Annenberg Insights: Pushing past the status quo to innovate and support our students

Earlier this summer we wrapped USC Annenberg’s Maymester programs, in which our students gain high-level exposure to the media, entertainment and tech sectors in New York, Washington, DC, and, right here in Los Angeles.?

Twitter. Riot Games. ABC News. NFL Networks. Spotify. Condé Nast. Emerson Collective.?

This immersive learning experience exposes our students to the ways in which critical issues transforming these fields are shaping jobs and careers paths. It connects them directly with senior executives and leaders along with early career professionals who share insights about their professional journeys and daily life on the job. In fact, our recent Maymester grads are even beginning to host us at their new workplaces.?

Maymester is in many ways the perfect expression of just what we are advancing with?Annenberg Insights. It’s what we like to call dynamic collaboration, creating new opportunities to share?knowledge and engage with our industries of practice.?

In our Maymester programs, we support our students’ unique academic and career trajectories as we hear in-real-time about the rapidly evolving needs of industries, emerging careers and in-demand skill sets across the technology, media and communications landscape. And employers acquire invaluable insights from a generation that will challenge them to think about their business in a whole new way.?

Annenberg Insights provides another tool for academic and industry collaboration as we capture, explore and share big-picture data about relevant industries, our alumni, professional partners and our own academic foundations.?

It was inspired by a gift from USC Annenberg parents that challenged us to explore entirely new ways of innovating in advisement and career services. With the creation of Annenberg Insights, l knew our assistant dean of student affairs, Suzanne Alcantara, would help us ensure that we build the right tool and that what we learn from the data results in action.?

As our conversation below demonstrates, we are laser focused on supporting our students in innovative and customized ways.

Willow Bay: When you first heard about the concept and ideas around Annenberg Insights, what were you most excited about?

Suzanne Alcantara: I’m inspired to work at a school that is never satisfied with the status quo and always looking for new ways to innovate and support our students. When I first learned about the generous gift that would support this project, I was most excited about the potential the tool has to change and improve the way we do our work. For many years, we were using messy, incomplete spreadsheets and losing critical data when staff members left the organization.?

The launch of our Annenberg Insights project is deeply exciting. We now have a comprehensive record for each student, including their work post-graduation — at our fingertips. All of our staff can use the “Advisor Link” tab of Insights to see students’ academic and career progression alongside trends in employment so we are able to develop goals and create career maps during the advisement process.

WB: Developing a data-minded culture has been something really new for all of us at USC Annenberg. What are some of the ways you’ve worked with your team to embrace this new approach??

SA: Over the years, we have been fortunate to hire new staff and offer expanded programming to our students. Yet, there remained unanswered questions about who we were reaching and where there were gaps. Annenberg Insights affords us the tools to more accurately and deeply assess targeted student needs. Being able to research, plan and coordinate student programs, program services and special events to address these needs will change our approach within Student Services. For example, in career development we have spent several years collecting data on student career/company interests to inform our employer outreach. Now we’ll be able to determine growth in specific industries, skills in those areas that map to what we are teaching in our curriculum and new companies to develop partnerships with.

WB: We were all struck by a statement you made during one of our planning meetings: “This is my 21-year Annenberg brain in a map. No one else on the team has this knowledge accumulated, and now it’s here!” So tell me about this map — from east to west what does it look like?

SA: The joy of my work is meeting a student in their first or second year of college, supporting them during their time at USC Annenberg and then watching them leave the nest and launch their careers. In 21 years, I have countless examples of career trajectories of our alumni as their progress forward in their professional lives. With Insights, we’ll have increased visibility to the specific careers and industries our alumni are finding success within.

Also, having started my career at USC as an academic adviser for three years and then moving into career advising, I have this perspective of how understanding the curriculum ties into a student's career goals. Annenberg Insights will position any advisor to have more visibility, to both areas, to be able to support students, to answer their questions, to have a bigger picture of the skills and learning outcomes in a class, and how that ties to careers and even internships.

So, if an academic adviser is meeting with a student, they can enter “marketing coordinator” into Insights and see that to work in marketing you really need to have specific skills like those in Adobe Creative suite. Advisers can then reinforce opportunities available to build those skills through coursework or through our Digital Lounge.?

WB: What are the most significant ways you anticipate that Annenberg Insights will impact academic advising and how your team supports our students? In other words, what does access to these advanced analytics mean in the day-to-day lives of our students and alumni?

SA: The academic advisement team relies heavily on data to inform their support of students but have been working with disjointed and incomplete data sets. With Annenberg Insights when an academic adviser is able to marshal data about alumni career outcomes and pair it with information about the learning objectives and outcomes for particular classes — all within a few seconds during a student advisement appointment — a student’s course selection and enrollment planning process then becomes a lot more intentional, purposeful and impactful. Having comprehensive and complete data will allow our team a much richer look at enrollment management and enable us to make sure that our course offerings are aligned with student interest and registration requirements.

WB: How do you think our advisers will use information around alumni trajectories to help students map out their career pathways?

SA: Our team is routinely asked by students about the types of careers that map to their degrees and Insights will be revelatory in our ability to offer more concrete answers. Our advisors will have access to a greater quantity of the most relevant data and information that is also both more timely, up-to-date and of greater quality than what we have access to now. Our team has never had access before to labor market data and trends in hiring. With these advanced analytics on evolving career paths, we’ll be better positioned to help our students make clearer, more informed decisions about courses, skills and experience needed to achieve their career dreams and aspirations.

WB: What have been the biggest surprises so far? (i.e.: Identifying alumni in careers and jobs we did not know they worked in; using “skills” tab to uncover what our alumni consider their “top skills” and event planning being high on this list)

SA: One of the biggest surprises is the sheer amount of data available through Insights. Having access to job postings in various sectors across the country gives us a much greater visibility to industries experiencing job growth and the skills and experience that employers within those industries are looking for. For example, external labor market data shows?there is job growth within healthcare communications and that allows us to encourage our students to learn more about this field and the skills required to be most successful. Using our “Career Calculator” function, each student will have individualized skills curated for them based on the USC Annenberg courses they have taken and the internships they have completed. From there, they can see what industries are looking for their unique skill sets. What an incredible and innovative way to give them the tools to articulate what they are learning as part of the USC Annenberg community and open their eyes to a world of career possibilities they may not have previously considered.