Building Employer Relations – Professional Development Webinar
MCEIA hosted its 1st Webinar on Friday, February 19, 2010 called “Building Employer Relations.” It was facilitated by Cincinnati State Co-op Coordinator and MCEIA Past President, Kelly Harper. We were fortunate to have over 20 participants in the program.
The MCEIA Board of Governors has spent a great deal of time and efforts in looking for ways to incorporate value add opportunities for our membership. This webinar was just one piece of the strategic initiatives that the Board has been discussing and developing over the past two years. We hope that this will be the first of many webinars for our membership.
The “Building Employer Relations” webinar focused on co-op/internship coordinators’ ability to make connections with employers and how to nurture those relations. Discussion topics focused on reflecting on time put forth in building and maintain the relationship, the balance between credibility and visibility, engaging employers with our colleges and universities, managing expectations from all constituents and troubleshooting.
As practitioners, we are often telling our students to develop and build connections with people. Network, Network, Network, we often hear ourselves saying. However, meeting people and having a relationship are two different things. Relationships take work. This can be hard given hectic schedules and the variety of directions we are pulled professionally.
In dealing with employers, we must balance a variety of areas – credibility and visibility, HR needs – cheap labor vs. student learning, and the list can go on. We also look for a balance between the needs of our constituents – employers, students and colleges/universities.
Building relationships takes time, flexibility and commitment. In our webinar, we looked at the percentages that we devote to our constituents. Most shared that students and office duties win over the time we spend working with employers. Some of our offices have a student first mentality which may put employer relations down the list of importance.
We also looked at the Sales Process Model that focuses on establishing relationships, helping define the needs of employers and solving their problem. Often, there may be some visibility issues. Do employers even know that we exist? As for credibility issues, why as educators are we the expert an employer might need? What do our organizations have to offer? What do our students have to offer?
The sales process also looks at lead generation, collection, qualification, distribution, incubation, tracking, and follow-up. Participants were asked to look at how they do this at their college or university. How do they manage these relationships within their office – what systems/processes do they have in place to track their interactions with employers? Also, why the tracking of this information is potentially needed and how can it be used in organizations?
Engagement is also a key to the relationship. This can be both passive and active. We defined active engagements as interactions on both parties and passive interaction on the side of one party. As we looked at these engagements a key point focused on making the life easier for the customer/employer.
Social media is an emerging tool that can be used for both passive and active engagement. These tools can be actively used to get our message out to the employer about our programs, our offices, and our universities.
In co-op and internships, there can often be a disconnect between expectations about the co-op or intern. Helping the employer understand realistic expectations about your campus and students as well as follow-up while the student is employed is an essential piece to the relationship building. Sometimes, we even have to see our role as the troubleshooter in creating the balance between our imperfect students and our imperfect employers.
