UCLA launches digital career and extension programs for students & alumni
The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) will provide access to personalised digital career-coaching system, uCoach to it's entire alumni body. The coaching is being offered as a result of a partnership between the UCLA Extension, UCLA Alumni Affairs, the UCLA Career Centre and Inside Track. The latter provides personalised support, one to one meetings with professional career coaches, career search plan templates, live job workshops and video tutorials. The system is available on the web and as an app, and will be run alongside UCLA’s traditional career centre options.

Dive Brief:

Campus Technology reports on a new initiative from UCLA to deliver career development services to graduates and students in its cooperative extension program through a new digital platform, powered by InsideTrack.

Online resources will include distance career coaching, broadcast and video tutorials on job searching and skill development, and templates for resume building and interviewing.

The digital resources will be available through web browser and mobile applications.

Dive Insight:

This program is an extension of the idea of colleges as a workforce development tool beyond the campus. Many universities host job fairs and networking mixers for young alumni, but few offer training resources to encourage graduates and current students to develop stronger job finding and soft skills for interviewing and networking.

These are the kinds of programs which the federal government is seeking to support in order to facilitate higher job placement and lower loan default rates, while simultaneously justifying the rising cost of education, and doubts about if the investment is worth it in 2016 and beyond.