PART 1

Customer/User Job-to-be-Done or Problem

As a researcher and/or decision maker across multiple departments (Academics, Marketing, President's Office, Advancement/Alumni Relations, and Advising), I want to use insights from Alumni career and education pathways to inform my work, so that I can inform others' decisions and/or make better decisions myself.

Related:

As a prospective, current, or alumni learner, I want to see actual Alumni career and education pathways to inform my decisions about pursuing additional education and/or work opportunities.

Value to Customers & Users

Gains

Over the past few years (including in 2022 research and 2023 Alumni Pathways customer interviews), we continue to hear market interest in career and education pathways insights as a tool to support:

Key institutional activities:

• Creating & improving educational offerings

• Promoting educational offerings

• Stakeholder & public relations

• Securing funding for educational offerings (including grant, legislative, and donor-sourced funding)

• Alumni relations & engagement

• Employer partnerships & engagement

• Advising (enrollment, academic, and career)

• Faculty education and classroom instruction (resources, materials, etc.)

Key institutional metrics:

• enrollment

• retention, persistence, and completion

• post-completion outcomes

Pains

Along with the market interest, we also continue to hear market dissatisfaction with current alternatives due to their typically high effort to produce and low confidence in their accuracy.

Value to Lightcast

Based on these market signals, we believe a new Alumni Pathways feature providing insights based on career and education pathways would be highly valued by our markets and have low competition from alternatives. This would directly correlate to sales and retention.

Additionally, given the market interest, such a feature would be highly demo-able and marketable.

Target User Role/Client/Client Category

Academic, Marketing, President’s Office, and Advancement/Alumni Relations/Foundation, and Advising teams across all Education segments

Delivery Mechanism

This would be a new feature in the form of a new repot (page) at least 1 new packet (data visual) on the Alumni Pathways vertical of the Analyst Platform.

We expect this feature to be delivered to all Alumni Pathways users.

Success Criteria & Metrics

Definition of Done

Career and education pathways insights are customer-facing in the Alumni Pathways platform. We have the ability to provide these with or without our National Student Clearinghouse data partnerships.

• In PI 3: Research & Prototyping is complete (including scoping and prioritization), including completing:

  • External research with customers and prospects to refine how this information is optimally presented in the Alumni Pathways vertical of the Analyst platform

  • Internal research by product with support and input from engineering teams (Documents, Analyst Red, Micro, CDOT, & Raptor) on how best to translate our data into the formats that best serve customer needs

• In PI 4: Work with CDOT, Micro, Documents, LMI (Dave Beauchamp), and Raptor to complete data pipeline processing that must be completed in order to effectively display this information in the Alumni Pathways Vertical.

  • Stretch Goal: Begin Production Build-out and get mid-way through MVP feature.

• PI 5 & on: see https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Z__f34WEBTn5_qGuqyeVmv2pHX9ddJG1-ylcEebLkC8/edit

• PI-6: see https://docs.google.com/document/d/1K11u825jxt2gmtA2JmgxhRAbiHasYkYekfNnDi6T_JA/edit?usp=sharing

North Star Metric

Alumni Pathway’s current North Star Metric is Filtered Reports per Month by Account (as a proxy for answering institutional users' questions and supporting their work). We believe this new data pipeline will move that metric via:

• Providing at least one additional report to filter

• Newly serving all personas across a number of use cases (new/more people engaging with the software for new/more reasons)

  • Greater engagement will also increase exposure to and awareness of the other Alumni Pathways reports (and subsequent filtering opportunities there)

• Adding value that attracts more accounts and higher retention (e.g. more opportunities to see/use this and other reports)

Our target improvements for this metric are:

• >33% more Filtered Reports per Month by Account within the first two months after the first feature is released

• The higher level of Filtered Reports per Month by Account is sustained (e.g. does not drop back to previous levels over time)

Aspects that are out of scope (of this phase)

This epic covers a minimum viable product (MVP) release of this new feature. Subsequent extensions and enhancements are not included.

This epic also assumes anonymized records (e.g. no PII) being displayed as aggregated analytics.

We are separately exploring ways to provide insights on education outcomes and pathways (without including career steps): https://economicmodeling.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/DPM/pages/2563212401

We’re also separately exploring converting existing consulting offerings into software modules ( https://economicmodeling.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/DPM/pages/2620785236 ). One of those offerings provides Career Pathways Analytics. We will need to ensure that we align our strategy and approach between this and that epic.

PART 2

Solution Description

Mock-up for PI-6 Delivery

Open

Early UX (wireframes or mockups)

Rough early mock-up Figma link

Early Concepts

Product research in 2022 surfaced a number of potential Pathway Visualization examples (starting on Slide 46). Of these, slide 51 shows a working prototype developed by @David Beauchamp which could potentially provide a starting point for this project.

NSC Data

Data from the National Student Clearinghouse can potentially support this work (but should not be the sole foundation for such work).

Below is a screenshot of the data we expect to get from NSC (which will cover every enrollment for every learner that attended a Lightcast Alumni Pathways customer institution). A text list of the fields follows.

Open

Text list of the fields from the screenshot above:

• Institution Unique Identifier (for the Learner)

• First Name

• Middle Initial

• Last Name

• Name Suffix

• Requester Return Field

• Record Found Y/N

• Search Date

• College Code/Branch

• College Name

• College State

• 2-year / 4-year

• Public / Private

• Enrollment Begin

• Enrollment End

• Enrollment Status

• Class Level

• Enrollment Major 1

• Enrollment CIP 1

• Enrollment Major 2

• Enrollment CIP 2

• Graduated?

• Graduation Date

• Degree Title

• Degree Major 1

• Degree CIP 1

• Degree Major 2

• Degree CIP 2

• Degree Major 3

• Degree CIP 3

• Degree Major 4

• Degree CIP 4

• College Sequence

Non-Functional Attributes & Usage Projections

Privacy / Security Implications

Customer- (or National Student Clearinghouse-) provided student records contain personally identifying information and are protected by:

• FERPA regulations

• [If applicable]: National Student Clearinghouse partnership contract terms

Localization Requirements

Alumni Pathways is USA-only. Wherever National Student Clearinghouse data is used, development must be restricted to the USA only (due to security requirements in our partnership agreement with the Clearinghouse).

Performance Characteristics

This feature needs to perform (loading time, uptime) at a similar level to the Alumni Pathways vertical and Analyst platform.

Mobile and Accessibility Requirements

This feature needs to meet the Analyst platform standards for mobile and accessibility support.

Dependencies

This epic cannot be finished until these epics are complete:

• https://economicmodeling.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/DPM/pages/2488304662

• https://economicmodeling.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/DPM/pages/2620784653

Legal and Ethical Considerations

Just answer yes or no.

High-Level Rollout Strategies

This represents a major new feature for Alumni Pathways, and thus we would want to:

• Prototype concepts (pre-engineering) with customers and prospects to inform

  • Prioritization

  • Designs/user experience

  • Engineering specifications

• Prepare Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success in advance so that they are prepared to demo, promote, and support it, and also ready to relay feedback to the product for subsequent improvements

• Subsequently roll out to all customers

Risks

• Any work that interfaces with National Student Clearinghouse data will need to comply with our contractual requirements described in a previous epic ( https://economicmodeling.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/DPM/pages/2488172582 )

Open Questions

Complete with Engineering Teams

Estimated Costs

Direct Financial Costs

Are there direct costs that this feature entails? Dataset acquisition, server purchasing, software licenses, etc.?

• Small cost (~$75/person) of National Student Clearinghouse-required background checks

Team Effort

Each team involved should give a general t-shirt size estimate of their work involved. As the epic proceeds, they can add a link to the Jira epic/issue associated with their portion of this work.