Scaling Alumni Mentorship and Career Engagement at the University of Texas San Antonio

Hi. My name is Mario Vella. I serve as assistant vice provost of Career Engaged Learning and executive director of the University Career Center at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Within Career Engaged Learning at UTSA, my role serves two very important purposes. One is the professional and career development of all students within the institution. So we provide insights into market realities of what the job market has, how to negotiate, and networking and recruiting for the students. In addition, we serve, the employer engagement function of the university, so we work with employers that have established relationships recruiting with us, but also relationships that we're building with companies that have never recruited with us, and that we're establishing that relationship where they can start seeing our students as potential candidates for the roles that they have. The impact we've been able to achieve through the Peoplegrove platform is something that we've never seen before. Currently, we have nine thousand users on the platform. What we see is constant connections from our alumni to our students, from simple questions regarding their degree plans to career aspirations to even just information on how work is in their function, in their industry, and even in their region. So that gives them an opportunity to obtain that social capital that they wouldn't have had access to before. Our students consistently rate the interactions that they have with our alumni incredibly high. We're seeing it being effective with the networking that they're able to do with nonalumni as well, with recruiters and with other members of the recruiting community. So with the broader vision of career engaged learning, it's always to give students a competitive advantage in a very difficult job market, a better resume, better interview skills. What Peoplegrove offers is network, a network that they didn't have access to before, and a network that the institution didn't have access to before. And so now through the Peoplegrove platform, we're able to give them a competitive advantage in terms of the network that they're building. The advice I would give other university leaders is really think about the potential connections that you have and the insights that you wouldn't able to scale in a way that you wouldn't have access to if you didn't have this platform where alumni are saying, I want to give back. I want to be able to inform the next generation of our alumni and build that confidence in our students to have a better life and have a better career. My experience working with the Peoplegrove customer success team has really been about the senior leaders building the relationship with me and the institution. They believe in what the institution's mission is in terms of social mobility. So I'm constantly meeting with the Peoplegrove team in terms of how do we do this better together. The differentiator between Peoplegrove and other platforms is that students are opting in to connect with alumni in a closed network that is from the institution for the institution. And not only can our alumni network with our students, but alumni can network and mentor other alumni. Something I'd like other institutions to know is that the students deserve a network that is for them and that will help them in their careers. If you're not building this, you're losing a great deal of social capital that the students should have access to. This really is a moral obligation for the institution. So some of the plans that we have with the PeopleGrowth platform is they actually just resigned our agreement because we we believe in the platform. We have a vision that the relationships that we'll build within the platform are comprehensive from our alumni to our alumni, our alumni to students, to students to students, and from students to prospective students. We want our prospective students know that there is a place for them at our university, and that they deserve to be building that relationship with our students. And I know that our students would be up for being mentors to prospective students.