The University of New South Wales (UNSW) has just over 63,000 students across seven different faculties providing world-class tertiary education. UNSW Business School is the number one ranked Business School in Australia and is voted as having the most employable students at the AFR Top100 Future Leaders Awards for the last 4 years.
In 2021, the decision was made to extend the use of CSM to the Career Accelerator Team and make CSM a one-stop-shop for all things careers within UNSW Business School. The Career Accelerator Team had fully transitioned over to CSM by 2022 and are now using many of the different functions within CSM to manage its work integrated learning (WIL) programs.
Transitioning the Career Accelerator Team to CSM
CSM has been used at the Australian Graduate School of Management (AGSM) at UNSW Business School for several years to manage the support and career development for MBA Students. Prior to 2021, the Career Accelerator Team were managing their career development learning programs, events, and WIL programs in a range of different platforms and spreadsheets. They were using manual processes which made it difficult for tracking and reporting on student engagement.
The Career Accelerator Team run over 10 different WIL programs across both undergraduate and postgraduate cohorts. This includes Sydney based and global opportunities, team-based programs, traditional internship programs and consulting projects which vary in terms of requirements and complexities to manage. In 2021, the Business School launched a newly designed Bachelor of Commerce degree which has guaranteed WIL, resulting in a large increase in WIL uptake.
“We needed a system like CSM to better manage the scaling of our WIL programs, while moving away from old manual processes and systems, one that could integrate with data from our student information system and support more sophisticated reporting,” said Lisa Hunter-Smith, Operations and Learning Support Manager, UNSW Business School.
Work Integrated Learning (WIL) in the Career Accelerator Team
The Business School uses a variety of functions within CSM to manage WIL. “Since we implemented CSM, we have seen a 65 percent increase in enrolments into internship courses across both undergraduate and postgraduate cohorts, and a 400 percent increase in applications from students,” said Joshua Munoz, Senior Industry Engagement Officer, UNSW Career Accelerator Engagement Team.
UNSW has streamlined outreach for both students and industry partners with various automated messages, enabling the team to move away from managing email campaigns outside of the system without reporting and tracking. Now, all campaigns are tracked within CSM, serving as an important function for batch email and bulk email campaigns with templates, customisation, and pre-populated information.
“You can brand the emails and get banners and things like that into the email when you're sending them out through the CSM. But to be honest, it just makes my life a lot easier being able to click one button in the system instead of going to an Excel spreadsheet, doing a mail merge through Word document, etc.,” said Munoz. “The campaign manager makes it much easier for me to not only bulk email everybody, but then actually organise and simplify all that information that comes back from our employer.”
Custom dashboards and reporting
In addition to utilising campaign manager, UNSW has been using CSM’s custom dashboards and reporting functions which has “been enhancing our ability to upscale,” said Munoz. Students apply for an internship within CSM which provides us with “valuable data and insight.” This includes data on partner information, what industry they’re in, the duration of the internship, when the internship was advertised, how many students applied, and the number of students the internship was offered to.
The Business School also now has data on a student’s degree, specialisation, residency status, how many opportunities they’ve applied to and when they applied for them. This information is helpful as it “paints a much clearer picture” of what organisations can expect when they’re signing up for this program and offers insights into engagement with their job postings.
It's quite a nice packaging of information. And then from this report, we've been able to create dashboards within CSM to visualise this data that the report collects,” said Munoz. “This information is useful as it allows us to easily identify what industries are most popular with our students and also where we should focus our efforts when we're building new relationships with organisations that want to partner with UNSW.”
When it comes to employer relations, UNSW can provide accurate data to employers on how many, and the type of students interested in an opportunity.
Conclusion
UNSW Business School has made significant strides in enhancing its career development and WIL programs through the implementation of the CSM. This transition has led to a substantial increase in student engagement, WIL program enrollments, and industry outreach.
The decision to extend the use of CSM to the Career Accelerator Team has proven to be a good move, streamlining the management of various programs, and providing valuable insights through custom dashboards and reporting functions. The integration of CSM has not only simplified processes for the Career Accelerator Team but has also strengthened their ability to provide accurate data to industry partners.
