Importance of Surveys in Career Services Management

Career Services Management is undoubtedly the most important function in an educational institute as it plays a pivotal role in enhancing the job prospects of students and bolstering the reputation of the institute. Career Services team plan and conduct various activities that are expected to help students in various ways in getting their dream jobs. As a career services professional, do you measure the effectiveness of the activities you have conducted? How do you come to know what is that the students are looking for? How do you know if you are on the right track as a team? How do you vindicate to your management that the activity you have conducted was a success? Do you listen to the feedback from the employer partners? 

The answer to all the above questions is Surveys. We are familiar with First Destination Surveys and let’s leave that for now. Let’s look at surveys as a tool for measuring effectiveness and as a tool for listening to students and employer partners.  

Surveys as a tool for measuring effectiveness 

Career Centers should run surveys after conducting any events such as workshops, webinars or career fairs. In terms of webinars or workshops, the survey can tell you how relevant the students perceived the topic/subject was and whether you should have a similar program for the next batch. Surveys can give you insights on what students’ thought on the delivery of those workshops/webinars and if the presenter was good enough. This helps in planning for the future and avoid repeating mistakes. Also, this improves student engagement as they feel they are part of the ecosystem and career center is listening to them. 

Surveys as a tool for listening to employer partners 

It’s important that you listen to the feedback from employer partners after an event in which they are involved. Surveys can also be conducted on their future hiring plan, skill sets they expect in the near future, etc. Understanding what the Employers need will help you in devising programs that will benefit your students during the hiring season. Conducting a survey  will make the employer partners feel good about the association with your institute, brings about a sense of working together and they will realize how important they are for your institute. This helps in bettering your processes and improving the relationships with Employer partners. 

 How do we conduct a Survey? 

There are several Survey tools available using which surveys can be conducted. The problem with such tools is that you will have to upload the student and employer data on those tools and create silos. You will have one more system to manage. The best option is to have a Career Services Management application that has a powerful built-in survey module with analytics. Some of the modern CSM applications such as Cynaptx let the career centers design their surveys and configure questionnaires that can be disseminated through the application itself. Respondents can easily give their response and the application will give a detailed analysis of the response collected.  

Such survey reports can be used for internal decision making. Also, Career centers can publish reports and articles based on the survey analysis which will be a strong marketing content. It’s imperative that Career Centers conduct periodic as well as event-based surveys to stay on top of the expectations of the students and employer partners. Surveys can synergize the Career Services ecosystem.