Robert Pearl Starks

Ronda, Thank you for introducing yourself. If your objectives are to establish stronger relationships with students and to create an alumni community, social media provides the right tools for these objectives. Ronda, you describe the community you'd like to see as one in which students can share success and even frustrations. It would be interesting to hear more about the overall objective you have with this strategy. How might such a community help you achieve your career center objectives? Are you prepared if sharing frustrations transforms into venting? How might you handle these types of interactions if they occur? What… >>>

Hello Ronda, Thank you for contributing to the forum. Would you describe your activity of "liking" pages of relevant organizations as a strategy to make students aware of such organizations? I am curious to learn more about the strategy you have employed here and what prompted this tactic. If you would be willing to elaborate, it would be very helpful for all of us learning from one another's tactics. As you approach the end of this course, I would be interested to know the ways you might modify your strategies to see if you develop new ideas on your approach… >>>

Stacey, Great idea to get students started early. I noticed you stated you use Facebook for tracking down students and you indicate LinkedIn being helpful to discovering where people work if you have trouble contacting them. These are definitely two benefits of these platforms but I am very curious how you might start using social media to accomplish other career center objectives. What are some ideas you might have to improve student participation, employer relations, career services programs, or events? Any ideas on just one other aspect beyond employment? I'd love to hear your ideas at this point in the… >>>

Stacey, It sounds like your school has a person running your social media but not your department. I have found that many schools who do have a social media strategy are mainly using it for marketing/admissions. Often, there are policies in place that require departments who want their own page to request permission and provide justification for why the page is wanted. This can sometimes present a challenge because organizations can fear giving up "control" since social media can be very challenging to manage. What's the situation you face? Do you know much about the social strategy currently being used?… >>>

Stacey, I hear you on this one. I remember similar challenges. Because career professionals rely on others (gatekeepers) to partner with us to provide us with what we need to do our jobs, relationships are essential to our ability to optimize our results. Often, when I was a Director of Career Services, we had some Registrars we frequently interacted with at other schools to get enrollment verification. These are people we would send thank you cards to or go out of our way to do something nice for them. In the event that such people are on social media platforms,… >>>

Hello Stacey, This is a big question that requires a thorough response – so, here it is for you: The challenge you present is how can one intervene with a robust plan that helps students get experience before they graduate and how does social media play a role in that overall plan? A number of intervention strategies I’m sure you’ve already identified are developing programs such as internships, externships, service learning programs, volunteering opportunities, etc. that encourage students to get experience while they are in school. The ideal situation is when you can make experience a required part of the… >>>

Stacey, Before identifying a tool, you'd have to first identify your goal. Let me give you an example. The reason Career Services conducts workshops is to educate students. The idea is that educating students improves their career readiness, thus, increasing their likelihood of success which is a win-win. In this example, if your goal were to improve the career-readiness of students by scaling your educational workshops (Reaching more students), you could use a few tools to help you accomplish this goal. So, you might choose to create short video snippets covering a variety of career topics and have a Youtube… >>>