To complete the interview series begun at EDUCAUSE, we are progressively conducting a series of conversations with vendors and practitioners to describe the leading edge of analytics products and practice that affect higher education.  This will result in a white paper later this fall.

One of the important elements of Action Analytics is that the focus has expanded beyond traditional higher education in two important directions: 1) the scope of comparative analytics has expanded to consider the full pre-K-20 continuum and 2) analytics that illustrate the linkage between learning and work and employability are increasingly sought after.

The workforce linkage is spawning efforts at institutional, employer, and employment agencies, often working in concert.  Individual institutions are positioned to use data mining to understand the success paths followed by their students.  Many institutions are increasing their efforts to collaborate directly with employers to align offerings with employment competence needs.  State and federal workforce agencies are redoubling their efforts to provide useful data.  And large employment services, temp agencies, and workforce agencies are mining their vast data resources to illuminate employability trends, patterns, and opportunities, often using real-time data.

To understand where learning to use workforce analytics might be heading, we approached the largest employment enterprise in the United States, Monster.com.  Other examples will also be collected through interviews and posted over time to complete he snapshot.

Lee Ramsayer, Vice President, Sales, Monster Government Solutions

Lee Ramsayer is a seasoned higher education technology professional who was Vice President of Sales and Marketing for the Higher Education Vertical at Oracle Higher Education and later worked for Intelliworks, the CRM company.  Lee is now leading the effort at Monster.com to leverage its trove of data on jobs, job seekers, and the workforce through a growing arsenal of analytics services and products.

Monster Government Solutions is focusing on providing data and analytic services to public sector and education clients that enable employers, government, education and job seekers to align their efforts and make sense of the learning/employment connection.  Their theme is “Creating the High Performance Workforce,” which is reflected in a series of White Papers and other resources.  Their strategic intent is to create “real-time labor intelligence” that is actionable.

Monster is in a unique position to be a partner in learning/workforce solutions.  It recently acquired hotjobs.com, so it now has access to a trove of searchable data resources and analytics capabilities:

• Supply Side – tens of millions of US resumes and thousands of new resumes added daily; more than 11 million unique job seeker visitors each month; and Monster manages nearly 24 million Job Seeker Accounts nationwide;
• Demand Side – One of the world’s largest jobs data sources; on average over 200,000 current jobs listings; ability to access additional posting from hundreds of job boards, plus government, non-profit, and industry association sites; and
• Research and Analytics Teams – Dedicated analyst and research team, plus partnerships that extend research capacity into employer surveys, curriculum development, and economic forecasting that can be woven into customized solutions.

Monster Government Solutions’ current analytics-based services include a subscription service, custom reports, research briefs and research on demand (aggregated- and detail-level supply and demand data that can supplement the analytics efforts of local, regional and state governments, employers, and institutions to make sense of market conditions and align curricula with strategic skills requirements).  Current opportunities focus is on regional analytics with strong economic development applications.

Monster offers other analytics-supported services that complement and extend these capabilities:

• Making It Count Program – high-energy presentations to 9^th, 11^th and 12^th graders to help students recognize the value of an education and assist in sharing their career choices in the context of exiting talent gaps in the region’;
• Monster FastWeb Scholarship Engine and PinAid.org – Internet’s largest scholarship site profiling 1.3 million scholarships worth over $3 billion;
• Monster Career Planning Tools, Career Fairs, and Leadership Programs – services to job seekers and students.

Future Possibilities – Data Mining on Student Success Factors, Filling Knowledge Gaps, and Employability. In addition to these current uses of its data and analytics resources, Monster is positioned to be a participant in more ambitious analytics-based efforts to make sense of the learning and work environment.

For example, future possibilities could include any of the following:

• Data mining to identify the pathways, competences, and habits of students who achieve successful job placement and career success (through longitudinal analysis);
• Collaborations with institutions, employers, and workforce agencies to create more powerful analyses of successful pathways and working the results into institutional and employer programs and practices;
• Identifying knowledge and competence gaps that impede employment for particular jobs and collaborating with institutions to develop corrective, knowledge gap filler programs that can be used by graduates to rapidly fill gaps and prepare them for employment, independent of the degree program; and
• Providing guidance and ongoing data support to institutions and other learning enterprises that aspire to become “success makers” in coaching and positioning their students for ongoing success.

These examples are consistent with the sense that emerged from conversations with other practitioners and vendors:  higher education is poised on the cusp of a dramatic increase in analytic applications that:

• Involve enterprise analytics capabilities and data mining of existing data resources;
• Span traditional institutional, organizational and sector boundaries; and
• Involve partnerships, collaborations, and business relationships with multiple parties.

We will include other workforce-oriented interviews as part of this ongoing conversation on “What’s New in Analytics?”