EverTrue analyzed recent Career Moves from alumni of colleges in the New England Small College Athletic Conference (NESCAC). Here’s what we learned.
Over the years, EverTrue has been proud to work with most of the member institutions of the NESCAC. As a Boston-based company, many of our team members graduated from NESCAC colleges including Bowdoin, Williams, Wesleyan, and Hamilton.
In August 2021, we tracked career movement among alumni at these institutions, identifying graduates who changed jobs or were promoted in the previous three months. Then we went a step further and analyzed high-ranking job-changers (any graduate who took on a new role as a vice president, president, C-level executive, or partner).
Here’s what we learned by looking at alumni career movement within the NESCAC.
First off, why is updated career data important?
Career information is a foundational data set for advancement teams. Having up-to-date companies, job titles, and industry data helps teams segment audiences, build strong alumni networks, fuel matching gift programs, update prospect ratings, and more.
Here’s a guide for using career data in alumni relations and development, plus 9 things West Point is doing with continually updated career data.
Yet it’s often difficult to obtain new job information and keep it updated. Or it used to be before EverTrue introduced Career Moves. Now teams can put information like this into action to engage more graduates and build stronger alumni networks.
Analysis of recent Career Moves among NESCAC alumni
Middlebury College is the largest NESCAC member with more than 35,000 alumni on LinkedIn — about twice the number of graduates from Bowdoin or Bates. So it’s no surprise they had the most alumni change jobs in the last 90 days, followed by Wesleyan and Williams.
But all NESCAC colleges had more than 1,000 alumni get promoted, change companies, or retire in the last three months. That means each institution sees anywhere from 4,000-7,500 alumni changing jobs each year.
Now it gets fun!
Even though Bates and Bowdoin are the two smallest NESCAC members, they each saw the highest percentage of alumni change jobs, coming in at just under 6 percent (5.88% to be exact) of all their graduates taking on a new role.
Middlebury saw 5.71% of its graduates change jobs, followed by Connecticut College with 5.56%. All NESCAC institutions had more than 4 percent of their alumni take on new roles.
Prospect researchers love career information. Combined with past giving, it’s a great indicator of capacity and useful for assigning prospects. Career changes are also an opportunity for gift officers to reach out and congratulate their assigned prospects.
Here we analyzed the percentage of alumni who had changed jobs in the last 90 days and took on a title that was Vice President, Partner, or in the C-suite. These high-level job changers are ones your team should watch.
Every NESCAC institution had 12.9% or more of their recent job changers take a VP+ position — demonstrating a solid financial return on investment for their alumni.
Amherst College had the highest percentage with 17.8% of its 1,000 alumni job-changers take a high-ranking position. Trinity saw 17.6% and Wesleyan had 17.4% of their respective alumni gain a VP+ job title.
While each institution had a different top-3 new employers for its alumni job-changers, three companies appeared most often on the list: Google, Morgan Stanley, and J.P. Morgan.
All three happen to have strong matching gift programs. With many NESCAC institutions atop the alumni participation leaderboards, there are hundreds of current donors who can double their gifts via an employer match. Do you know who they are?
How can I put this career data into action?
We’re glad you asked! We’ve put together a guide for using up-to-date career data and ideas from West Point to help you get started.
Career Moves (new from EverTrue) supplies alumni job updates every 90 days, keeping you on top of important career updates. It’s now easy to access this information. Now it’s up to your team to put it into action.
Ready to see more? Request a demo and sample of Career Moves data.
For this analysis, we used our Career Moves tools to analyze LinkedIn data on job changes within NESCAC member institutions, looking at every alum who updated their LinkedIn profile between the end of May to the end of August.