Summary Overview:

• On April 29th, UNLV will host its 5th annual Datapalooza – an event that brings together faculty, staff, and administration for a deep dive into institutional data resources (including Lightcast), and guidance on using it effectively to improve student outcomes.

• This year’s event focuses on key metrics relevant for regional accreditation, specifically UNLV’s Year Seven Evaluation of Institutional Effectiveness through the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities (NWCCU). The team of peer evaluators commended UNLV on its efforts to develop a robust data infrastructure that supports evidence-based decision making.

• Below is an excerpt from a recent issue of The Datapalooza Bulletin, where UNLV shares – in their own words – how Lightcast data unlocks insight into program-to-market alignment and alumni career outcomes.

• Read on to learn how UNLV promotes and leverages this data to inform new program proposals, accreditation and program review, student recruitment, workforce-aligned curriculum redesign, and alumni outcome assessments.

THE DATAPALOOZA BULLETIN

Lightcast: Building a Future-Ready Workforce

Shining a Light on Student Outcomes and Career Data

If you’ve ever felt at a loss to predict enrollment demand for a proposed new degree program, assess outcomes of your existing programs, or document the specific career trajectories of your program’s graduates, you’re not alone. Whether developing recruitment messaging that promotes your graduates’ career successes, drafting new program proposals, or preparing for accreditation or program review, finding the data you need to tackle these tasks can be daunting.

Our definition of student success focuses on academic outcomes like retention, smooth degree progression, and timely completion, as well as preparedness for success in the labor force. We have a lot of tools to assess course, program, and student outcomes, but for career success, it’s important to have accurate, up-to-date, regionally and nationally relevant data. Getting this data has been a challenge – until UNLV partnered with Lightcast (formerly Emsi/Burning Glass) to provide us with timely workforce data and indicators of our students’ career pathways after leaving UNLV.

Getting this data has been a challenge – until UNLV partnered with Lightcast to provide us with timely workforce data and indicators of our students’ career pathways after leaving UNLV.

In this edition of the Datapalooza Bulletin, we highlight UNLV’s partnership with Lightcast and how this data can be useful to you in a myriad of ways. Lightcast offers a suite of tools to help higher education institutions better understand the market for their degree programs, the workforce demand for their graduates, and the real-life career paths of their alumni.

UNLV currently subscribes to two Lightcast products to provide data- informed guidance to departments for new program proposals, accreditation and program review, student recruitment, workforce-aligned curriculum redesign, and alumni outcome assessments. Our goal is to make it easy for you to request guidance and access the data you need to promote program excellence, student success, and positive alumni workforce outcomes, so read on for the information you need to make Lightcast data work for you.

Cheers,

• Kate Korgan, Senior Vice Provost for Academic Affairs

• Skip Crooker, Vice Provost for Decision Support

• Laurel Pritchard, Assistant Vice Provost for Academic Initiatives and Data

Key Resource: Lightcast Analyst

Lightcast Analyst aggregates data from a wide range of sources to provide a comprehensive view of a program’s competitive market position, as well as the job market for graduates from that program.

Data sources include reports from government agencies, such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. Census, and the National Center for Education Statistics, as well as job posting data from more than 160,000 online sources. Lightcast Analyst then applies the Lightcast Occupation Taxonomy and the Lightcast Open Skills Library to link academic programs to the occupations graduates are most likely to enter and the skills needed for those occupations. A flexible set of filters allows for reports that are customizable by program CIP Code, degree level (bachelor’s, master’s, doctoral), region, comparator institutions, higher ed sector (public vs. private), and program modality (in-person vs. distance/online). Lightcast Analyst reports have numerous, flexible formats to allow departments to explore questions like:

• How many jobs are available in our region for a particular degree?

• How does employer demand for specific skills addressed in our degree programs compare with job applicants’ endorsement that they have those skills?

• Who are the top regional competitor institutions for a particular degree program, and are their programs online or in-person?

Figure 1: Comparison of mentions of specialized skills related to cybersecurity in job postings vs. mentions of the same skills in online professional profiles.

Key Resource: Lightcast Alumni Pathways

Lightcast Alumni Pathways combines data provided by UNLV about our degree completers with publicly available data about those individuals’ post-UNLV employment and education outcomes. Lightcast does this by scraping social media profiles and other sites where people post their resumes and career information to create over 130 million unique career profiles in the US. Lightcast then matches our alumni, based on data we provide, with the career profiles, which are matched to our alumni profiles on at least three variables (usually full name, UNLV as the degree-granting institution, and the name of the degree program from which the individual graduated).

The matched profiles are aggregated and anonymized, then combined with up-to-date labor market data to provide valuable insights about where our alumni are going and what they are doing after graduation. For example, Alumni Pathways reports can tell us what percentage of program alumni with matched profiles are working “in-field” vs. “out-of-field” or provide an estimated salary of matched alumni from a specified range of completion years. We can also see whether alumni are staying in our region or moving farther afield, as well as where they are pursuing graduate and professional education, if not at UNLV.

Special thanks to UNLV for allowing us to share this excerpt from their Datapalooza Bulletin! To learn more about the Lightcast solutions mentioned in this article, please contact us. We’ll follow up soon to help you explore how this data can drive impact at your institution.