One of our project outputs is an Employability Catalogue. This would enable the searching of data held in Myfolio to identify students matching a range of criteria. A typical scenario might be where a prospective employer, perhaps already employing Kent alumni, wants to identify students or alumni studying a particular subject and with a range of other skills appropriate to posts the employer needs to fill in the future. The Employability Catalogue would allow the employer to enter criteria and to filter the results to identify individuals that meet those criteria. Obviously a service like this needs careful thought and safeguards – this would be an opt-in service – and I am sure there are diverse views on the merits and pitfalls of providing the Employability Catalogue. However in this blog I want to explore the cost implications.
All services have costs and providing services to our students is not controversial. But how do things change if we extend a service to alumni? At a quick glance, providing a PDP and e-folio application to alumni seems a low cost proposition. There are some practical areas around security and membership to be surmounted but they should not prove too challenging or have high on-going costs. We will need to provide storage space but again the cost of this should not be too high. We currently offer students 50 Mb of storage but many users will not need this amount of space especially if they are embedding images and videos rather than uploading them to Myfolio. It is difficult to give accurate estimate so soon after roll out but we would not expect all our alumni to continue to use Myfolio and we do not project support costs to be high.
“In a nutshell – a service which puts employers in contact with alumni”
But if we supply an Employability Catalogue there are other considerations. Currently we are looking at using the Google Search Appliance (GSA) to catalogue and make a user’s data in Myfolio searchable. GSA is a hardware/software solution which offers the security and
customisation, and obviously the search capabilities, we need to provide the catalogue. We can provide users with a familiar Google style interface with faceting to allow users to narrow down their searches. GSA is not a cheap solution but many HEIs will be considering using GSA (other search Appliances may be available) more widely within their organisations – if they are not using it already. The cost of GSA is dependent on the number of pages indexed. Kent is already committed to using GSA and the addition of Myfolio pages is not going to push the costs up.
There will be initial costs in developing indexes and the front end but the on-going costs will come in the administration. In a nutshell we are proposing a service which puts employers into contact with alumni. So it could be very simple – the alumnus provides an email address and the interested party contacts them. But is this a model which gives alumni and the University the best advantage? Probably not. Would our alumni welcome unsolicited contact from anyone who finds them? In particular it is likely that employment agencies would find this a good route to use, which may or may not be welcome – but less benign contacts could easily become a problem. Such a plan would also ‘cut out’ the university – we would not gain any insight into how well the service was working or get additional data as to where our alumni go and how well they do.
An alternative would be for Kent to act as a broker for this service but this is where we need to be aware of on-going costs. Acting as a go-between between alumni and prospective employers would require skilled staff with a knowledge of the employment market and an ability to sort the wheat from the chaff – the genuine offers from those seeking to sell additional services. Of course we already have such staff but how would this increase their workload?
We would need to market the service both to our alumni and to employers. And we need to think hard about how long we can offer this service post-graduation. Kent produces close to 4000 graduates each year. But if we get it right this will be a service which brings benefits to employers, to our alumni and students, and to the reputation of the university.
Hi Leo,
I was really interested to read your thoughts on the cost implications of alumni services such as those we have been developing as part of our projects.
I have been having similar concerns about GradSpace. Staff resource is crucial to the success of these initiatives – for example, a large proportion of my time is taken up maintaining the GradSpace site, answering queries and developing new materials and resources. We are committed to supporting GradSpace after the project funding ends, but I believe that this will have to be a collaborative effort between various departments/individuals in order to spread the workloads and costs of maintaining the service.
Anyway, how is the project going and are you well?
Best wishes,
Loretta
The truth is that any task with lots of information handling is labour intensive. Am I right? So GradSpace is going to take up a lot of some people’s time, isn’t it. Or am I wrong?
My view is that the nature of the work/task changes as the new systems come in, and that volumes may go up more likely than down. This means that it is important for teams to be prepared to cut old tasks and responsibilities as they take on new ones. So, as below, work needs to be cut (and redirected) as well as taken on.
“An alternative would be for Kent to act as a broker for this service but this is where we need to be aware of on-going costs. Acting as a go-between between alumni and prospective employers would require skilled staff with a knowledge of the employment market and an ability to sort the wheat from the chaff – the genuine offers from those seeking to sell additional services. Of course we already have such staff but how would this increase their workload?”