Important: As of March 2023, customers will no longer be able to purchase Career Coach licenses as it is being deprecated. The product will still be supported until June 30, 2023, after which customers will no longer have access to it. To save your data from Career Coach, please follow the instructions on this page. For further information, refer to the Career Coach Deprecation FAQs.
Career Coach is a Microsoft Teams for Education app powered by LinkedIn that provides personalized guidance for higher education students to navigate their career journey.
This guide is for educational institutions to get started with Career Coach. You’ll get guidance to create a planning team, define a vision and identify resources, choose an adoption scenario, customize the experience, and build engagement. Use the information provided to make a plan for Career Coach that will meet needs of your students, prepare your academic community, and fit your resources.
Note: If you aren't familiar with Career Coach, you can learn a little about how Career Coach works and more about Career Coach's features.
Create a planning team or committee
Every educational institution has a unique set of needs they want to address by introducing new technology and a specific set of resources to make it happen. Bring together faculty, staff, and IT Admins to work through the steps below to integrate Career Coach. Below is a list of common tasks to implement Career Coach
Tip: Use Microsoft Teams to collaborate, share documents, and meet. Create channels to organize planning and conversations.
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Organizer for team / committee meetings
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Outreach lead for faculty / staff
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Outreach lead for student leadership
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Manager for awareness / outreach campaign for student body
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IT Admins / IT Admins coordinator
Define a vision and identify resources
Define a clear vision for offering Career Coach at your educational institution and determine the resources you will need to bring that vision to life. You can use the questions below to guide the discussion:
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How does Career Coach align with the mission and priorities of our educational institution?
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How can Career Coach support student employment outcomes and encourage student-alumni engagement?
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What are the career planning needs of our students and how can they be met with Career Coach? How can Career Coach be utilized by faculty and staff in and out of the classroom? How can Career Coach be used by the career center?
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When do students need help the most? Near the beginning, middle, or end of their time at our educational institution? At the beginning or the end of a semester? Which students could Career Coach have the biggest impact on?
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What needs to happen to set up Career Coach? What department will be responsible for onboarding and training?
Choose an adoption scenario
Use the vision and resources you identified to evaluate whether you should implement Career Coach for the partial campus scenario or the full campus scenario. Review the details and benefits of each one to assess the planning and resources it will take. Decide which scenario aligns with the impact you want Career Coach to have.
Note: A Career Coach free trial is available for 90 days for 25 students and 25 faculty/staff to help make an informed decision about the adoption scenario you decide to choose. The trial can be activated through the Microsoft 365 admin center.
Partial campus
By adopting Career Coach for part of your campus, you can prioritize access to only specific students, like first-year students, a club or group, work-study students, or a specific program or department. This focuses Career Coach efforts for particular students who need Career Coach or are interested in it, without having to implemented it for the entire institution.
Full campus
With a full campus adoption, all students will have access to Career Coach the whole time they're a student at your educational institution. This way, faculty and staff across departments can implement Career Coach goals and activities into their lessons and courses, and use is not limited to a certain group of students.
Customize Career Coach
Collaborate with your IT Admins to determine how you'll gather the data, files, and resources to customize and update Career Coach with information specific to your institution. Establish a cadence and collection method for updates. For detailed instructions on customizing and integrating Career Coach, visit Career Coach support for IT Admins.
Build engagement
Follow these steps to get everyone in your academic community what they need to get started and build engagement.
1. Measure and share success
Determine metrics like aggregate student engagement data to measure the success and gauge the impact of Career Coach. Create goals and benchmarks to assess on a regular basis and make quick adjustments based on feedback to share successes with your academic community (including the people on your planning team). Here are some questions to consider when determining metrics and benchmarks:
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What is the current engagement with career-focused activities, events, or tools in relation to the whole student body?
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What kinds of activities and events do students respond well to?
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How many students do we expect to reach with Career Coach? How many students would we like to reach?
2. Create awareness
Share info about Career Coach through emails, flyers, and messages. Here are some resources you can send out:
Tailor information for each group in your academic community. Make sure everyone knows what Career Coach is, how it works, and the role they can play:
Students can use Career Coach to help them on their career journey. Inspire them to create a comprehensive profile to get career guidance that’s meaningful to them. Make sure they have the support they need to get started with Career Coach and stay engaged. Students can also use Career Coach to view the LinkedIn profiles of alumni for inspiration and to network.
You could send them the Career Coach quick start guide for students, the 2-minute introduction video, the demo video, and the clickable demo.
Notify alumni that your institution is introducing Career Coach, and that they will get more notifications to connect with current students on LinkedIn to help build their networks. If there are active alumni in the alumni association, encourage them to respond to current students and get involved through student-alumni networking events. Give them details on how to manage their profile visibility and create pathways to engagement by providing alumni with tips or templates for communicating with students.
You could send them the 2-minute introduction video, the demo video, and the clickable demo.
Faculty and staff can advise and mentor students working on Career Coach activities. They can take part in launch events, onboarding sessions, and engagement efforts, as well as include Career Coach in their courses. They need to know the different ways they can participate and what Career Coach resources are available to support them in their role.
Tip: Aggregated student engagement data and other metrics are available in Career Coach Insights to help faculty and staff assess their efforts and better understand student participation.
You could send them the 2-minute introduction video, the demo video, the clickable demo, the informational pamphlet, the informational eBook, or the FAQs.
When launching Career Coach, the IT Admins at your educational institution are responsible for customizing and managing Career Coach. Then, every semester or school year they will need to update the list of majors and the course catalogue to keep students' Career Coach experience up-to-date. They should know how to get that information or who to contact for those lists. Career Coach can be set up from the Career Coach admin support.
You could send them the Career Coach product page, the 2-minute introduction video, the demo video, the clickable demo, the informational pamphlet, the informational eBook, or the FAQs.
3. Support onboarding
Learning how to use Career Coach should be accessible, fun, and time effective. Here's a list of some ideas and notes for creating onboarding and training:
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Ask student leaders to try it out and share their experience with peers. This not only helps them build their network, but also helps build confidence using Career Coach.
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Onboard and train in-person and online to be inclusive of learning styles and schedules.
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Host demos and trainings to make sure students who want to learn about Career Coach have the chance to learn and ask questions.
4. Get feedback
Capture student, faculty, and staff feedback about Career Coach. Write questions to assess engagement, satisfaction, and impact. Here are some questions you can ask:
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How did you find out about Career Coach?
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On a scale of 1 to 10, how easy was it to get started?
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Have you connected with alumni, faculty or staff, or other students?
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On a scale of 1 to 10, how well do you understand the skills you need to develop to get started in a career?
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On a scale of 1 to 10, how helpful is Career Coach in building skills?
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On a scale of 1 to 10, how much confidence do you have that you will be able to get a job that directly connects to your career goals?
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How likely are you to recommend Career Coach to a peer?
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Is there anything you don't like or don't understand about Career Coach?
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Do you know how to get started looking for a job related to your career goals?
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How will you start looking for a job related to your career goals?
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How else can the institution help you with your career journey?
Tip: Use Microsoft Forms to create surveys people can take in five minutes or less.
5. Make Career Coach part of campus life and learning
You can get started with Career Coach goals and activities to bring Career Coach into campus events and classrooms. The guide has easy-to-follow lessons for the goals and activities in Career Coach. Faculty, staff, and student leaders can use the guide to build engagement with Career Coach and help students develop their career aspirations as they grow lifelong personal and professional skills.
Faculty and staff can leverage job market trends from LinkedIn to inform student programs and curriculum. Relevant hiring data can also be used to advise student career decisions and help align students' activities with their career goals.
Resources and support
Career Coach quick start guide for students
Career Coach support for IT Admins
Get started with Microsoft Forms
