Use Cases
How Institutions Put uConnect to Work
Budgets are tight. Enrollment is harder to predict. And institutions are under intense pressure (from everyone) to show positive outcomes and ROI.
There’s no room for guesswork. Especially from career services, the department with the most immediate and obvious connection to outcomes.
uConnect’s Virtual Career Center (VCC) platform gives career centers the infrastructure to scale their work, embed career across campus, and prove their impact on outcomes.
Here are four ways career centers use uConnect to become indispensable.
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1. Increase engagement with career resources
Most career centers already invest in powerful tools, technologies, and resources. But too often, students don’t know they exist, can’t find them, or don’t understand how to use them.
This isn’t a content problem. It’s an infrastructure problem.
uConnect’s Virtual Career Center platform serves as the critical infrastructure that connects and amplifies the resources you already have. Plus, with uConnect’s analytics and tracking features, you can see exactly how students, faculty, and other stakeholders engage with your content—giving you the data you need to analyze the ROI of every resource you pay for.
By centralizing access, personalizing the experience for students, and continuously surfacing relevant content, the VCC drives real engagement with job platforms, assessments, experiential learning tools, employer resources, and career content that would otherwise sit unused.
uConnect customers see an average 88% increase in student engagement within a year of launching a Virtual Career Center.
Type of content: case study
How WGU Centralized Career Services and Increased Engagement by 140% in Two Months
With 150,000+ online students, WGU uses uConnect to streamline access, empower remote learners, and scale career support for students and alumni at every stage of the career journey.
Type of content: case study
How uConnect Increases Handshake Engagement by 200%
By centralizing access to tools like Handshake, uConnect helps institutions increase visibility, drive student usage, and get more ROI from their existing career technology—without adding more work for their teams.
Type of content: Podcast
How to Use Data to Track and Improve Student Engagement
Julia Vollrath, the Associate Director for Campus Initiatives at the University of Florida, shares how her team is using data to track and improve student engagement.
Type of content: Case Study
Promote and Scale Experiential Learning with a Virtual Career Center
uConnect helps institutions like UMass Amherst and Swarthmore College make experiential learning more accessible, student-friendly, and strategically aligned with campus-wide goals.
2. Scale your team
With skyrocketing student-to-staff ratios, no career center can scale its impact through staffing alone. Career teams need infrastructure that allows them to serve every student 24/7—without burnout.
uConnect helps career teams scale in two key ways:
- We constantly source fresh, timely, and genuinely helpful career content from a diverse set of creators in a variety of formats—adapted for all learning styles.
- We automate those manual, repetitive tasks that suck up your team’s time (and crush their souls in the process), like curating and sending weekly emails, finding and publishing content, answering the same questions over and over, and managing basic inquiries.
Let the Virtual Career Center handle those manual tasks, so you can spend more time on the uniquely human elements of your job, like coaching students, high-level strategy, and programming.
Type of content: case study
How Columbia University Saved 80 Hours a Week with uConnect
The Columbia University School of Professional Studies Career Design Lab uses uConnect to curate an all-in-one career resources hub, streamline communications with students, and improve marketing efforts.
Type of content: podcast
Scaling Career Support for Nontraditional, Online Students
Anita DeCianni Brown shares how she scales career support for SUNY Empire State University’s 17,000+ online, largely nontraditional students through flexible programming, technology (like uConnect), and partnerships across campus.
Type of content: case study
How a Team of One Saves 20 Hours a Week and Scales Career Services with uConnect
Discover how uConnect helps the one-man-band career center at Hardin-Simmons University scale his work, improve access, foster collaboration, and free up time for what matters most.
Type of content: article
6 Ways to Make a Big Impact with a Small Career Services Team
Looking to make an outsized impact with a small career services team? Here are six tips and strategies from uConnect power user UTPB to help you reach more students—without burnout.
3. Embed career into the campus ecosystem
Career readiness can’t live in a silo. Institutions that see the strongest outcomes embed career into every part of the student journey, from the admissions process to the classroom to student orgs to graduation and beyond.
uConnect makes it easy to equip faculty, staff, and campus partners with career resources and data they can confidently share—turning them into career champions without adding work for your team.
Our customers use the Virtual Career Center platform to:
- Embed career into academic advising
- Facilitate Career Champion programs
- Engage faculty with career resources, toolkits, example assignments, and more
- Scale career support for recent grads and alumni
- Inform partnerships with enrollment, advancement, alumni relations, and student affairs
- And more
Career services should be everyone’s business. When you are the connector, facilitator, and go-to source of student stories, outcomes data, and labor market data, the career center becomes a true strategic partner.
Type of content: article
How Career Services Can Blend Academic Advising and Career Coaching
Learn how Washington State University blends academic advising and career coaching—and how uConnect’s Labor Market Insights module helps advisors integrate career into advising sessions.
Type of content: Podcast
How to Make Career Services a Requirement by Embedding It Into Curriculum
Gene Rhee and Jessica Best of the University of Oregon Lundquist College of Business share how they’ve partnered with faculty to embed career-related assignments into core business classes.
Type of content: Article
5 Ways to Engage Faculty with Career Services
Looking to better engage faculty? Here are five strategies to help you engage faculty and enable them to have meaningful career conversations with students.
Type of content: podcast
Partnering with the Alumni Office to Support Recent Grads
Emily McCarthy of the University of Arizona shares how her team partners with the alumni office to support recent grads in their career development—including how they cost-share the uConnect platform.
4. Improve employer relations
Employers are essential partners in career outcomes, but managing those relationships at scale is a lot of work. uConnect helps institutions create structured, value-driven employer engagement through digital sponsorships, branded content, and targeted visibility.
For many institutions, employer engagement isn’t just about outcomes—it’s also about sustainability. uConnect enables career teams to generate revenue that offsets costs and funds continued innovation.
Type of content: case study
How Spelman College Earns $60,000 a Year in Digital Corporate Sponsorships
Learn how Spelman College completely funded their uConnect platform (with several add-ons and modules) through revenue from a digital corporate sponsorship program.
Type of content: playbook
How to Build a Digital Corporate Sponsorship Program for Your Career Center
Learn how to generate revenue and connect more students with great employers with this 9-step guide to building an effective corporate sponsorship program.
Type of content: article
5 Ways Career Services Can Partner with Employers to Get Students Career-Ready
What does career readiness actually look like to employers? And how can career centers partner with employers to make sure students are prepared for the workforce? Learn more.
Type of content: article
3 Creative Ways to Fund Technology for Your Career Center
Looking for new funding streams so you can buy more technology for your career center? In this article, we walk through three creative ways to do this, along with specific steps for getting started.
Increase engagement.
Drive better outcomes.
Prove it to senior leaders.
Schools that partner with uConnect see stronger student outcomes
because they’re intentional about career engagement.
16% higher
6-year graduation rates
9% higher
first-year retention
$14,000 higher
median earnings
Across hundreds of institutions, uConnect serves as the critical infrastructure that powers engagement, scales teams, embeds career across campus, and strengthens employer partnerships.
The results speak for themselves.
And the best part? uConnect’s advanced analytics help you connect the dots between career engagement and outcomes—for your team and for senior leaders.