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Every Sunday (okay, sometimes Monday if it's a three-day weekend) we review and send all of our partner schools a 'Weekly Usage Update'. While users can always find these stats in their uConnect admin dashboard, we email clients key datapoints so they can better understand how their community is engaging with their career resources. In doing this, we hope to support clients in reaching their utilization goals.

So partners can benchmark and improve usage of their uConnect portal, we wanted to create a 'Readership Primer' or essential, brass tacks, list of practices to provide a foundation that ensures career constituents are paying attention to all the wonderful news and information shared through the uConnect portal.

Back to basics for increased utilization in 3, 2, 1...

There are more online resources, third-party apps, and services for career centers than ever. Your career center probably has a library of fantastic online resources scattered across various websites, portals and apps, which means they're most likely hard to find and potentially underutilized. Adding more resources might even confuse your audience base and set you up to compete with your current offerings, decreasing overall utilization.

Before you bring on another resource, whether it be for mentoring, interview prep, or even a whole new career services management system, we encourage you to consider two things...

All clients provide value, but there are some, the 'super client' who change the way we do business for the better. Finding those super clients isn't as straightforward as it might seem, they might be the ones quietly and consistently using your product, and other times, they’re the ones pushing your support team to the limits with custom requests. For an early stage start-up, identifying high-value clients can mean the difference between boom or bust.  

We want this article to serve as a resource for other B2B entrepreneurs who may be potentially overlooking clients that, with a little TLC, could positively transform business.

How can university career centers reach and engage students?

For the second year running, Boston University’s Center for Career Development played host to a unique conference designed to help answer this overarching question. There seem to be a lot of unique ways through which attendees are reaching their students and approaching career center marketing, from emails to social media to tabling and handing out fliers. Below are some of the most popular ideas of the conference. 

Our lives are becoming increasingly intertwined with the internet. We use it at work, we use it at home, and, thanks to smart phones and tablets, we use it on the go. What’s left behind is a mound of unorganized information. It’s no surprise then that innovative companies everywhere have begun to organize this data and put it to good use. 

This week we’re talking about another social media tool: Twitter. We’ll be discussing what it is, why it’s important for career service professionals everywhere and some best practices to engage students in fun and creative ways.

Employer recruiting on college campuses has been a part of the higher education experience for years. Now, however, with new-found pressure to improve career preparation and student outcomes, recruiting plays a bigger role than ever.

Creating content is hard. You've accumulated all of this insight, but how do you share it with students so that they will listen? This is the hardest part. 

In the Beginning

When asked what inspired me to start uConnect, I usually tell a story about an underutilized career center. While I was an undergrad at UMass Amherst, I frequently visited the career center. So after graduation, when tasked with hiring junior analysts for the private equity firm where I was working, my first instinct was to call the Director of Career Services at my alma mater to coordinate an info session.

Greetings and salutations from England. I’m writing from a little cafe sandwiched between a book store and a hotel on High Street in Oxford. The architecture is stunning, as you might expect, and Harry Potter was filmed just around the corner. Thought you’d want to know.  

Anyway, enough about me. This week I want to discuss the importance of underclassmen involvement in career programming. Recently an article was written by Janet Lorin, a higher education columnist for Bloomberg, on this very topic. The purpose of this blog is to discuss both why and how schools have started moving to this model.