How Many Jobs Did Our Job Shop Fill? - Monitoring Issues and How to Resolve Them

1. How Many Jobs Did Our Job Shop Fill? - Monitoring Issues and How to Resolve Them Job Zone – University of Birmingham Guild Dawn Roberts & Jim Reali NASES Conference July 2011

2. NASES Conference Aims of this session…. • To identify the benefits of stats monitoring in a Job Shop environment • Demonstrate the experience of the Job Zone • Identify potential issues • Help to identify how we could use stats effectively in our services

3. NASES Conference Benefits? • What Do You Think? • Identify the potential benefits of monitoring your service • Assess success of service • Spot trends in industries, job types, hours, average wage • Demonstrate value and impact of service to management/your institution • Providing information for institutional reports • Solid source of marketing information • Secure future funding/resources

4. NASES Conference Job Zone Case Study – Monitoring the Jobshop 2010-2011 • Why Did We Start Monitoring in Detail This Year? • Reasons as already identified • University Employability Strategy • Resources for service being ‘streamlined’ • What Did We Decide To Monitor? • Continued traditional stats counting to monitor usage of service • How many students Found Employment • How much students earned from their employment • How many hours they were working • Feedback from students engaged in Job Zone activities • Measuring impact of Job Zone activities on students’ employability

5. NASES Conference Job Zone Case Study – Monitoring the Jobshop 2010-2011 • How Did We Attempt to Tackle the Challenge? • Simple counting sheets • Number of student enquiries • Numbers of students attending events (e.g. Jobs Fairs) • Employer correspondence • Database • Numbers of students registering for service • Web hits • Contacting employers at the point of closure of vacancy • Set of questions to go through • Feedback from students • At the point of the activity • And at the end of the term, to help measure any impact • A very big spreadsheet….

6. NASES Conference The Monitoring Spreadsheet

7. NASES Conference The Monitoring Spreadsheet

8. NASES Conference What We Found Out…. • Our students: • Earn an average of £7.97 per hour • Work an average of just under 11 hours per week in term time • And they work just over 28 hours per week in vacations • Stats • Over 400 students received support from our workshops , CV checks, or one-to-ones and a further 500 came in to speak to Job Zone staff • Over 3,100 students newly registered for the Job Zone website • 5,500 students visited our Jobs Fairs • 220+ followers on Facebook and Twitter

9. NASES Conference The ‘Impact’ we had on Student Employability…. • Students seeking additional employability support • Largest number were students from the College of Social Sciences • 63% were undergraduates (so 37% postgraduates – more using our services this year) • 51% were non-EU international students • 24% of students who responded to CV drop-in follow-up questionnaires had found work since their drop-in • 3.1 out of 5 average student satisfaction rating from Job Zone services • More students who had completed a Job Zone activity were likely to recommend the service to a friend than not • But…. Of the students who responded to follow-up surveys, the majority disagreed that they felt more confident

10. NASES Conference The ‘Impact’ we had on Student Employment …. • Employment Results • 475 vacancy advertisements • 4998 actual vacancies • Worked with 235 employers • Rated 8.9 out of 10 for service by employers • Got 70.5% response rate from our employers • Over 1200 of our students definitely secured a job through the Job Zone (1 in 4 of those we advertised) • Over £1066, 000 in wages earned by our students through their part-time work in this academic year

11. NASES Conference Barriers & Risks • Working in groups…. • Identify the potential barriers and risks associated with monitoring your service • Suggestions on how to over come these • Time • Staffing/resources • Difficulty chasing people for feedback (higher phone bills!) • Alienating employers and students with your requests for feedback • Harder for employers with large number of vacancies to give results • Risk of more time spent on monitoring than delivering service! • Methods for capturing the data – IT technology/accuracy

12. NASES Conference Barriers & Risks • Suggestions on how to over come barriers and risks… • Follow up constructive feedback • Give clear case to management about resources required • Agree realistic level of monitoring that can be achieved and agree priorities • Snapshot stats and monitoring – e.g. 1 week a term • Use survey websites – find out what is out there that you can use • Work with NASES to ensure our database providers can develop the reporting functions we need for the future

13. NASES Conference Next Steps… • Fine tune the spreadsheet • We will make a blank version available for use by NASES members • Work on developing our database so that we can: • ‘Baseline’ our students’ skills at the point of registration • Get the database to do some of the recording for us • Continue to ‘refine’ what we collect in line with our resources and the value of the information • Publicise Our Results • Press releases • Impact Report 2011 • Convince management/University of our value • Use evidence to build on relationships • Use evidence for future funding bids

14. Marketing & Communications Discussion & Questions