A SOLUTION TO MANAGE 20,000+ UNIVERSITY STUDENTS LOOKING FOR WORK AND THE EMPLOYERS LOOKING TO HIRE THEM

Challenge:
The Student Employment Services (SES) at the University of Manitoba centralized their day-to-day operations around a classical paper-based flow of information.

Daily operations at SES include, among others, assisting active students and recent graduates in their career development, and keeping in constant contact with a variety of employers in order to help them with their job recruitment.

A crucial aspect of all types of employment centers is in the maintenance of their vital statistics. Students and employers alike are in constant need of numbers pertaining to opportunities in their disciplines of interest. The University administration also requires feedback on the success rates of various programs in order to provide appropriate funding. For SES, statistics are an essential tool influencing the creation of new programs and the improvement of existing ones. The paper-based system at SES included maintaining and compiling a comprehensive list of statistical results. There was an enormous loss of time spent manually counting and recounting results on an ongoing basis. There were also erroneous results due to overlooked follow-ups, duplicated entries, and recording inconsistencies among the staff.

At SES, each staff member maintained their own set of files on employers, including a history of job vacancies and success rates. The filing depended on the disciplines for which each staff member was responsible. However, there are many situations in which the information in one file for one staff member overlaps the information in the file of another staff member. Retrieving and updating files at times thus required distracting co-workers in order to ensure that all the information is consistent and accurate. The decentralized paper-based system was to blame for a lot of the running around between offices, constant reorganizing of filing cabinets, and an excess of sticky-notes or e-mails requesting co-workers to perform duties which they could easily have accomplished themselves had they have direct access to the disjoint files.

Duplicated data was also a recurring problem. One commonplace form of redundancy was filing an employer's profile under say, "GE", and subsequently creating a second file in error, and labeling it "General Electric". The sheer volume of all records made these types of errors difficult to track and rectify.

The problems with the existing filing system were mirrored by multiple versions of employer-tracking electronic files and databases. Lacking conformity and consistency, these repositories were very limited where extensibility, maintainability, scalability, and general usefulness are concerned. Queries didn't provide sufficient results, and the practicality was virtually nil.

Solution:
The definitive solution was to deprecate the file management system which consisted of a variety of MS-Word documents and MS-Access databases in conjunction with miscellaneous paper documents, and replacing it with the development of a new centralized version of a job order tracking database, combined with extended capabilities for employer tracking and report generation.

The new system, dubbed the Student Employment Services Job Order Database (SES JOD), would link job order records to corresponding employer records.

All pertinent information would be available to all staff members. Reports, generated through Microsoft Access, would consist of statistical summaries that could be extracted for any specified period, which could then be compared.

The database would reside on their local area network where all pertinent staff can share relevant information. The U of M has a Novell network in place, and employees are fitted with a minimal of Microsoft Windows 95 desktops. The SES JOD would be stored on a Novell file server with a shared partition that only the SES staff would be able to access.

Some of the targeted purposes for the new system encapsulated the elimination of the manually derived statistics. Another use would be to automatically generate job order printouts for students from pre-defined templates. The previous employed method was to write individual MS-Word files for each job order, which leads to poor file manageability. The new method would consist of extracting the necessary records from the database, and with one click the job order would appear on the screen instantly. With a second click, the document would be sent directly to the printer. Where all information recording is concerned, the new database would eliminate the duplication of data found in disparate repositories.

The platform of choice was Microsoft Access on a Novell file server. The popular relational database management system was already supported on the University network, so additional licenses were not required.

MS-Access' powerful data integrity tools assisted in developing a robust system by enforcing primary-foreign key relationships among the records in the database. These relationships are the safest approach to linking the records because the staff will not be able to delete any specific records unless the related records are first unlinked or removed. Historic records are therefore maintained in a reliable way for future reference.

Security measures were added to allow privileged staff to grant or revoke access to various parts of the database to specific staff members based on their needs.

Change Management:
Careful planning was exercised in order to allow the staff to smoothly transition from the paper-based system to the new centralized electronic database system including:

Reasonable expectations were established, and benefits of the system were disclosed.

All staff was consulted throughout the development of the database to ensure that the newly adopted procedures would reflect sound and effective compliance to an efficient coordination among the staff.

Sufficient training was provided to ensure that the staff of SES could take full advantage of their new database system, including both operational and administrative components. The staff were taken in groups and individually, and they were walked-through all the functions of the database.

Ongoing support was provided to ensure that everyone was comfortable within the new environment.

Results:
The new centralized database system, consisting of over 50 forms, tables and reports, embraced all the functional components of two integrated subsystems: a job order tracking subsystem and an employer tracking subsystem.

A comprehensive statistical reporting system and a flexible querying system were also incorporated. While the reporting system made use of templates to obtain pre-defined reports, such as job order printouts or a summary of activities, the querying system added the ability to filter any sets of records in order to find lists of records based on any given criteria.

SQL queries, which were embedded in Visual Basic for Application (VBA) code, were the backbone of the system.

The SES JOD is also extremely reliable and scalable, offering plenty of room for expansion beyond its current data requirements.

The staff of SES experienced better time management through increased efficiency - not only in organizing the data, but also in knowledge management. The automation of flexible statistical reports eliminated tedious administrative duties. Ad hoc queries permitted the staff to retrieve specific data that was previously unattainable without menial research. Superior communication with employers was also realized. Improvements on the information flow allowed the staff of SES to focus on their primary objectives of assisting students in their job hunting and career development.

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