Enabling Career-Readiness from Day One

Harrisburg University of Science and Technology, located in Pennsylvania’s capital city, is a private, non-profit, STEM-focused institution known for its strong ties to industry and commitment to career preparation. With a strong presence of first-generation and nontraditional learners among the student body, the university prioritizes preparing students for career success.

To scale its career advising capabilities and ensure students have access to relevant labor market insights, Harrisburg University recently implemented Lightcast’s Career Coach platform. In the Q&A below, Rebekah Harriger (Sr. Director of Career Services & Experiential Learning) shares how the tool has helped Harrisburg extend the accessibility and impact of their career advising services, while also helping students prepare to succeed in a fast-changing job market.

Context and Outcomes:

What was the goal you hoped to accomplish and why did you land on Career Coach as the right solution?

We wanted a tool that we could provide to prospective students (and current students) that would showcase our programs alongside relevant labor market data, including the top skills employers in our region are seeking. We also wanted to scale our career coaching services to boost accessibility for students and the Career Coach platform aligned with that goal.

Are you seeing the outcomes you were hoping to see with Career Coach?  How are you measuring success?

Our goal was to scale our services to impact more students, so we measure that mostly in terms of the number of individuals who engage with the platform. So far, we’re achieving our goal – within the first six months of deploying Career Coach, we’ve seen over 1,000 unique users take advantage of the platform.

Best practices:

Could you tell us more about how you’ve implemented Career Coach?  What would you say are the keys to a successful roll out of Career Coach and driving engagement with the tool?

We have integrated Career Coach into all our professional development seminar courses that students take each year while enrolled. 

We have also partnered with admissions to ensure incoming learners have equitable and reliable access to salary information and the skills that are required for STEM career pathways. Through this partnership, Career Coach has been implemented and shared in our admissions presentations and orientations. 

Parents have given extremely positive feedback at admissions events when shown Career Coach. They love to know what their learner can do with the education they are receiving from Harrisburg U. and learn about the salaries that are associated with each of those career paths.  

Overall, the main keys to success have been our intentionality to embed Career Coach into our courses, as well as creating comprehensive training sessions for faculty, staff, and students. 

Key features:

What are the top 3 features or capabilities of Career Coach that are most valuable to you? 

The top 3 features that have been most valuable have been:

1. Employment data based on users’ career interests, showcasing top employers and job titles for their chosen field.

2. Live, updated job postings that are specific to our region.

3. Skills employers are asking for. These have been instrumental for students as they tailor their internship and job applications, and update their professional profiles to showcase their skills in alignment with what employers are seeking.

Next steps:

What’s next? Do you have plans for how to expand use of Career Coach or Lightcast data in the future?

We plan to continue leveraging Career Coach in our professional development seminar courses, but also hope to expand on how we use it to help students clarify skills gaps and apply for jobs – specifically, by helping them leverage the skills information to optimize their resume/CV and professional profiles, and to identify where they need to upskill or take additional courses so they can be competitive in the job market.