CQT Worksheet (.pdf)
Accountability. It may be the single most important issue facing career centers. Increasingly, college administrators look to the career center to demonstrate its value, to show what it brings to the college and its students. But how do career centers, which deal with many intangibles, demonstrate their value. How many students are you serving? What kinds of services are you delivering? How successful are your clients? If you want to increase your services and expand your center, you must measure what matters and report the results. The good news is that you don’t have to re-engineer your career center before you can operate an effective performance measurement system. All you need to do is stick to two guiding principles: measure what matters; and keep it simple. Here is a simple accountability statement that appeared last September 2005 on Ball State University’s Career Center site:
Ball State students are our most important clients. Last year in our customer service areas, we greeted almost 20,000 people and answered more that 12,000 telephone calls. We assisted 9,000 students with referrals to on-campus student jobs. We provided in-office, telephone, and e-mail advising to more than 1,100 students and alumni and met with almost 7,500 students in classes and workshops. We met with prospective students and their parents at Admission Events and during Orientation to introduce Quest and the Career Success Plan.
To begin or extend your career center's accountability ... review the ideas listed below.
- Get together with your staff and write a simple 5 or 6 sentence statement with numbers attached about what your staff accomplished last year. (Use the Ball State example.)
- Together list services you offer and want to add to the list for this year. (Track and Tally Your Numbers Using We Measure What Matters Worksheet)
- List information about how you will measure each of the services you provide.
- Define who needs to know about your center's success, and how will you share the results.
For some additional sites and resources check out "How to Develop a Tracking and Accountability System."
If you can't measure it, you can't manage it. Peter Drucker