as well. And we never organized alumni according to what career they were in. But I think that the little bit we've seen from, from the experience they like it. They like helping our students and hopefully as they liked doing that they will be willing to give to our students as well.
Speaker 3:And in general, um, you know, it's the same items that you have to worry about when you're putting any new technology in. And you know, we're gonna talk about this later in terms of these type of projects. You need to be able to make sure you have, understand your requirements when you're selecting a system. This tool has to be easy to use and useful, which is the basic of the technology except that model, if it's useful and easy to use and folks feel they have perceived resources to support them in adopting it, they'll use it and it'll be successful. So testing, adoption, communications are all are all part of this. And you know, as I mentioned, we're doing a large ERP project too, so that's absolutely critical. And also making sure we remember all these connections as we're implementing other systems as well. And how easy is it for students to log on? Do you have a single sign on piece that they don't have to remember yet? Another password and another piece of information. At what point do you connect these to your main student information system and are you being aware of the privacy FERPA and all the other pieces as you, uh, start looking at data that's going to be shared, not just with the, um, with the potential employers, but also as you navigate, you know, cloud services and their privacy and data security procedures and policies. So it's an interesting time technology-wise as these different offerings. How do they connect? How's stored? How were we working with the vendor to make sure, you know that the information is maintained in a good thoughtful way. So, um, you know, there are a lot of pieces that have to be connected when you're making even smaller software purchases and keeping the student and the student experience in line as you are making these, you know, how are they going to be using it, when are they going to be using it and the two year, four year thing as well. I think these systems are especially critical for two year students. A lot of them were going right into the workforce afterwards rather than transfer. So we're an important player or an important support in this area and we have to do it uh, quicker and in a more responsive way cause we don't have four years. We also have a number of students that are returning, drop out for a semester for whatever reason, um, and then come back. So, even though it's two year, it could be four, six year and how these tools are going to be very important for us to continue that connection and outreach with them until they reach their final, uh, goal with the, in, with the career path that they would like to take. So there's a lot of pieces at work here, technology wise, people wise, project wise and you know, they all have to be connected for the solution and the, um, system to be successful.
Speaker 1:Cool. Let's talk a little bit more about the people component. As you've combined these departments, did your staffing model have to change?
Speaker 2:It did. Um, when we combined the two, we were fortunate enough to have about three or four open positions so we could, it provided an opportunity for us to rethink how the staff was organized. So what we did was take half of the staff to focus on employer engagement with internships and experiential learning and then took the other half of the staff to work with students and we organize those counselors according to our areas of study, our guided pathways, so that they could become more specialist instead of generalist. And it allowed us to do that.
Speaker 1:Has this change made any difference to your employment metrics or a difference in giving?
Speaker 2:It has. When I arrived here five years ago, you were, I would say institutional advancement was very paper driven. We had an ERP system where you had to go to a programmer to write a program in order to run a report. And I think what all of these systems have let us do is be more self sufficient. It allows us to house information in different way and it also allows us to do easy reporting to get those metrics, which was a challenge before, um, Razor's Edge. It involved changing a culture though amongst the staff that the database was the central depository for information before it. They kept it on spreadsheets and it's taken a two year process in razor's edge to get people really understanding that if they get an email, they get a phone number, that somebody changes positions it needs to be changed in the database. Um, but we're there at this point. Um, but I think the biggest thing is being able to do our own reporting to be able to track our metrics. The difference in giving. I think the more we can have a cohesive look at corporations, the more it allows us to ask them for scholarship dollars because they're benefiting too. They're getting access to our students through internships and jobs. Um, and so I think we are starting to connect those dots between giving and the relationship. Overall.
Speaker 1:What advice do you have for an institution thinking about rolling out this model?
Speaker 3:Well, from a technology standpoint and even from an operational standpoint, more importantly, you really have to think about the whole student life cycle and student experience and also the impact on the employee experience, change management and the time in others. The pieces that you have to do from a technology, a technical standpoint, convert the data, put it in, test it up and running. You can underestimate a constant care and feeding you need to do in terms of not just the system but also the folks that are going to be going through this change. In some cases there haven't been changes to daily operations in decades. So introducing these tools also change the way folks do their job as Sharon mentioned in this last example, you know, and how you become a data center a little bit more on that, on those pieces without losing the touch with the student and the employees as well. Um, you have to step back and look at the whole picture and not just the individual tool and how these connections are made and the impact. Get feedback, give support and, and, you know, keep, keep moving along with it and be willing to adjust on the way to, I can be perfect out of the gate. You're not going to think of everything. It's a process. Um, but in the end, in a, the change is going to be good and it's going to help you know, students and even, you know, operations to be, you know, more forward thinking and being able to support these different changes, um, that are, you know, impacts not just internally but externally as well. What do you think from the people standpoint?
Speaker 2:I think from my end, it's very easy to build a new system the way you did it in an old system and you really need to look at the capability of a new system and take full advantage of it. And I think that was one of our challenges when we went through the transition to Razor's Edge is understand that this system functioned in a different way or give us more capability and to not build it like our previous system. Right. I think you can't underestimate the amount of acceptance that has to happen. We came from a very antiquated system that had limited capability and I didn't anticipate kind of the adoption part of it that it was going, they were still going to have that adoption period where there's frustration because they're using a new system. But I think as Deb says, the more user friendly the system is, the easier that happens.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And there's new folks join our organization. They don't have that historical piece of it and dirt, dirt grabbing it and they're going with it. So it's an interesting dynamic and because we were able to learn from this, I'll call it smaller project that was more based in the advancement area. We've got some lessons learned and also some key takeaways as we continue down our ERP project path. So it's been a good experience.
Speaker 2:One of those was the testing. We wished we had done a lot more testing than we did, um, until we were fixing some things on the back end instead of the front end. And I think Deb's done a good job in this ERP transition of allowing did that testing to happen.
Speaker 3:And data clean up. I mean ways you brought data and it didn't have, I mean in the type of tools and the places to store it and older systems and you know, 10, 20 years ago people weren't texting saying how you didn't really need to collect the cell phone. Now you do. And some of the older systems didn't accommodate these things as well. So we're finding, you know, how do you clean up and get ready for moving your data? It's like moving a house, going through the basement, pulling the stuff out. Do you need it? Do you want it? You have to change it. You get it new when you get on the other side. Right. So, it's a process.
Speaker 1:Thank you both so much for your time today. I've really enjoyed learning about your innovations at Northhampton Community College.
Speaker 2:Thank you. It was good chatting with you, Katelyn.
Speaker 1:This concludes our Top of Mind Podcast. Please check back with us next month for another great topic. And don't forget to subscribe to The Tambellini Group's Top of Mind blog and podcast series, so you never miss an update.