Revitalizing a successful alumni program with Noble Schools
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Noble Schools are tuition-free, public charter schools open to all students in Chicago. They serve more than 12,400 students across 18 campuses and support more than 20,000 alumni. The schools are recognized nationally for performance in college access.
Noble’s Alumni Career Office works to positively impact the employment outcomes for their alumni. The office helps its alumni unlock their greatest potential through effective career coaching, contributing to an overall pre-pandemic success rate of 85% for job placement or graduate school enrollment for their alumni that are recent college graduates in a given year.
“These correlative outcomes demonstrate the power of Noble's to-and-through college and career model,” said Solomon Dixon, Director of Alumni Careers at Noble Schools.
After the pandemic, the Alumni Career Office is moving forward using innovative measures to engage their alumni classes and increase their career coach capacity to support all of their alumni- not just recent graduates.
“Our alumni in many ways are still feeling the effects of a market still adversely impacted by the pandemic,” Dixon said.
Many Noble alumni are also the first to hold salaried career positions in their families. A large amount of them struggle to find gainful employment due to not being able to gain experience through unpaid internships or because they lack the networks of some of their peers.
“Similar to the challenges [they faced] being a first-generation college student, there are cultural challenges they face entering a workplace that was not designed for them,” Dixon added.
That’s why Noble is partnering with RiseKit. RiseKit’s Service Provider Connect software will enable Alumni Career Office staff members to increase their overall capacity, boost alumni engagement, and help alumni build career pathways.
RiseKit will also help Noble’s Alumni Career Office improve the efficacy of its programs and create a trackable and streamlined system to better connect with its former students. This partnership will ultimately help many first-generation college graduates and underemployed individuals receive the customized assistance they need most.
Through this partnership, Noble hopes to restore its success rate to pre-pandemic levels and eventually increase it. Additionally Risekit will aid in better understanding the efficacy of current career development programming in the office. The Alumni Career Office also aims to help its alumni thrive by removing barriers to employment.
