Situation
Mississippi State University has a long history with Symplicity. In 2001, the school implemented CSM, becoming one of the first career centers to adopt the system. The school’s strong commitment to its Cooperative Education Program led the team to seek an online management system to coordinate all activities related to the program. The Career Center partnered with Symplicity to customize its system to serve the co-op and internship program, and together developed what is known today as the Experiential Learning module. In addition to being a pioneer school for Symplicity, the school also relies heavily on CSM data and the reporting feature to measure student engagement, employer satisfaction, and post-graduation employment outcomes.
“[Symplicity] is a one-stop shop for everything that we do, everything that we need, and all of our services, and that's really convenient."
Charlie Wilder,
Assistant Director for Assessment
Solution
The Career Center continued to upgrade its system and find innovative ways to use the platform. The office created hundreds of reports to track experiential learning outcomes and on-campus recruiting events. However, staff members struggled to locate their reports and ended up creating new ones. The Assistant Director for Assessment, Charlie Wilder, worked closely with his Customer Relationship Specialist, Melissa Witte, to clean up the number of reports in the system. Together, they added categories to the report filters and reduced the number of reports from 450 to 40 reports. “We have a labeling scheme now,” Charlie explains. “When we need to find a report on a certain topic that has already been created, we can easily look and find it.”
Charlie and his team also used the data from the First Destination Survey to the create an annual career report for the College of Engineering. At spring graduation, staff members passed out the survey to graduating seniors at the bookstore and collected the responses. The data was entered into CSM for tracking purposes. If students did not provide a response, Charlie followed up with them via phone or email and recorded whether they had found employment after graduation.
Success
Since 2001, Mississippi State University has relied heavily on Symplicity to manage all of its career services processes. From tracking co-op opportunities and on-campus events to measuring post-graduation employment outcomes and facilitating employer outreach, CSM is the primary career services solution for students, employers, and staff members at the school. Using Symplicity has helped streamline communication between the Career Center and the school’s academic departments. Employers, who were formerly reaching out to the academics looking for qualified students, are posting jobs and screening candidates themselves on the site.
Despite using CSM for over 15 years, the university continues to expand its use and is satisfied with the value it provides to its students, employers, and staff members. When asked why he would choose Symplicity over other solutions in the market, Charlie was impressed by the company’s ability to deliver a successful product over time. “Looking at Symplicity's record, they've been in the market for a long time when other products have come and gone,” Charlie said.
“We just generated an end-of-the-year report for our college of engineering students, and the data that we get from the First Destination Survey is helping us do that."
