Do you offer your alumni career services?
If not, it may be time to start. By providing alumni career services, you’ll meet alumni expectations, raise engagement, and build stronger alumni relations. And with the right strategies and tools, you can meet the needs of a multi-generational workforce.
Learn how to support your multi-generational alumni network with the career services they all want.
What are alumni career services?
Alumni career services are any services offered to help alumni with their career development.
This is common in academic alumni associations, where graduates receive support and resources to help them pursue their career goals or make career changes. But it’s gaining popularity with corporate alumni programs, too.
How will my organization benefit from offering these services?
Let’s address why employees leave in the first place. Life circumstances, changes in the job market, and personal reasons are sometimes behind the decision to leave. However, when good employees leave, it’s often to pursue growth opportunities or seek better compensation for their work.
Reasons like these give you clues as to how to help their future careers. Employers often miss the mark and don’t give employees what they’re looking for in a work environment or job role. But it’s never too late for your business to build stronger connections with your former employees.
Alumni career services are a great way to do this. By offering alumni these services, you’ll benefit in the following ways:
Higher alumni engagement
By offering alumni services that help with their career goals, you boost engagement with your alumni program.
Mentorship opportunities
Career support services include mentorship opportunities, where senior alumni can mentor junior alumni. But with a good mentorship program in place, your current employees can also benefit from your alumni’s experience and expertise.
Better odds of securing boomerang employees
When your alumni see that you’re invested in helping their future growth, they may wish to return to the company. If you post information about job vacancies in your alumni program, they will feel confident enough to apply.
Boomerang employees can save you thousands on recruiting to fill important positions like succession posts.
Understanding the multigenerational workforce
To offer the best alumni career help and guidance, you need to understand the multigenerational workforce. Your alumni network will usually include up to four generations, specifically Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z. However, most of your alumni will likely come from the Gen X and Millennial generations.
These generations all have different needs from the alumni program. Do you want to create a more inclusive alumni network where every generation feels valued? Our guide to engaging alumni across generations with tips for inclusive programming will help.
Boomers & Gen X
The Boomers are the generation born between 1946 and 1964. Your senior alumni will have been born in the later years of this generation. These are typically your employees who have retired.
Gen X, the generation that followed the Boomers, are people who were born between 1965 and 1980.
Compared to your other alumni, these two generations are the best qualified to provide career resources, such as mentorship. They have many years of experience to draw on when helping their peers reach their career goals.
What to offer them
Your older alumni may be looking for more flexible retirement options. Keep them active within your organization through leadership and mentorship opportunities.
They could help manage the alumni program or related programs at your organization, or they can fulfill other roles at the company. An example is appointing a senior alum as in-house counsel for your law firm. Read our guide to the benefits of law firm alumni networks to learn more.
Millennials & Gen Z
Millennials are the generation born between 1981 and 1996, while Gen Z are those born between 1997 and 2012. You might not have many Gen Z alumni, and if you do, they will be from the earliest years of that generation.
Of all your alumni, these two generations, and especially Gen Z, are the most likely to need a career boost with mentorship.
What to offer them
Your younger alumni will appreciate uplifting opportunities such as upskilling, continuous learning, purpose-driven career-growth opportunities, and networking. They can benefit the most from the knowledge and expertise of the older generations.
Career development initiatives for multi-generational alumni
Alumni career services are among the top expectations corporate alumni have for their membership benefits.
But is it really possible to provide career development to multi-generational alumni without separate platforms for each? Yes, it is.
By following our guidelines for the different generations listed above, you’ll target the needs of each generation. But by combining them on one platform, you can meet all their needs at once. And Aluminate for Enterprise, the world’s most customizable corporate community platform, is the obvious choice.
A platform for career service awareness
The digital dashboard is the core of the Aluminate community builder. It’s what every alum will see first, and it’s the perfect place to post career growth information and any job postings they may be interested in within your organization.
Here they can explore what’s on offer with ease, and every generation will enjoy the user-friendly interface.
A digital library of continuous learning and career growth resources
Every member will see the news, career resources, and support most relevant to them when they log into the digital dashboard. From here, job seekers can navigate to the resources they need the most.
Allow your multigenerational alumni to assist each other in their future career journeys with our Groups module. This lets you segment your alumni community into sub-communities.
By creating groups according to interests and goals, you’ll enable the different generations to interact naturally.
A convenient meeting place for mentors and mentees
Our mentor-mentee matching feature lets you match up the best mentors with mentees without the hassle. They can reach out to each other and take advantage of your learning materials and other online resources, all in one convenient place.
This one feature alone will meet the needs of multiple generations. It helps senior alumni remain active in, feel valued by, and stay connected to your community. Meanwhile, junior recent alumni will feel their needs are understood and met.
The role of alumni networks in career services
What is the role of the alumni network in offering your alumni career services? The truth is that it fulfills several roles.
You can use your alumni network to increase awareness of your career-building resources, encourage collaboration, and facilitate mentorship. You can also use it to highlight job postings and promote career-building events.
And Aluminate for Enterprise has all the tools you need to fulfill all of these roles.
Using technology to build engagement through learning resources
When you offer your alumni career services as part of their alumni benefits, you raise engagement too.
But if you want to offer alumni help with their career goals in a digital world, you need engaging technology. The Aluminate platform can double as a digital library of career advancement resources.
Your choice of web applications, software, and online resources can also make or break your alumni engagement and career resource efforts.
Read our guide on using technology to engage your alumni to learn more.
Empower your alumni network with Aluminate for Enterprise
It’s never too late to assist your employees in realizing their career goals, even when they no longer work for you.
With alumni career services, you can nurture your alumni network’s career growth, all the while building a better, stronger community. It all starts with the right online community software, Aluminate for Enterprise.
Request your demo today.
