Universities today are focused on empowering all students to become career-ready and connecting them to high-quality, relevant opportunities—Symplicity’s #1 priority is supporting this mission. The university has always been our customer and we’re committed to supporting it and its students first and foremost. We feel now more than ever the importance of providing a technology platform that creates the best possible, unified student experience. An important part of creating that experience is future planning and integration that focuses on effectively recruiting and retaining a student body that aligns with the institution’s mission, while also preparing them for success in their personal and professional lives beyond graduation. To do this, Symplicity CSM solves the critical challenges facing higher education institutions such as having different academic divisions conduct their own student services activities. As a result, historically, these activities have been very decentralized, which has resulted in processes, technology, and functions that may vary widely between divisions.
Your Data
CSM’s solution involves data. Not only does Symplicity firmly believe in protecting student data but our business model will never require students to give rights to use their data in order to access a core university service. Updated reporting and new custom dashboards help clients extract better information about career outcomes, student trends on job applications, event registrations, and tracking the progress of KPIs. This was the experience of Cleveland-Marshall College of Law that used CSM’s reporting ability to understand how their career services efforts have fared across the years and provided educated answers to students, employers, and anyone else interested in learning more about employment trends. According to Heather DiFranco, Director of Career Planning, “The power of CSM lies in its underlying reporting ability for data, as opposed to just [being] a repository for information.” Symplicity is the only provider who can support custom fields, localizations, and translations with the custom dashboard feature, and this helps clients easily visualize data.
Your Brand
Another CSM solution is to support a client’s brand. The platform and all branding belong to the university—not Symplicity. We feel this is completely critical to the success of the career center and university at large in order for it to develop long-lasting relationships with students and employers. Since the enterprise layer allows CSM to integrate with countless other partner apps, every institutional office can use their own individual apps underneath the same umbrella of one system. Symplicity Branded Mobile App allows clients to add a custom icon to the new Symplicity app to match the branding of their career center or institution. Our branded mobile efforts help clients contribute to their brand’s identity and stay top of mind in their students’ career journey, which leads to increased student satisfaction, retention, and engagement. Hundreds of schools are applying branded mobile as it provides the most convenient way for students to access the career center system.
Your Platform
When it comes to our clients’ CSM platform, we’ve built and enhanced a platform with deep configurability and functionality. Our platform enables schools to measure and report on critical KPIs around student engagement and outcomes, streamline student and employer outreach, and run robust OCR and experiential learning programs. These values are core to our mission and drive our decision-making in everything we do—today and in the future. The CSM Pathways feature allows students to explore and develop career competencies gathered from educators and faculty, engage with employers, understand the skills and career competencies associated with academic majors and build their own career maps. Queens College CUNY used Pathways to develop an integrated academic and career learning environment. Five career educators and five peer mentors are working with Queens College students as they navigate CSM Pathways, utilize services, and attend events on career readiness. Their HireQC Pathways project was a finalist for the 2019 Career Innovation Showcase.
For those interested in becoming part of the conversation, or for those with questions, concerns, or general feedback, please reach out to universityfirst@symplicity.com.
