One of the largest missed opportunities amongst career colleges and trade schools are the unemployed (and sometimes unemployable) who are actively seeking employment or a career change. Like education seekers, job seekers usually have accepted the idea of a life change, but the concept of returning to school is not on the immediate forefront of their minds.
Job seekers may not have considered career training as an option, so there is a strong likelihood that your school is the first one to interact with this prospect. The challenge with converting job seekers into students lies in perfecting a targeting and admissions process that effectively addresses their concerns and needs as a prospective student.
These types of leads are usually unemployed. However, many may be employed and looking for a career change. The focus here is career. As a career college or trade school, one of your most important functions is to not only train your students for employment, but to help them secure it. Part of the process is to help a prospective student understand and focus on the outcome of career training: increased employability. Doing so will help you set better expectations with your leads and drive conversion numbers up tremendously.
Since very few schools spend much effort targeting job seekers outside of the traditional career fair setting, costs are typically quite low. In addition to traditional advertising, schools can form partnerships with workforce agencies, staffing firms and other organizations that interact daily with quality job seekers looking to improve their chances at securing meaningful employment. Such partnerships have a nominal cost compared to other types of lead generation campaigns and, if managed properly, can enhance your school’s enrollments by over 25%.
While the concept seems simple, targeting job seekers can be a difficult campaign to set up without a tremendous amount of experience in similar campaigns. In addition to understanding the appropriate mediums to target these types of leads, you also need to prepare your admissions team for handling these types of leads.
Whereas education seekers are going to be much more focused on the typical aspects of your school (financial aid, length of programs, accreditation), job seekers are usually most focused on the types of employment partnerships your school has, the types of jobs realistically available after training(,) and the flexibility of scheduling since many will have other responsibilities (possibly even current employment) that they will need to work around.
The long-term benefits of increasing your marketing scope to target these types of leads are significant and can help you grow not only your bottom line revenue, but also positively impact your branding within your community.