7 Tips To Ensure Accurate Placement Rates
One of placement teams’ biggest challenges is determining and proving the accurate placement rates that accrediting bodies require. Tracking down students, managing the attestation paperwork, and keeping files audit-ready can be almost more difficult than actually getting students placed.
It’s hard work, but your team has to do it to maintain accreditation standards. Here are seven tips to remove pain from the placement tracking process and ensure accurate placement rates.
Automate surveying and tracking
Automating surveying saves your staff time and prevents students from getting lost in the shuffle. While some students will always require manual follow-up, if you can automate a bulk of the work, you’ll keep fewer students from falling through the cracks.
Some career services teams are a team of one, working with limited resources. But even large teams report staffing struggles that leave fewer employees handling more responsibilities. When teams are short-staffed, things start to slip through the cracks. Automating surveys and student outreach is a great way to maximize your staff and give them time back to do higher-value tasks.
But it only works if you….
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Meet students where they are
Students are mobile first. Your surveys should be too. Younger generations find phone calls intrusive, and email only has an open rate of 20 percent. Texting has a 98 percent open rate, and 90 percent of text messages are read in under three minutes. Plus, you can automate texting to reduce the workload on your team.
Some students are more challenging to reach than others and may require additional communication channels, but texting is a great place to start. Many placement teams find success scanning student social media if a student is unresponsive via text, email, and phone.
Keep in constant communication with your graduate
Set the expectation before they graduate that automated surveys, phone calls, and other communications until they report employment.
Keeping consistent will help you quickly learn whether or not a graduate needs extra support finding a job. Plus, when you set the expectation that you’ll reach out, the graduate is less likely to opt out of communication.
Gather as much information as soon as possible
If a graduate self-reports, gather as much information as possible while you have their attention. If you wait, you risk not being able to get ahold of them again.
Implement processes to secure your data trail
Between managing attestations, chasing down signatures, and tracking confirmations, placement teams are the best jugglers outside of the circus.
Implement processes to secure your audit trail, accounting for every worst-case scenario. For example, if someone leaves shortly after verifying a student placement, they may not get all their paperwork filed appropriately.
Build strong relationships with local employers
Picture this: You and the HR leader at your school’s largest employer have an excellent working relationship. You send them qualified workers and a fruit basket on their birthday, and they ping you when they hire one of your students. It’s a win-win.
This isn’t a pipe dream. This is what your team COULD be doing if they weren’t spending so much time calling and texting students. By automating and digitizing placement tracking and documentation, your team gets time back to focus on building solid relationships with employers.
Communicate with your marketing department
You might have accurate placement rates internally, but it only matters if they’re correct on your marketing materials.
Under new BDR regulations, inaccurate placement rates on marketing materials could serve as evidence of misrepresentation, even if it was a simple administrative oversight.
Collaborate closely with your marketing team to ensure accurate and up-to-date materials if placement rates change.
Software to help ensure accurate placement rates
Your goal has always been to produce high-quality, job-ready graduates, but you still have to prove it. While it’s not an easy task, these seven tips will help you ensure your placement rates are accurate and that no student falls through the cracks.
Request a demo if you’d like to learn how CourseKey helps schools like yours streamline the placement process.
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