By Guest Blogger:
Matt Craven, Managing Director
I recently wrote an article on What career development resources look like in the 21st century and I thought I would follow up with a piece that homes in on some of the career programmes that membership organisations are currently running.
As I have previously mentioned, members of professional bodies are almost always ‘career-minded’ people who are focused on career development. It’s often the single reason they joined a professional body in the first place, yet, career resources are often a bit of an after-thought.
Despite research telling us that members really want and need high quality careers advice / resources / services, the provision offered by membership organisations can be somewhat lightweight, which leaves members having to source help, advice and services on the open market.
Here we look at some of the career development programmes currently being offered by membership organisations.
Job Boards
As mentioned above, people see their professional membership as being synonymous with their career and job seeking, which is why many membership organisations have launched job boards in recent years.
With ‘full job board service partners’ and job aggregators readily available, development costs and job acquisition is less of a challenge that it once might have been, and the benefit that membership organisations have over other job boards is that their traffic is ready made i.e. their members.
With a ready-made traffic source and revenue share available for job clicks, developing a branded job board for members can offer financial returns as well as an additional value-added resource that keeps members in their professional bodies’ ecosystem.
Partnerships with CV Writing Companies
Both active and passive job seekers understand that their CV is crucial to success in the job market. It could be argued that for many people, it is their ticket to what they do 8 hours a day, 5 days per week and 48 weeks of the year, until they retire.
With this fact not been lost on members, securing credible assistance with their CV is extremely valuable. CV writing companies have seen this as an opportunity, and some offer an outsourced and free CV appraisal service (as well as critiques of people’s increasing important LinkedIn profile).
These free appraisals come in various guises from automated to in-person, from hard sell to consultative, but when done correctly, it’s an incredibly valuable free resource to offer members.
In addition, some CV writing companies offer a revenue share on sales and this can run into thousands of pounds per month depending on volume.
Online Career Hubs
Providing career advice is a specialist area, and while it’s possible to provide some advice in-house or to commission various guides, blogs and articles to populate a careers section of a website, some membership organisations have embraced the outsourcing route.
There are organisations who offer an association-branded careers portal that contains pre-written guides and resources. Typically, these portals are sold using an annual licencing fee model, with pricing based on the volume of users who are given access to the portal.
As with all services, quality of content can be hit and miss and often misaligned with the needs of qualified and more senior members. There is also the issue of members having to log in and find their way around (something time-poor people are reluctant to do), but if the content is high-quality, this model can offer a quick and easy solution to providing career resources to members.
Live Online Career Workshops
According to a recent report online, 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and visuals are processed 60,000 times faster in the brain than text. Couple this with the fact that YouTube is the second largest search engine on earth, and the education sector is embracing the use of video in the classroom, there’s no escaping the fact that humans prefer video to text.
Articles, blogs and guides are all useful resources, but video is more powerful and can drive significant uplifts in member engagement.
The CV & Interview Advisors offer a programme of online career workshops, which are delivered as live, one-hour webinars, covering topics such as advanced CV writing, LinkedIn, personal branding, interview technique and thought leadership.
Over 20 membership organisations, including large global chartered institutes run this programme, which allows them to promote own-branded, live events to their membership on a completely cost neutral basis.
White-labelled Career Services
Similar to the way in which membership organisations can launch a job board using 3rd party technology and services, the market also affords the opportunity to offer career services on a white-labelled basis.
Setting up a Career Coaching or CV Writing business from scratch would be a large undertaking, but outsourcing to a specialist provider allows membership organisations to offer a full suite of career development services, under their own brand, but have none of the headaches of building infrastructure and service delivery capability.
This opportunity can generate significant revenue streams while providing services that members would otherwise buy on the open market with larger risk and potentially cost.
Matt Craven is the Founder of The CV & Interview Advisors, who are experts in career development and personal branding and work with over 20 membership organisations, including leading institutes and associations. Find out more by emailing Matt at [email protected] or calling 01274 408 222.
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