What is “Vocational Intelligence” and Why Your School Needs Vocational Intelligence Software
- Thea Le Fevre
- July 25, 2022
As of 2020, roughly 5,000,000 students were enrolled in a 2-year degree or certificate program compared to the 12,000,000 enrolled in four-year bachelorette programs. In the last decade, high school students were encouraged to take the ‘right’ path toward a four-year degree even when their passions better allied with vocational education.
But that’s changing.
Drops in enrollment during the pandemic reflect a change in the way students are thinking about higher education. Enrollment in trade schools spiked in 2022, in some places, as high as 40%.
Shifts in the economy are causing students to think more carefully about how much debt they can reasonably accumulate and how quickly they want to get to work in their chosen career field.
Vocational education is making a comeback, but do schools have the resources to scale?
Student data is a critical resource—but do schools have the tools to harness it?
Society placed four-year universities on the main stage, and because of this, they received the latest and greatest tools and tech. Career education institutions have long labored beneath strict regulations while using processes like manual data entry and software that doesn’t address their unique needs.
Tracking data from paper attendance lists, spreadsheets, and multiple systems means that staff spends more time managing data than acting on it. By the time staff enters data and pulls it from different systems into a report, the data may already be obsolete.
In schools subject to 14-day drop rules, hours caps, and more, real-time data is a critical resource. Without it, executives don’t have the best information on how to improve the student experience, help more students graduate, and catch compliance risks before they become an issue.
Most career colleges have all of the information they need to scale their schools, but they’re lacking something that pulls it all together.
Schools turn to software to help manage student data
Many schools turn to point solution software to help manage their data.
Point solution software is used to solve a singular problem. It may resolve one issue, like taking attendance, while leaving another in the dust. You may still have to dig for student data and bring it to the forefront before you can try to gain insights.
Depending on the size of your school, point solution software may be the perfect solution for you. However, schools with a larger number of students and systems need a platform to manage the volume of data and use it to gain insights that will help them scale.
It’s not unique to career education schools. Large universities and businesses of all sizes use business intelligence platforms to gather, understand, and visualize their data. Some large career education schools have implemented BI platforms to manage their data but found that horizontal solutions simply don’t meet their needs without significant oversight and management. There wasn’t a business intelligence platform on the market that met the unique needs of career education programs — until now.
What is vocational intelligence?
Enter vocational intelligence. Vocational intelligence is the enrollment, placement, student, instructor, course, program, compliance, and other data that vocational education programs need to scale.
A vocational intelligence platform connects your software and point solutions (SIS, LMS, CRM, and more), to combine all the data in one location, visualize critical insights for informed decision-making, and improve the entire student journey from enrollment to placement.
With a vocational intelligence platform, your school can:
- Power executive decision-making with real-time student, course, and program data.
- Leverage student attendance and behavioral data to improve intervention to help more students cross the finish line.
- Follow the entire student journey to identify—and eliminate—barriers in the student journey.
- Eliminate administrative burden on staff members, allowing them to spend more time focusing on student success.
For more information on how our vocational intelligence platform does this, read Introducing Cortex: The Future of Vocational Education.
Request a demo to see how the world’s first vocational intelligence platform can help your school grow to meet the rising demand for vocational education.
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