As one of the top 10 research institutions in the country, Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) prides itself on supporting and preparing students predominately in fields such as engineering and computer science, alongside standout programs in business, design, liberal arts, and sciences. Located in Atlanta, GA, Georgia Tech has become an integral part of the economic development in the state of Georgia and around the country. Georgia Tech works with over 700 businesses, industries, and organizations throughout the world that employ Georgia Tech co-op and interns each year and is ranked #1 in Career Placements by the Princeton Review.
Supporting its students to succeed is the Georgia Tech Career Center, which has been a Symplicity CSM partner since 2007. For over a decade, Georgia Tech has relied on Symplicity CSM to streamline its center operations, connect to employers, enhance its experiential learning programming for its students, and much more! Operating as a centralized office, CSM ensures that the career center stays relevant and operates in a unified system that is familiar to students and employers.
"Having everything in one system, it allows for consistency, allows for us to share the system with other on-campus partners to help them better connect with students and employers."
Andrea Comsa
Director of Co-Ops and Experiential Learning, Georgia Institute of Technology
Experiential Learning
Supporting 40,000+ students each year, the Georgia Tech Career Center has been utilizing Symplicity CSM to understand its changing student demographics, employability, and career readiness landscape for over a decade. As the Director of Co-Ops and Experiential Education, Andrea Comsa supports the roughly 18,000+ undergraduate students that have, or want to have, a co-op or internship opportunity during their time at Georgia Tech. “With Symplicity we are able to track the students that participate in our EL programs and help them in their search for placement and eventual employment,” said Comsa. “We can look at our traditionally underrepresented students and identify what resources or programming we need to engage with them more, all within our Symplicity system.”
With such a robust experiential learning (EL) program, Georgia Tech heavily utilizes the EL module within CSM. This includes creating videos that are embedded into the student EL application and making it a a requirement for all students applying for EL to view and then answer a series of questions before they submit the application. A student then has access to the full scope of the Georgia Tech’s EL module to support their career readiness. Additionally, Comsa and her colleagues can easily utilize the data gathered in CSM to make data-driven decisions, “We are tracking the students, and we are able to provide data to the institution on the students that are co-oping or interning these experiences with the Career Center. “Through Symplicity, we are easily able to pull that data and provide that data because we can run that in Symplicity,” said Andrea Comsa. The ability for CSM to integrate with third-party applications to help Georgia Tech understand its student data is also a value to the career center.
Robust Student Engagement
“Customization is huge for us,” said Terrance “Scott” Green, Application Support Analyst Lead at Georgia Tech. “Other systems we’ve looked at in the past are rigid in how their systems operate and not flexible for what we need. We love Symplicity CSM because it can do a lot of things within the system that can be customized based on whether it’s a student, employer, faculty, or staff member.” This customization means that Georgia Tech can utilize its campus-specific language that students are familiar with and direct them to one centralized location for everything career readiness related. The customization within CSM has allowed for the career center to track students throughout the duration of their work term and enables the center to make data- informed decisions on how to expand and continue to improve their EL and co-op programs.
CSM enables Georgia Tech to track placements and progressions of students in the system. From experiential learning placements to on-campus interviewing, to scheduling counseling appointments and attendance information, the staff is able to pull reports in Symplicity to make data-informed decisions to understand their activities and what services they should provide to better assist their students. Plus, utilizing CSM’s form generator means that Georgia Tech to directly gather information from students without constraints of other systems in the market and directly reach students, employers, and other campus partners.
“The API is a game-changer,” said Green. “I love that [Symplicity] give us the flexibility to pull anything in the system out and communicate effectively with our students. We can advertise our workshops and information session on our webpage and student can access them into the CSM instance and I absolutely love that.”
"Other systems we’ve looked at in the past are rigid in how their systems operate and not flexible for what we need. We love Symplicity CSM because it can do a lot of things within the system that can be customized based on whether it’s a student, employer, faculty, or staff member"
Terrance “Scott” Green
Application Support Analyst Lead, Georgia Institute of Technology
Career Fairs and Employer Relations
Over the last four years, Georgia Tech has also expanded its use of CSM by utilizing the career fairs and employer relations modules. Georgia Tech has one of the largest career fairs in the Southeast and previously was using an in-house solution to capture student engagement and eliminate long lines that cut down on employer-to-student interaction at the fair. With the kiosk feature in CSM’s Career Fair module, Georgia Tech has been able to improve the check-in process tremendously, that ensures students and employers can quickly connect. Post career fair, this also includes downloading reports of the number of students that engaged with employers, how many attended, and more to enhance the career fair experience for students.
Additionally, utilizing CSM has improved employer relations at Georgia Tech where employers can, with permission, download resume books of students, do direct outreach on opportunities that directly apply to students’ interests and majors. This means students aren’t flooded with irrelevant job opportunities, but instead can build meaningful connections with potential employers and increase career readiness skills for Georgia Tech students.
