Shocker Career Accelerator recently announced that Handshake, the university’s current job search platform, has been replaced with a more WSU-centric program. The new platform, Shocker Central, succeeded Handshake on Aug. 2. 

According to Kim Kufahl, the Shocker Career Accelerator (SCA) assistant director of marketing and communications, the SCA was one of the first 60 organizations in the nation to use Handshake when it was launched. 

“We’ve always just been on the cusp of what is new and what’s innovative,” Kufahl said. “Handshake was great, and it was good for the time that we had it, but now it’s time for something new; it’s time for something better.”

Kufahl said Shocker Central, which is hosted by a company called 12twenty, offers advanced analytics and improved alumni engagement features. 

“It will give us more holistic applied learning, and what 12twenty gives us is a data-driven approach,” Kufahl said. 

Kufahl explained the program will also help SCA track work and internship experiences students are participating in and where alumni are getting jobs after they graduate from Wichita State. 

“Students will be able to see that information,” Kufahl said. “They’ll be able to see where current students are working, giving them a bigger picture of opportunities where they can be a part of it.”

Kufahl said because of the more personalized features, SCA can take that information and offer students more personalized career coaching sessions. 

“We’re already doing a lot,” Kufahl said. “ But now we can dig even deeper than that. We can monitor the student’s successes and identify where students need more support within Shocker Central and tailor that coaching and guidance throughout their full career journey.”

Brian Austin, the SCA director of employer relations, said he’s excited about the transition into Shocker Central. He said the change was made for many different reasons. 

“Handshake is a good system; it’s one of the best,” Austin said. “There aren’t very many career services management (CSM) systems on the market. There’s really only three major ones, you could argue, maybe four.” 

According to Austin, the four CSM systems on the market for universities are Handshake, Simplicity, GradLeaders and 12twenty, the latter of which Austin said is gaining significant market share because of its features. 

“One of the big things that we are excited about is 12twenty’s capabilities to capture specific outcome data from students,” Austin said. “(The data from) their first destination survey will allow students and parents and all kinds of folks to be able to see where our students are working and what they’re learning.”

The outcome data that Austin said Shocker Central will capture includes where students are working, how many are working or still seeking work, and how many students are pursuing graduate school or other education. 

“Generally, that’s not reported very well at most institutions, and we could do a better job of reporting it,” Austin said. “ If we had the data, we could do a better job of reporting it here at Wichita State University, too.”

Austin explained that Shocker Central will be more user-friendly and customizable. 

“Handshake was a one-size-fits-all system,” Austin said. “One of the things that was challenging was, within Handshake, we couldn’t necessarily highlight features that were provided by our local employers.”

Austin explained that there wasn’t a way for SCA to highlight local opportunities in a student’s feed through the online jobs applied learning portal. 

“We have the capability to kind of curate that a little bit so that a student is able to see when they log in, here are the employers that are directly engaging with Wichita State University and Shocker Career Accelerator,” Austin said. “As opposed to what you got in Handshake, which was just 26,000 job opportunities laid out in a tile format that you… had to dig into a little bit before you were able to find the local ones that applied to you specifically.” 

According to Austin, Handshake talked about democratizing opportunities and, he said, that while that was great, it meant that if an employer selected all majors, then that opportunity, regardless of whether it was relevant to a student’s major or not, would pop up as a relevant opportunity.

“For us, we want our fine arts students to see the opportunities that really are what align with their career goals in fine arts, we want our accounting students to see opportunities related to accounting,” Austin said. “Opportunities for house painting or car washing, those are great part-time jobs, but we want to highlight the applied learning opportunities, the internships, the on-campus jobs, that kind of thing.” 

Austin hopes the percentage of students that complete the first destination surveys, which captures students’ internship experiences, will help bring more collaborations across campus with different colleges and departments and help SCA increase the student response rate to the outcome surveys. 

“(I’m) looking forward to that,” Austin said. “I think there’s a great deal of motivation. I think everybody is really eager to collect this data and report on it and celebrate the wins of our students and celebrate their successes.” 

Kufahl said SCA is slowly transitioning to Shocker Central after officially rolling out the program on Aug. 2. SCA is urging students to update their passwords and download their resume and other information they want out of Handshake.