As mentors, we want to incorporate purpose-driven advising practices into the student experience beginning in the first semester on campus. We have opportunities to proactively facilitate career development by guiding our students in effective goal setting, planning, and personal/professional development strategies. One of those strategies is the basic KPI model for their goals.
Action Items for Advising
- Practice using KPIs in your personal goals to provide examples when helping students
- Practice explaining the KPI Table with students first examples
- Review and research the top skills and titles related to the majors you advise
What is a KPI
The term comes from business as the Key Performance Indicators allow teams to evaluate their performance on sales, marketing, and business factors. We can recalibrate the KPI model to apply to the personal, academic, and professional lives of students.
Benefits of Guiding Strategic Goal Setting
Here is what our community said about the benefits for stronger goal setting. The responses focused on a sense of power and confidence-building for students.
We also recognized that Communication and Critical Thinking remain top skills for most job positions. Setting, implementing, and following through on personal and academic goals now will help students in their professional lives in the future.
Human-centered skills like Strategic Thinking show up frequently on job descriptions. We help our students build this keystone skill for success across industries and positions when helping them communicate their goals.
Our advisors identified several WHATs and HOWs to guide students towards their dreams.
During the Skill Session, we talked through several examples of guiding better goals. One example was “Hayley wants to find a good job when she graduates.”
WHATs
HOWs
Connect with Career Readiness
Schedule an appointment before Spring Break
Attend the Career Fair and Alumni Panel events
Research Skills, Interests, and Career Tracks
Read 2 job descriptions each morning related to their general field
Complete career inventories and assessments through Career Readiness
Arrange Internships
Talk with professors in their major and minor departments about opportunities
Create a profile in Handshake and set up alerts for opportunities
Our skill session included over 70 interactions and 13 Active Participants. 15 Advisors joined the learning session to build their purpose-driven advising skill. Check out all our responses.
