The journey from education to employment isn’t always straightforward.
Students have a different path based on their unique aspirations, interests, and skills.
How can we turn these aspirations into actionable steps?
Introducing Career Coach, a Microsoft Teams for Education app powered by LinkedIn, that
provides personalized guidance for higher education students to navigate their career
journey.
With Career Coach, institutions can help students discover their career path, grow real-world
skills, and build their network as they make progress towards their goals.
From their first year to graduation, every step forward in a student’s career journey
starts by understanding where they are now.
Students can set up a profile that personalizes their experience in Career Coach.
First, students select their field of study and year in school.
And they can share whether they have a LinkedIn account already.
Then, students upload a resume or transcript, and Career Coach uses AI to help them identify
skills they’ve gained from past work and learning experiences.
If they don’t have their documents ready, they can come back to it.
Students also have the choice to add skills they feel they have from a list of skills
companies need most, according to LinkedIn.
Then they can select in-demand skills they are interested in learning as well.
Next, students can go to their personal dashboard – a single page that helps them understand
where they are now and what they want to do next in their career journey.
The Dashboard is organized by career-related goals and activities for students to learn,
reflect, connect, and build confidence.
Students can set and refine goals and choose activities based on where they are in their
personal career journey.
They can track completion of their activities here, too.
With Career Coach, students can discover volunteer opportunities, internships, co-ops, or campus
experiences to prepare them to reach their career goals.
Each educational institution can include links to their own unique student programs and offerings.
Students may wonder what their career options are and the top skills they need.
Career Coach shows students different careers based on alumni insights from LinkedIn.
They can get inspired by browsing the careers that align with their skills and interests
from their profile.
And they can focus their career search by selecting filters based on skills, field of
study, industries, companies, and locations that interest them.
Then, they can select the careers they want to learn more about.
This lets students view top skills, companies, and locations of alumni who have this career
today.
Students build more confidence as they explore career options and learn how they can grow
their skills and connect with alumni to support their journey.
Students can keep track of skills and careers they like by saving them.
This automatically adds the top skills for this career to their profile.
A student's profile is organized by skills they have and skills they're interested in
learning.
They can review skills that were added from careers they saved.
And students can set and refine these skills and interests on their profile any time.
Career Coach helps students grow real-world skills.
Students can select a skill and find relevant learning opportunities from their educational
institution, LinkedIn, and Microsoft.
Anytime students want to explore learning opportunities, they can browse for featured
topics and search for courses across different catalogs in Career Coach.
Integrated catalogs include courses from their educational institution and content from Microsoft
Learn, Microsoft 365 Training, Microsoft Certifications, and LinkedIn Learning.
A separate license for LinkedIn Learning is required to access more than 16,000 courses.
This empowers students to decide which learning opportunities to pursue both inside and outside
the classroom.
As students discover their career path, Career Coach helps them build a network of peers,
advisors, and alumni who can help inspire and support them along the way.
Using a LinkedIn account in Career Coach allows students to privately view alumni profiles.
This feature is unique to Career Coach and helps students take note of experiences they’d
l like to target in their career journey.
Plus, since Career Coach is integrated with Teams, students have access to continuous
communication with their professors and peers.
Career Services can even use Microsoft Teams for advising appointments, career fairs, and
connecting students with employers.
To help higher education institutions integrate Career Coach, there are best practices and
career-related lesson plans to empower educators and staff and facilitate student engagement.
Graduation is an exciting opportunity for students to feel confident about their career
options, prepared for their future, and inspired to continue their career journey.
Career Coach provides higher education institutions with insight to enhance the student experience,
improve student success, and drive employment outcomes.