Today’s schools don’t just need outcome data, they need to prove institutional ROI by understanding the employability drivers that actually make a difference. Knowing which internships, partnerships, and programs truly move the needle allows you to double down on what works, improve what doesn’t, and scale career readiness as a true institutional differentiator.

That starts with comprehensive tracking, reporting, and integrated tools built specifically for career services.

With Symplicity CSM (Career Services Manager), your team can visualize, report on, and act on data across the entire student journey, making it easier to measure, explain, and improve institutional ROI.

What Institutional ROI Means and Why it Matters

Institutional ROI measures the financial value of a college degree. For career services, it demonstrates how investments in career services, experiential learning, and employer partnerships translate into measurable value for the institution.

This value is connected to the outcomes leadership cares about like student retention, graduation rates, post-graduate employment, employer engagement, and staff efficiency.

When institutions can connect their specific efforts to these results, it shifts the role of career services from a support function to a strategic driver of institutional sustainability.

The Challenge of Reporting ROI without a Platform 

Without a centralized system, career services may face significant operational hurdles. The absence of a platform leads to:

• Siloed outcome data across spreadsheets or departmental databases
• Lack of visibility into which programs and partnerships are most successful
• Limits leadership’s ability to make informed decisions about budget and program value

Without the right platform in place, institutional ROI remains largely theoretical instead of measurable. What career services need is a unified platform that connects career support to retention, accreditation, and reputation, showing how employability work strengthens the institution.

How Symplicity CSM Excels at Reporting Outcomes 

Symplicity CSM stands out as a leading platform for reporting due to several key features and continuous enhancements:

1. Built for outcomes, not just activity

   CSM reports across the entire student journey by linking appointments, events, jobs, experiential learning, employer engagement, and post-graduation outcomes in one reporting engine.

2. Fully customizable and institution-controlled

   Schools control custom fields, surveys, workflows, reporting views, and which FDS years are shared, with support for Excel/CSV imports—so reporting evolves as institutional priorities change.

   
   
   
   

3. One reporting engine for every audience

   Uses a single data source to support career staff dashboards, leadership summaries, accreditation and state reporting, and student-facing insights, eliminating duplicate reporting tools and manual efforts.

4. Transforms outcomes data into student insight

   The Post-Graduation Outcomes Research Tool, powered by First Destination Survey (FDS) data, gives students anonymized, filterable views of employers, job titles, industries, locations, and salary distributions to guide career decisions.

   
   
   
   

5. Tells the “why,” not just the “what”

   Because outcomes connect back to engagement data (appointments attended, events participated in, experiences completed), CSM helps institutions explain why outcomes differ by major, population, or pathway.

6. Supports equitable and strategic decision-making

   Filterable reporting by major, degree, employment type, location, and class year enables analysis of trends, gaps, and equity outcomes across cohorts.

   
   
   
   

7. Improves employer-side data quality and outcomes alignment

   Multi-select employer filters (majors, degree level, class year, minors, school) improve applicant targeting, producing cleaner application pipelines and more meaningful outcomes data downstream.

8. Scales across campuses and departments

   Designed for multi-office, multi-campus institutions, with consistent reporting across units while preserving local flexibility.

9. Embedded AI Insights for faster, deeper, and more comprehensive data analysis

   Combine the power of CSM reporting with a secure AI, hosted on a private LLM (Symplicity’s Large Language Model (LLM)). Access trends and insights immediately after running a report, thus saving time, and reducing the need for multiple applications to analyze data.
   
   

CSM is the Right Fit for You If... 

Symplicity CSM connects the full student journey to outcomes, and turns that data into insight for students, staff, leadership, and employers from one system. With built-in workflows, automation, and engagement tools, CSM helps your team reach more students and employers without adding headcount.

CSM is the right fit if: 

• You want to connect outcomes to the full students journey to understand your unique employability
• You want flexible reporting that lets you create custom fields, surveys, workflows, and reports on demand, without submitting tickets or being locked into predefined views.
• You want students to explore real post-graduation outcomes using anonymized, trusted institutional data.

Get Started

Questions? Want to explore CSM? Get in touch.