As a career services professional, your focus is connecting students with careers that align with their goals. With the job market changing significantly in the past few years, the tools and strategies you use to accomplish this may no longer deliver great results.
Many things have changed in the hiring landscape, which means you should modernize your approach. It’s a time to shift perspective and adopt job-matching technology that supports you and your students.
Career services have a substantial impact on student success in the job market.
Your role is to connect and facilitate, and students are eager to get your assistance with job hunting because it leads to better outcomes. According to the 2022 National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) Student Survey, graduates using at least one career services program received an average of 1.24 job offers; for every additional service used, the average job offers increased by 0.05. These numbers were higher than those of students who didn’t use a service, who averaged only one job offer.
The career services that drove this increase included assistance searching for internships, mock interviews and network preparation. Those are all pillars of most career services and can help a student be career-ready.
The ultimate goal of career services is job placement. However, every student that seeks your services may not have their future figured out. In these scenarios, career services become a guide to help them get exposure to different career paths and learn what their strengths are and how that translates to in-demand jobs. You may be using a mix of tools to do this. Challenges arise when attempting to scale because counselor ratios and budget cuts impact your progress.
Career services face challenges that technology can alleviate.
Modernizing career services means embracing technology that streamlines processes, ensures you can support all those who want help and delivers a way to measure results. It allows you to do more with less, which is essential since the student-to-counselor ratio is 408-to-1, according to the U.S. Department of Education National Center for Education Statistics. That’s an extreme workload, and career services professionals need more effective technology to bridge the gap.
Another challenge you may be experiencing is budget constraints. According to NACE data, 33.6% of career services programs saw cuts to personnel budgets and 56.7% to non-personnel budgets in 2021. Those numbers rebounded in 2022. Those increases were encouraging but, at best, put budgets where they were before the decline. As a result, investments must be able to deliver long-term, incremental results.
You may also have concerns about how to resolve the skills gap that’s present in today’s workforce. Ideally, you want to align your programs with sought-after skills, which are changing as the industry evolves, creating new jobs and eliminating others. You’re playing an integral role in building the workforce of the future, and to do this, you’ll need job-matching technology.
What is job-matching technology?
Job-matching technology is a new approach to hiring that pepelwerk uses. These platforms are unique because they leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) algorithms. It’s more than just resume matching. Rather, AI and ML produce automated matches between a candidate’s profile and an employer’s job profile by:
- Looking for similar phrases — not exact keywords
- Connecting skills listed on candidate profiles and those needed for the job
- Combining data from human and technical data points
This data-driven job matching supports placement rates and allows you to track and measure everything. You and your students will benefit from job-matching technology, and here are a few more reasons why you should adopt it.
Why should you adopt job-matching technology?
Beyond career matching, the pepelwerk solution provides more features for career services, including:
- Dashboards to track outcomes, so you can continue to refine your program
- Assessments for your students to help them identify their abilities, attributes and attitudes
- Skills and interest in predictive analytics, which enables students to understand the skills they need and how to obtain or improve them
- Career readiness content
- Virtual reality job exploration
Find out more about job matching and career planning apps by watching the video below.
Modernize career services with job-matching technology that will propel success for students.
Adopting the pepelwerk platform is a win for you and your students. It’s a comprehensive career services technology solution that’s revolutionizing how the industry works in line with the current environment of recruitment and hiring. Be part of this movement by exploring how you can close the skills gap for students with technology.
