As you know we've been doing a lot of work around updating Resources within CareerHub. 

Finally we're getting to the top of the 'hump' and will be able to make it onto the downhill run to rolling the new features into the student interface.  

But we have one task that we are going to require your help with - and it's a bit messy. So put on your working boots, grab a mop and help clean up your topics. 

We didn't want to lose anything during the update so we converted all your Entity, Service, Discipline and Campus categories into topics. Now these these aren't really appropriate as 'topics', but we couldn't accurately just write a script to make decisions for you as it really needs a set of human eyes cast over it.

As soon as you get to this task then please let us know and we can go ahead and begin updating your student interface when student can search all your resources based on topics :)

To help you along the way I have put together this short video. If you have any Q's please contact support. If you don't have time to do a cleanup yourself and trust us to do it for you then please let us know and we'll bring in the sweepers and then update your student interface straight away.

Cheers

:Dee

Over the next week we are continuing the re-think and reconfigure of the 'resource' management areas of CareerHub. At the moment the resources include Links (websites), News, Info Sheets and FAQ's. As you know links and news have already been update to the concept of 'topics', over the next week you will see a similar change occur to FAQ's and Info Sheets.

This core change has been one of the most significant changes to the way CareerHub 'works' that we have undertaken. It was quite a weighty decision on our part to change the way the system works when a practise has already been in place for many years. This significant change is not a decision that we made flippantly one afternoon - it is a core change required to implement some features we want to achieve in a modernisation of the students interfaces.

Why are we doing this?

The very first version of CareerHub was designed by me way back in the 90's as a way to streamline how I was managing the resources to present to students. At the time people were used to 'libraries' and shelves and the way CareerHub worked paralleled this. As web interface became faster and more efficient to access to information, it became obvious that the 'library management' methodology was getting a bit outdated. It's normal for administrators to think about things in terms of what type of resource their managing, but... what about student users? How do they want to access information, and what are they familiar with doing in todays web environment?

This is what happens now if I am a student (interfaces do differ but generally speaking).

1. I want some information about resume/CV writing
2. login to CareerHub
3. look for something that hints at resume /CV help 
4. Generally I can't see anything obvious but can see links to FAQ's, Info Sheets, Links, News
5. Click on any of the above hoping to find something
6. Get a list of categories and maybe resume /CV advice will be one
7. If I see something resembling Resume/ CV then click on it and look at the list of items
8. If I see an item of interest read it
9. repeat steps 5-8 for each of the other resource categories
10. If I can't find it or get bored then give up and log out

As you can see this is quite a tedious and uncertain pathway because our 'front door' is based on the resource type.

This is what we want students to experience.

1. I want some information about resume/CV writing
2. login to CareerHub
3. instantly see an obvious path to resource information. This may be either a search box with 'what are you looking for?' or a clear link to a page that asks this question and includes suggestions of most common or recently added information for people studying the same as you.
4. As the student types resume (or CV) it uses the 'topics' you have added to help built ranking and also uses text in the description of the item. The search box will begin to suggest things for them in a similar way to how the 'quick search' works in Admin.
5. Student will immediately receive a list of all  the resources you have (regardless of type) on the topic of their choice ranked using the most popular combined with recently added.

This method is quite removed from the library approach of categorising and filing resources. I am hoping that everyone can see the end benefits of this approach.

What other goodies result from this change.

1. For a long time we have had difficulties reconciling the resources categorisation with the same categories as jobs. We did our analysis and found that most resources were already categorised for all disciplines and all services - so why have this at all? With the removal of these categories and the introduction of 'topics' we free up the categories for jobs and open the door to a future re-think of these categories in the sole context of how they relate to jobs.
2. A simpler and faster way to manage your resources without having to think of all the options that were previously presented.
3. Removal of things that have been used by 5% or less,  this means we clean up the interface and remove clutter of things that just simply aren't getting used. This means Associations, Journals and Labels for Info Sheets and FAQ's - we've looked at what you have entered and found that even if you were in the 5% that made an entry it usually seemed only temporary. I will be directly contacting anyone where doubts arise. But don't worry... they will still be hidden in the database for the next few months should we need to access them.

The downside :(

All good comes at a cost - luckily these are only temporary. We are unfortunately forced to go through a slightly awkward transitional process since we have to update the admin areas first then, sweep up and then update the student interfaces. 

Here's what to expect:

1. The change to 'topics' means a change in your current practices and a re-think of how you work with your resources,  don't think 'librarian' from now on - think 'journalist' providing relevant and up-to-date information. You'll get used to this idea soon enough.
2. All your categories currently used will be translated to topics. This is a safeguard so we don't lose anything but... it means there are now a lot of irrelevant topics in your system. We'll help clean these up for you after we get through the update. I'll write a blog post to let you know about the options and process when the time comes.
3. We have to wait until the dust settles before we can update the student interfaces to make full use of what we have done. As a stop-gap solution we have built some controls to put on your student sites to temporarily make them look similar to what they are now, but using 'topics'. For most people this will not affect the student view too badly. I will contact those with possible larger issues. 

It is not an easy decision for us to push all our users through a large change like this, however we know that the end result will be justified and enable us to help you provide a better service to your students. Please bear with us while we transition across.

:Dee

We don't change staff very often here... but sometimes we just have more things to do. We are regularly having more universities coming on board creating just that bit more demand. We're now up to 10 in the UK and one more launching here in AU (there aren't many left) . More on this later,  but... we needed new peeps!

Last week Katrina, our newest team member, all the way from Portland Oregon USA,  joined the team. You'll all get to know her soon since she is now taking up the challenge of keeping this blog up-to-date and editing training videos (yep you still have to listen to my training rants for a bit but soon you'll enjoy the change to Katrina's softer tones ;) 

She's taken this over a bit from Nick - a Sunny coast boy who is also one of our recent team additions. Nick is working pretty hard on doing site restyling for people right now, relieving a bit of pressure of our hard worked all timer Min! But Nick will also get back to making a few more of the training site videos and enhancements too. 

We will also have another team member soonish to fill the void from our sadly missed Carlos - (from Columbia) - not that hes' completely gone,  he's still doing some testing on mobile apps for us. But after two enjoyable years with us he's taken a new challenge. I really enjoyed listening to CareerHub support in Spanish with some of our local spanish speaking administrators.

Let's talk about Katrina for the moment.. because her first job is just a simple ring around to check with you all that we have you current up-to-date contacts. So expect a call soon!

:Dee

You know when sometimes you wake up, and you feel fantastic about solving a problem. But then you realise that it was just a dream, and the problem hasn't really been solved. Well these couple of things aren't that bad, but we would like you to know about these changes where we thought we'd resolved issues, but in fact we just complicated things a bit.

1.  Role Tabs

With different users of CareerHub being added as administrators to CareerHub all the time. Each with a different 'role' in the system we thought it would be a great idea to try to automatically configure the interface toward them. And ... if people were in two roles they could choose their role tab for the day. Sounds OK right? Well it did to me at the time too, but after a year or so of this being in place we notice that very few people use the feature. And in fact, it becomes more frustrating than anything once you know how CareerHub works.

We're saying goodbye to the tabs in an update very soon. From the stats it doesn't seem like anyone will be particularly concerned about this, but if yo uare then please let me know.

2. Alternate email address

We added a secondary email address a while ago in an attempt to resolve situations where students weren't recieving emails, or where unable to obtain their login details after they graduated. While the aim was good,  the solution of simply adding the secondary email address has not resolved the issue. So... the thinking cap had to go back on.

What we really want is one good email address that the student actually reads. We know they don't often read their uni emails and not all students think to re-direct their uni addresses. Of course some will and we need to cater for that as well.

If you are bulk mailing students, which is usually where the issues of bounces and unread emails are a problem, then or course we don't email both addresses that the students can currently provide. Emailing both addresses would be a bit stupid since the majority of students would receive two emails and if you were emailing 30 000 then... you get the idea. And you certainly woudl want to go through each student and choose which email address to send to .. would you?

So how do we know which email address the student wants to use? Simple, ask them, and let them alter it. For those of you still without student system integration then you won't be affected at all since students already just add their own email address. For those of you that are provisioned here's the plan.

• student email address is provisioned from the student system
• The first time a student logs in we ask them if they want to keep the current address or change it to a preferred address (and let them)
• If they change it then the system will remember and won't overwrite it with a provisioning update
• if they don't change it then their email address will continue to be provisioned from the student system.

While we know that this won't be perfect (it is impossible to ensure everyones email works) it is better than having two email address but only be able to really use one. Also it should go some way to resolving the graduate login problems since grads should still be able to access whatever email address they 'preferred' where often they can't access uni email addresses to reset password.

So it's not 100% rollback like tabs, but we won't try to have 2 email addresses anymore. If you desperately need to contact the student then there's always the phone number and a quick SMS through CareerHub.