Alumni are critical to your institution in several different ways, from providing networking opportunities to your current students to impacting your school’s reputation and even impacting your institution’s financial standing as it relates to donations. If your career services management tool has no way to service alumni after they graduate, this could be hurting your school on several different levels.
Some of CSM’s competitors do not have any way of allowing users to continue using your career services tool without a university-affiliated email address. Most colleges and universities do not keep these email addresses active indefinitely. This means that in order to continue offering career services to graduates after their university email addresses are turned off, your career services management tool must allow them continued access by letting them log in with their personal email addresses.
So how will it be a detriment to your institution’s overall goals if your system does not have this capability?
Mentoring and Networking Opportunities for Students
Career services professionals already know that alumni are an incredibly valuable resource for providing current students with career advice, mentoring and even potential job opportunities. With CSM’s Professional Networking Module, alumni and students can connect within the system to develop relationships, which will help your students improve their employability skills and even increase their chances of finding a job in their chosen field.
If alumni have no way of logging into your career services management system once their university-affiliated email is turned off, these beneficial connections between alumni mentors and current students cannot occur within your system – which, in the ends, hurts your current students significantly.
Overall Reputation and Loyalty to Your Institution
It’s a basic fact of life: the better your graduates do in their careers, the better your institution’s reputation becomes. Even if your school stops officially collecting and reporting employment data six months to a year after a student graduates, “employment outcomes” of your graduates last a lifetime. Continuing to offer career services to your alumni enables them to continue receiving these important professional resources, which in turn increases their chances of landing a top job. Then, when everyone asks that executive making a salary in the top tenth percentile for her field where she went to college, she can proudly name your school.
Not only that, but she will spread the word to her friends and network – which will likely include younger people trying to pick a future college or university – that your institution supports alumni by allowing them continued access to career services resources long after they graduate. No seasoned higher ed professional can deny the importance of word-of-mouth.
And while we would never reduce alumni to just a resource for donations, it’s also a well-known fact that many institutions rely on alumni donations for a significant part of their funding. Loyal alumni are alumni who donate, and the more you help alumni after they graduate, the more loyal they’ll remain to your institution.
This all brings us back to the main poin, which is that you cannot continue offering these services to alumni if they are only able to log into your career services management tool with their university-affiliated email address that has long since been turned off.
With CSM by Symplicity, your institution can opt to continue offering career services to alumni for as long as administrators see fit. Schedule a conversation with us to learn more about how CSM is better equipped than competitors at helping you nurture your alumni.