Solutions for Educators

Eighty percent of graduating seniors say that finding a good job is their top reason for going to college – and for colleges and their high school partners, the pressure is on to deliver. Generalized academic counseling is no longer enough, but efforts to significantly beef up the college-to-career pipeline have been hampered by the lack of timely and cost-effective tools for reading and reporting on the skills, certifications, and technologies currently in demand and for translating that information into actionable intelligence for program design, career guidance, and job placement.

Burning Glass addresses this gap by delivering web-based analytical solutions that help K-12 and post-secondary education institutions capitalize on real-time labor market information to answer these critical questions and more:

Program Design, Expansion, and Evaluation

• Which degrees, program majors, and occupational certifications are in greatest demand?
• How aligned are our programs to current employer job and skill demands?
• What do we need to do to “retool” our traditional programs to reflect the skills in demand today?
• What new targets of opportunity are provided by emerging industries such as green and what are the associated skills in highest demand?
• Are there new occupational and skill demands emerging in our current locations that provide targets of opportunity for program expansion?
• What are the top locations with demand for our occupational programs?

Career Guidance and Placement

• What are the “best bet” programs for entering students when their skills and interests are balanced again current labor market demand?
• What education and employment paths have successful candidates taken to secure jobs in the careers of interest to my students?
• What gaps do older non-traditional students need to fill to get a job and what additional course work or certifications should they pursue?

Facilitating Partnerships with Employers

• Based on the skills they are seeking, which employers can we target to develop high-value internship experiences and help more of our graduates secure employment?
• Which employers and which “starter jobs” should we target for our new graduates?
• Based on the skills and credentials most in demand, what internship experiences and additional course work should students pursue to bolster their chances for employment?

The pace of change in the job market is faster than ever before and continues to accelerate. Many factors, including a volatile global economy, evolving technology, and an increased concern with the environment, have conspired to create a job market that is vastly different from what it was 15 years ago… or even 15 months ago. It is no longer possible to take it for granted that traditional programs adequately prepare students for the job market or that program graduates will readily find promising in-field employment.

Burning Glass provides a comprehensive set of solutions that capitalize on real-time job market information to help you align your programs to actual employer demand and deliver state-of-the-art career guidance and job placement services to students at a cost that fits your budget.

Our solutions help you:

Align program curricula with actual employer demand – One measure of a successful program is how well it positions students for immediate employment. Our solutions provide you with up-to-the-minute intelligence on the skills and knowledge that local employers are looking for, giving you the opportunity to implement programs which reflect current employer demands and patterns of placement rather than historic conditions or conventional approaches.

Evaluate existing programs – In the long-term, program success can be measured by tracking the careers of program graduates. Unfortunately, that information does little to improve the employment outcomes of your current students. Our solutions provide a measuring stick for your programs right now, demonstrating if your curricula are properly targeted and if not, giving you the opportunity to make the modifications necessary to position your students for immediate employment and long-term success. This is particularly valuable in these budget-conscious times, because it is often more cost effective to retool an existing program than to design and implement a brand new program.

Analyze the demands of emerging industries – As difficult as it may be to stay on top of current technology trends across the board, it can be particularly challenging to assess the demands of emerging occupations, industries, and sectors – whether the green economy, advanced manufacturing, health technology, or others. Because Burning Glass mines a database of several million current job listings, it can highlight fast-growing skills and technologies, show which industries and occupations have greatest demand for these, identify certification requirements, and track how those skill demands correlate with demand for other knowledge sets – both emerging and conventional. With this real-time awareness in hand, you can develop programs designed to prepare students for jobs in these emerging sectors. Just as importantly, since emerging sector occupations often prove to resemble those in conventional industry, Burning Glass can help you identify how to adapt existing programs to prepare graduates for emerging opportunities.

Identify opportunities for program expansion – With shifts in hiring patterns comes increased demand for those programs that provide training for high growth occupations. Burning Glass provides the intelligence you need to target emerging training and certification needs, enabling your institution to develop and expand offerings that are aligned with the labor market. Similarly, as institutions expand their campus or web-based footprints, Burning Glass enables them to select those areas where demand is best aligned with program offerings.

Burning Glass enables you to answer these questions and more through our web-based analytical tool, Labor/Insight™. Labor/Insight is an online application that allows users to analyze, trend and compare jobs data on a real-time basis. It is specifically designed to enable educators and policy-level users to access the underlying real-time jobs file in order to generate actionable reports summarizing employment trends.

You would need a crystal ball in order to guarantee students a direct path from your program to a successful and personally fulfilling career. The variables are many: a combination of external obstacles (economic highs and lows, shrinking industries, changing technologies) and each individual’s unique mix of aptitude, interests, and motivation. A volatile job market also presents a challenge, as some of the truisms of career counseling are no longer quite so true, the many newly qualified lawyers now swelling the ranks of the unemployed representing just one example among many.

But the ability to foretell the future of your students is not just the stuff of fairy tales. Using Burning Glass’s advanced artificial intelligence technology, which has learned from the real-world career transitions made by tens of millions of actual job seekers, you can provide students and alumni with a clear view of all their possible career paths and you can support them through the full range of steps they need to take to reach their career goals – from resume building to job matching.

In addition, our solutions help you support adult learners and displaced workers as they consider the steps needed to advance their careers or transition to new opportunities. By providing a read on local hiring trends and by tracking labor market demand for the specific degrees and certifications they may be considering, Burning Glass helps these populations evaluate programs, select course options, and place into jobs.

Our solutions show students:

What’s in demand – Based on our detailed intelligence on real-time hiring trends, we can show students which occupations are in greatest demand at various degree levels, which industries and sectors are showing the greatest promise, what jobs pay the best salaries, and even who’s hiring. In this way, they can make program and course selections based upon immediate opportunities for employment.

The qualifications they need to get the jobs they want – Whether it be for an entry- or executive-level position, our solutions highlight the credentials (education, experience, skills) needed to secure these positions. Similarly, students can see which jobs, industries, and employers are hiring right now for people with specific degrees and certifications so that they can see the kinds of opportunities they may be qualified for upon program completion.

The possible steps along the path to a career goal – Leveraging our technology’s unique knowledge of actual patterns of job-to-job transition, we show students the many different career moves of real people who have eventually achieved a particular career goal.

Where the first step in their career path could lead – Our solutions provide students with a glimpse of the future, starting from any job of interest and showing them the roles real people eventually transitioned into.

Where they have gaps and what they can do about them – Our technology understands individual skills and other qualifications as well as the requirements of any job, including your students’ ultimate career goals. By comparing one against the other, our solutions conduct gap analysis and share the results with your students, including the local programs they could attend and internship experiences they could pursue to make themselves more attractive candidates.

Relevant job leads and build targeted resumes – Our Focus/Career™ job matching application brings together a range of resources to support your students and alumni through all phases of job placement – from writing a detailed resume based on a detailed, predictively-generated interview that does not require users to write to ongoing job matches based not on keywords but on a comparison of each user’s unique experiences and skills and past patterns of placement. Underlying Focus/Career is a database of over seven million current job listings, updated daily from over 15,000 sources. When put together, this means that your students not only have access to the world’s most comprehensive database of jobs but they also have the tools they need to find them.

To be effective in preparing students for successful careers, educational programs need to be grounded in an awareness of the requirements and work activities of real-world jobs. And there can be no better source for such bottom line intelligence than the employers themselves who hire into these positions.

Employer partnerships not only afford vital feedback for program design, evaluation, and alignment but they also represent powerful channels for facilitating placements and for sourcing internships and other practical experience. But knowing which employers to reach out to is not always easy. Not so long ago, there might have been a handful of large employers who would hire the majority of your graduates. In today’s economy, hiring is often more fragmented, with each employer hiring a few graduates or accepting only a few interns each year. The Internet makes it easy to find openings, with hundreds of jobs listed on dozens of job boards, but it provides quantity, rather than quality. How to sort through all that information to find the best fit for an individual’s qualifications and career plan? Which positions utilize the skills and knowledge taught in your program? Which employers hire entry-level candidates?

By applying the power of artificial intelligence, Burning Glass converts the noise of Internet job listings into actionable intelligence you can use to target employers and thereby facilitate the placements and internships that support students in both their short- and long-term career goals. Our Labor/Insight™ web-based analytical platform helps you:

Identify employers for targeted outreach – On a local, state, or national basis, our solutions help you search for employers as well as opportunities using criteria that you specify. Once you learn who has a history of hiring individuals like your students or graduates, you can reach out to them in the hopes of developing a relationship that is an ongoing source of jobs and internships for multiple individuals.

Research specific employers to find out exactly what they need – Your list of employers who have previously offered jobs or internships to your students is worth its weight in gold. Leverage that information to the max by keeping track of the skills and other qualifications they are advertising for – doing so will give you the opportunity to reach out to them regarding specific individuals or the program overall with specific reference to your ability to supply candidates with the skills they need.

Identify the most relevant opportunities – Our solutions not only match people with jobs, they match them with opportunities that fit their unique portfolio of education, experience, and skill, predicting who is best suited for a position by looking for job seekers whose qualifications and career path most closely resemble those of other individuals who previously placed successfully into similar jobs across millions of observations. Matches are scored based upon the statistical likelihood that a given job could be the next job for a given job seeker, not on the percentage of keywords that overlap.

Identify jobs that require the skills taught by your program – Job titles can be misleading and often do little to describe the specific responsibilities and requirements of a given position. Our solutions give you the ability to identify jobs based on the skills and knowledge that are the focus of your program, giving you the ability to get under the surface of Internet job listings to find the best targets for your students and graduates.