Using Labor Market Insight to Build a Competitive Business Program
3 steps to help you stand out in a crowded market & equip graduates for career success
Standing out from the crowd
As a business department or college operating in a crowded and fiercely competitive market, the need to differentiate your offerings from your competitors’ is vital. But how can you stand out from the crowd when so many business programs look so similar, at least on the surface?
That’s where reliable data on alumni career pathways and in-demand skills can make all the difference.
Lightcast is proud to work with hundreds of business programs all around the world to provide this insight. Below, we’ll outline a 3-step process for leveraging this data – students’ career outcomes and employers’ skill demand – to assess your programs' effectiveness, refine your offerings, and engage prospective learners with concrete evidence of your unique value.
The sample data on this page is an illustration of what's available. To connect with a Lightcast specialist and see data specific to your region, programs, and alumni, reach out.
Understand the jobs your programs relate to and the roles your graduates fill.
Identify key in-demand skills for relevant career pathways and incorporate those skills into your offerings.
Differentiate your programs with evidence of alumni success and curricula aligned to in-demand skills in your region.
Step 1: Understand Relevant Jobs
Which jobs do your graduates go on to fill after graduating? What employers do they work for? And what other roles could they fill, based on the job market and their educational background?
By answering these questions, you can identify the education-to-employment connections that are unique to your programs and alumni. This is the first step in both evaluating program effectiveness, and building a differentiated value proposition to stand out in a crowded business education market.
To illustrate, the chart below uses anonymized data from an International MBA program. The first tab uses our Professional Profile Data to show the job titles their graduates have. The second tab uses the same dataset to show which companies they are working for. The third tab uses Lightcast Job Postings Analytics to show a list of in-demand jobs, based on real employer job postings, that graduates from this course could pursue.
Step 2: Identify In-Demand Skills
Now that we’ve identified the most relevant employers and jobs for our business offerings – based on alumni career outcomes and employer hiring demand – we’re ready to ask: What are the emerging, in-demand skills employers value most when hiring for those roles?
The chart below illustrates how Lightcast data makes it easy to find your answer. Click through each tab to view the top Common, Specialized, and Software skills for job opportunities relevant to this example MBA program. Under each tab, skills are further sorted into four groups based on market trends:
- •
Rapidly Growing - Increasing in demand significantly faster than the market as a whole.
- •
Growing - Generally outpacing the market but not as significantly as the first group.
- •
Stable - The pace of demand growth is in line with the overall market.
- •
Lagging - Demand growth may still be positive, but is lower than the market as a whole.
Step 3: Differentiate Your Programs
Time to put it all together. Having clarified the career connections that are unique to your programs, and having validated or revised your programs to ensure that they teach the most valuable skills for those jobs, you’re ready to amplify this alignment as a way to stand out to prospective students.
For an example of how effective this can be, check out our case study and on-demand webinar with Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. You’ll see how Gies highlights career pathways and in-demand skills in their promotional materials, including videos and webinars that articulate the key market-aligned skills taught in their graduate certificates.
