Lightcast for Business Schools
3-Steps to Using Labour Market Insights to Stand Out from Your Competitors
Standing out from the crowd
As a business school operating in a crowded and fiercely competitive market, the need to differentiate your institution your competitors is vital. But how can you stand out from the crowd, when you are all offering broadly the same courses?
Here's an idea. If you could better understand your graduates' job prospects, and if you could incorporate the skills employers need for these jobs into your courses, wouldn't you be able to promote your institution as a place that is genuinely preparing its students for future employment success? Through our unparalleled Labour Market Insights, trusted by hundreds of universities and business schools around the globe, we can help you achieve this aim in three simple steps. Check out our 3-Step guide below, and begin your journey to using a data-driven approach to standing out from the crowd.
Understand the jobs your courses relate to and the roles your graduates are doing.
Incorporate the skills employers are requesting for these jobs into your courses.
Promote your institution as a place where students can get skilled for success.
STEP 1: Understand the jobs your courses relate to and the roles your graduates are doing.
Which jobs do your graduates do after graduating? Who do they work for? Which jobs could they do using the skills they've learned at your institution? If you can answer these questions, you can demonstrate the connection between your courses and employment outcomes, which can then be used to feed into your future course planning.
The chart below shows how our data can be used to establish this connection between your courses and employment outcomes, using anonymised data from a business school relating to their International Business MBA. The first tab uses our Social Profile Data to show the jobs their graduates are doing. The second tab uses the same dataset to show which companies they are working for. The third tab uses our Job Postings Analytics to show a list of in-demand jobs graduates from this course could potentially do.
STEP 2: Incorporate the skills employers are requesting for these jobs into your courses.
What are the in-demand and growth skills employers seek when hiring for jobs related to your courses? Answering this will give you the means to incorporate these skills into your courses, so making your students future-ready.
The chart below looks at the Common, Specialised and Software skills employers are requesting for the "other avenues" we identified in Step 1 for International Business MBA graduates. Within the three skill types, we have sorted the top 20 in-demand skills into four groups:
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Rapidly Growing - increasing in demand significantly faster than the market as a whole.
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Growing - generally outpacing the market but not as significantly as the first group.
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Stable - demand is tending to grow in line with the overall market.
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Lagging - may be positive or negative growth, but below the market as a whole.
STEP 3: Promote your institution as a place where students can get skilled for success.
What does this all mean?
Having gained a better understanding of the jobs your graduates are doing and who they are working for, and having identified the growing skills employers are looking for when hiring for the top jobs available to them, it's time to shout about it.
Below are three ideas of how a business school - which we've named Strathmore - might go about promoting itself to prospective students, having undertaken Steps 1 and 2. As you can see, Strathmore is able to promote itself as a future-ready, careers-driven, skills-based business school - a claim that is based on solid evidence, and which therefore marks it out from its cometitors.
Let us show you how we can do this for you.
Enter your business school, and we’ll be in touch to show you how we can help you understand the roles your alumni are doing, the companies they work for, and the skills their employers are looking for.
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