Career Coach, EMSI’s latest product that connects students and jobseekers to local careers and training, has seen good growth over the past year. The tool, which has been implemented by colleges, universities, workforce agencies, and other community groups, is now used in 28 states, and we’re excited about the success stories and feedback we’ve received. As a result, we have a new round of product updates to tell you about.
WHAT IS CAREER COACH?
Career Coach is a web-based tool for colleges, universities, and workforce agencies that are dissatisfied with how their websites engage students and jobseekers. Career Coach solves this problem by organizing relevant local information about careers in a simple, user-friendly tool that is easily integrated into your external website so anyone at anytime can learn about the local job market right on your website. Furthermore, Career Coach goes a step further and connects students and jobseekers to relevant education and/or training programs at your institution so you can drive enrollment and retain students.
LATEST UPDATES
Here are a four new features we are working on.
1. Linkages between GE widgets and Career Coach
For the past few months we have been using Career Coach to help colleges with gainful employment regulations. Career Coach will now link students straight to O*NET, which is part of the gainful employment regulation, and send them to the Career Coach look-up page so they can browse all of your programs
2. Custom Reports/Outputs from Career Coach
EMSI can build custom reports for your organization so that visitors can have a “takeaway” from the tool. The reports can also integrate with your career advising/counseling process. See this example (PDF) from the University of Nebraska at Omaha (visit UNO’s Career Coach page).
3. Openings Data
In addition to overall job change, we have added the ability to see the annual demand for a particular job. This is important for jobs that might be in decline, but still have lots of openings and turnover on an annual basis (e.g., manufacturing). See image for illustration.
4. New Admin Report
This is a snazzy new report that shows you key details about traffic to your Career Coach site. It is designed to share and present to others. We are also talking about a new admin user interface to give clients more control. See the picture below for a concept.
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FEATURES WE ARE THINKING ABOUT
Here are four updates that we are starting to think about. If you are interested, please email Larson (larson@economicmodeling.com).
1. Email Updates for Visitors
Some clients have requested that we set up an email system so that users can opt-in to email updates.
2. Job Board for Employers to Post Jobs
This would allow local employers to post jobs on your Career Coach site.
4. Occupational Assessment
This feature would help jobseekers and students pinpoint their interests via a simple interest assessment that recommends occupations based on interests. Below is an example of how it might look.
5. Career Coach Widgets for All Program Pages
The new DOE gainful employment rules have forced many colleges to display occupation information on their program pages for their non-degree programs. The drawback is that students now cannot find similar information for the degree programs. This development would fix that problem by linking visitors to Career Coach from all program pages. Think of it as a “mini Career Coach” that would be placed directly on a program page so that students that are interested in that program could explore related jobs right on the page.
CONTACT US
If you have questions about these updates or would like to learn more about Career Coach, please contact us. We would love to chat!
