Building a Full-Lifecycle Career Services Platform
How a university career services office partnered with Skills Union to replace fragmented systems with an integrated, AI-enabled career management platform
Institution
Major public university in Asia-Pacific (30,000+ students)
Office
University career services and employer engagement
Project Type
Custom career services management platform
Scope
Career services, mentorship management, internship management
Technology
AI-enabled matching, skills profiling, analytics, employer portal
Implementation
Phased rollout across 17 months
Why this partnership matters
This project represents a shift from career services as a fragmented support function to career services as institutional infrastructure. The platform is designed to connect students, alumni, employers, and mentors within a single system, creating visibility and accountability across the full career lifecycle.
Context
University career services offices are under growing pressure. Graduate employability metrics increasingly influence rankings, funding, and institutional reputation. Employers expect structured engagement channels. Students and alumni expect personalised, technology-enabled career support that reflects how they navigate the rest of their professional lives.
Yet most career services teams still operate across fragmented tools: spreadsheets for employer tracking, separate systems for internships, manual matching for mentorship, and limited visibility into outcomes. The result is reactive rather than strategic, with no unified view of how students move from education into employment and beyond.
For institutions serious about demonstrating career impact, this fragmentation is a structural constraint. The question is no longer whether to invest in career services technology, but how to build something that works across the full lifecycle, from first-year career exploration through to alumni mentorship and employer partnerships.
The Opportunity
The university's career services office identified the need for a unified platform that could replace multiple disconnected systems with an integrated solution. The platform needed to serve several distinct user groups: students exploring career paths, graduates seeking employment, alumni returning as mentors, employers posting opportunities, and administrators tracking outcomes across all of them.
The institution had an existing five-year relationship with Skills Union through a separate training partnership. That track record, combined with Skills Union's purpose-built career services technology and a national innovation grant for workforce technology, created the conditions for a deeper engagement.
Rather than procuring an off-the-shelf platform and adapting workflows to fit, the university chose to work with a partner that could build a solution configured to its specific needs, branded to its identity, and integrated with its existing systems.
The Platform
The solution is a full-lifecycle career services management platform, purpose-built for higher education. It spans three integrated modules, each designed to address a distinct part of the career services function while sharing a common data layer, user experience, and analytics framework.
Career Services Management
The core module connecting students and alumni with career opportunities, employer partnerships, and personalised guidance.
- Job and internship listings with intelligent search, filtering, and application tracking
- AI-driven skills profiling aligned to labour market benchmarks and role archetypes
- Skills match scoring to quantify fit and identify development gaps
- Personalised recommendations for jobs, courses, mentors, and events
- Intelligent matching with career coaches and mentors based on background and goals
- Workshop and event management with attendance, waitlists, and feedback analytics
- Employer portal with onboarding, job posting approvals, and relationship management
Mentorship Management
A structured system for connecting students and alumni with mentors, managing relationships, and tracking outcomes.
- Profile-driven matching using academic background, career interests, and expertise
- Self-serve scheduling with calendar sync, virtual meeting integration, and reminders
- Collaborative goal setting and progress tracking through session notes and journaling
- Post-session feedback and evaluation tied to mentorship outcomes
- Programme dashboards showing participation, satisfaction, and goal attainment
Internship Management
End-to-end management of the internship lifecycle, from posting through placement to evaluation.
- Unified internship portal with search, filtering, and direct-apply functionality
- Configurable placement workflows supporting multiple programme structures
- Progress monitoring with milestone tracking and structured employer feedback
- Reporting and document management for agreements, evaluations, and certificates
- Integrated communications with templates, tracking analytics, and personalisation
What Sits Underneath
Beyond the three functional modules, the platform includes cross-cutting capabilities that make the system work as institutional infrastructure rather than a collection of tools.
AI and Skills Intelligence
Dynamic skills profiling, competency benchmarking against industry frameworks, and adaptive recommendation engines that improve as usage data grows.
Analytics and Reporting
Institutional dashboards, cohort-level performance views, employer engagement metrics, and export-ready reporting for leadership and accreditation.
Assessment Framework
Self-assessments, 360-degree reviews, online skills validation, and scored results that feed directly into career planning and coaching.
Integration and Security
SSO, calendar sync, data integration with student information systems, and enterprise-grade security with role-based access controls and governance.
Validated by Industry
The platform has been shaped through direct input from industry leaders and is currently in pilot with multiple institutions. Early feedback from senior professionals in learning, HR, and talent management has been consistently strong.
"This is exactly what we needed. Codified skills, mapping out core competencies for roles, and then building people into those competencies. It's really awesome."
Former Director of Learning and Development, Global Cloud Services Provider
"We've had to look at a lot of similar platforms. The interface you've developed is the best I've seen in terms of simplicity and intuitiveness. Being able to look at something and get it within the first few seconds, you've really done a very good job."
HR and People Operations Manager
Implementation
The platform is being delivered through a structured agile methodology over 17 months, with two major phases. Phase one covers career services and mentorship management. Phase two adds internship management. Each phase follows a cycle of requirements, prototyping, user testing, sprint development, UAT, and staged rollout.
The university participates in requirements workshops, sprint reviews, and user acceptance testing, maintaining oversight and input without carrying the technical build. Change management, training, and knowledge transfer are built into each phase, ensuring the institution can operate and evolve the platform independently.
The dedicated project team includes a product manager with direct experience in Singapore's education ecosystem, a technical architect with 20+ years in software engineering, and a full development team covering frontend, backend, QA, data engineering, and UI/UX design.
Looking Ahead
As the platform rolls out across the university, the focus shifts from implementation to impact. With a unified system connecting students, alumni, employers, and mentors, the institution is able to move beyond transactional career services, toward a continuous career development ecosystem. Over time, the platform’s data layer will provide deeper insight into how skills develop, how mentorship influences outcomes, and how employer engagement translates into graduate employment.
For Skills Union, this large-scale implementation demonstrates how integrated career services technology can be designed and deployed in higher education to deliver measurable student outcomes.
As universities face increasing pressure to demonstrate graduate employability, skills readiness, and career impact, career services can no longer operate as a collection of disconnected tools. Institutions need infrastructure that connects learning, employability, employer engagement, and alumni networks into a single lifecycle system.
Across the sector, the shift toward outcomes-based education is accelerating. Universities are being asked not only to educate students, but to show clear pathways from education to employment.
Skills Union’s experience delivering complex, institution-wide career services management platforms allows us to help universities respond to this shift - building scalable systems that improve visibility into outcomes, strengthen employer engagement, and support students throughout their full career journey.
