by Kailin Burns
Since April, members of the Americas team have travelled to Seattle, Southern California, Atlanta and Washington, DC to host Regional Meet Ups. These half day interactive sessions are an opportunity to meet with colleagues in a specific region to foster learning, sharing and networking amongst graduate management professionals of all levels and program types. The backgrounds of those present at meetups include admissions and recruiting, marketing, career and student services, and program types include the MBA (fulltime, part-time and Exec), online programs and Masters. Some meet-up attendees are industry veterans and others have less than a year of industry experience. And we welcome them all!!! We’ve found that having this diverse group of participants makes the conversations rich and many attendees have commented that this time with their peers is a great learning tool.
Our goal through these events is to share and to learn. We provide an overview of what’s happening in the GME industry as well as a dive into region specific data. We also introduce attendees to some of GMAC’s free products and services that are available to all schools (like the
Validity Study Service, lead generation tools like the Mini GMAT Quiz as well as how to best use GMASS to recruit prospective candidates.) And we learn about the challenges keeping them up at night, new products they are considering and ways they believe GMAC can help.
Most importantly though is that these meet ups provide attendees the opportunity to learn from each other and share best practices amongst colleagues. Many people have shared that being able to spend the day with their peers is a great learning tool and is something that they look forward to.
This year when asked “if you could dream up a tool or product created by GMAC to help you recruit your next class, what would it be, responses included:
- recruitment tools that could be an alternative to grad school fairs
- a tool to help find alumni to engage in recruiting efforts
- a tool to assess emotional intelligence and integrity
- maybe a tool that worked with our CRM to help us identify who has sent us scores or identified us as a school of interest, but that did not start an application?
Industry trends that have surfaced at the Meet-ups include:
- increased recruitment through social media
- confusion amongst candidates with so many program types options
- a demand for greater flexibility in format
- international candidate demand for Supply Chain Management
- increased scholarship awards as reported by candidates
Finally, participants have indicated they’ve begun leveraging organizations like Study Portals, Prospect Cloud, 2U, Kira and Wiley to aid in recruitment efforts. (Mention of these products/services does not serve as a recommendation or endorsement from GMAC.)
There is still time to join the Americas team at a Regional Meet Up and its perfectly acceptable to join us in a region that is different from your home institution—the more the merrier! We will be in Chicago, New York, Boston and Dallas this fall and look forward to meeting you then.
If you have questions about the Americas Regional Meet Up or would like suggest a future location, please email Kailin Burns: kburns@gmac.com
--The Americas Team
Americas Market Development Team