About QuickStart
QuickStart provides comprehensive IT training for emerging and established professionals. Founded in Austin, TX in 1988, they have provided industry-aligned courses for 35 years, empowering IT professionals with leading-edge skills for the workforce. The company currently offers bootcamps for learners across the United States in Cybersecurity, Cloud Engineering, Software Engineering, and Data Science & Analytics. The programs draw close to 700 students annually, 16% of whom are employed before the end of their program. For those not employed before the end of the program, QuickStart provides a comprehensive career services curriculum, powered by a team of 3 career experts.
Career Services Pain Points
The QuickStart Career Services team faced 3 main challenges:
The bootcamps were launched quickly, without infrastructure to communicate with or track students post-graduation
The team was using Excel spreadsheets and manual tasks to maintain records
They thought their placement rate was below 15% because they could not get in touch with students
Career content was not integrated into the LMS
The team had to rely on complex automation triggers to email the curriculum to students at the right time
The career team spent so much time doing administrative work that they could not focus on strategic work like building employer partnerships
QuickStart initially partnered with Huntr. While it was somewhat helpful, they ultimately found it lacking in three key ways:
It could not house all students
There was not a community aspect or option to communicate with all members
There was not a way to engage with employers
Solution
Prentus offered multiple solutions to solve QuickStart’s problems:
Comprehensive tracking of all students, jobseekers, and alumni
Communication tools to send information to all students at once, or through select groupings (e.g., by cohort)
Collaboration with employer partners to showcase talent and build relationships
Visibility into every individual student’s progress from student to jobseeker to hired
Assigning tasks to students to guide them step by step through the process
Delivering material feedback directly within the system to scale support and save time
Logic requiring that materials are approved before meeting with a coach to reserve coaching time for high-quality conversations
Results
During the first year of using Prentus, QuickStart:
More than doubled student engagement with career services, from 30% to over 60% using the Community feature
Decreased career services-related refund requests by 17%, saving $500,000
Saved significant administrative time by providing feedback to students directly in Prentus
Eliminated the need to hire an additional career coach, saving the cost of another FTE
Increased employer engagement via talent links - employers who had gone silent responded to talent links the same day to set up a conversation
Best Practices
Prentus helps QuickStart achieve these results through multiple strategies:
Introduce Prentus to students during week 1 of their course
Require regular Prentus logins to retain access to career services support
Posting in the Community Monday-Friday with themes (e.g., Motivational Monday) and visuals (e.g., emojis, short videos) to share information
Require material submissions through Prentus before meeting with a career coach
Tag unresponsive jobseekers as such and make multiple outreach attempts to connect
Sending email blasts to jobseekers about job opportunities, event reminders, etc.
