Prior to becoming the Service Manager for Careers and Employment at the University of Derby, Clare Holden’s background was in library service. Her experience as a librarian made her keen on developing digital skills and delivering informative webinars online. When she moved into a careers role in March 2019, one of the first projects she was tasked with was delivering more resources online for students that were remotely learning. “In the beginning, my focus was supporting the career staff in terms of going online as well as developing the content and materials for students that were completely online,” Holden said. By the time February of 2020 came around, the University of Derby was delivering many webinars online and now, since March of 2020, all careers programs and resources are provided to students entirely online through the use of Symplicity CareerHub.
CareerHub has been extremely useful for Holden and her team, especially during the times of remote work. “CareerHub has enabled myself and my staff to continue supporting students. Between our webinars, careers resources, and online appointment management, our office is fully operational with our support and services,” Holden said, “We’re able to offer virtual internships, virtual volunteering, and record everything we’re doing online through the system.” CareerHub has allowed the University of Derby to not only maintain but also expand the offerings and opportunities to students. In a completely virtual world, this has been a huge positive for both students and staff.
“CareerHub has everything a careers office needs. It has all the workflows one might need for any program, but it’s also very flexible so it can be adjusted to suit the exact needs of any institution. For me, it’s that CRM approach with registering all the student contacts. All of the ways students engage within the system, I can pull out in a report and truly measure impact.”
Clare Holden,
Service Manager for Careers and Employment,
University of Derby
The University of Derby uses CareerHub for managing both student wellbeing and careers. For the careers team, there’s an opportunity to continue expanding the use of CareerHub. “We have big plans for how we’d like to maximise our use of CareerHub. We want to host more virtual events and we want to continue to evolve how we record attendance to those events and specifically see what sessions students are attending. With CareerHub, we can see what students have done so far and it’s all about recording the student journey,” Holden said, “We want to know if they’ve come to curriculum session of a webinar or if they’ve done a drop-in in the chat. If we record each step of the student journey, this enables us to measure impact and overall student engagement.” Holden confirms this will be crucial when running year-end reports as part of the planning for 2021 careers programs.
In addition to running reports, the Careers and Employment staff at the University of Derby utilises CareerHub as an online resource center. Holden stated that, “CareerHub has been the most beneficial from an online resources standpoint. We’re able to promote our webinars and record whether students have attended and send follow-up communication. What else is useful is the fact that we’re able to record all of our interactions with students. This makes it easier to keep track of the student journey, from providing feedback on their CVs to measuring the employment outcome.”
For more information about virtualizing student services, email info@symplicity.com or schedule a conversation.