Career Services and Student Success offices across the country are using Steppingblocks to give students access to real labor market data and help them graduate ready for the workforce. Here are five ways to put the platform to work on your campus.
1. Identify skills gaps and close them by adjusting your curriculum.
Steppingblocks shows you which specific skills industries and employers are actively hiring for. With that visibility, universities can update curriculum, introduce emerging skills, and connect graduates to employers who need them. Kennesaw State University used Steppingblocks to identify gaps in the data science and analytics sectors and restructure their programs accordingly. Read the case study.
2. Use skills data to strengthen your programs.
Students are graduating with technical skills gaps that employers consistently flag. Steppingblocks helps institutions pinpoint those gaps by program and make informed curriculum decisions before students leave campus. Explore our DataU conversation on Essential Skills to learn how to help students articulate and demonstrate their abilities to employers.
3. Drive student engagement with career readiness.
Only 11% of employers strongly agree that graduates are prepared for the workforce. Employers cite skills gaps, limited collaboration, and knowledge deficits as contributing factors. Steppingblocks helps institutions address those gaps through data-informed outreach and engagement strategies built for today's students, including nontraditional populations.
4. Launch or strengthen your student success program.
Student Success offices are being created at universities across the country, and the question is how to make them effective. In collaboration with the National Institute for Student Success (NISS), Steppingblocks produced a guide to building a successful Student Success program from the ground up. Download the ebook.
5. Support incoming students with career exploration from day one.
The University of Memphis adopted Steppingblocks to give students access to graduate outcomes data that universities have historically struggled to acquire on their own. They rolled out Digital Career Counselor campus-wide and are now using it to support career readiness from the moment students arrive. Read the full case study.