Trade schools play a vital role in equipping students with the work-ready skills they need to thrive in today’s economy. However, many of the students enrolling in our trade schools face significant challenges, including navigating postsecondary education as first-generation students, managing financial concerns, and balancing studies with nonacademic responsibilities. In this guide, you’ll find 10 simple yet effective tips for equipping students to overcome these challenges and improve outcomes at your trade school.
10 tips to enhance trade school student success
Try implementing these 10 strategies at your trade school to help your students persist through graduation and realize their academic and professional potential.
1. Enhance communication and collaboration
Strong relationships between students, faculty, support staff, and other stakeholders create a network students can rely on to guide them on their journey to success. Academic advisors and student success coaches can make especially impactful contributions here, including:
- Understanding each student’s academic goals and challenges, as well as nonacademic challenges.
- Setting personalized, measurable goals and academic success milestones.
- Referring students to other support resources, from tutoring and language services to child care and financial aid.
Communication with students, faculty members, support staff, family members, and employers can also help ensure alignment as each party works to help students achieve their goals.
2. Use targeted marketing
Tailor your marketing to show the practical value of studying at your trade school and attract students who appreciate the learning opportunity and are motivated to work for their own success. Agile marketing strategies can help deepen relationships between prospective or current students and your institution. These strategies include targeted nurture messages guiding prospects through enrollment, personalized social media messaging to establish contact and answer questions, and customized content based on individual student interests and needs.
3. Provide real-world experience and relevant curricula
Practical, relevant learning is core to a trade school’s value proposition and to its the long-term success of its students. But many trade schools still have opportunities to provide more real-world experience to students in their trade programs. Ways to achieve this include:
- Incorporating the same technologies today’s workplaces use into learning.
- Discussing industry best practices during lessons.
- Updating curricula to align with current industry practices and priorities.
- Designing project-based learning (PBL) assignments based on real problems students may encounter in the workplace.
- Partnering with local businesses and tradespeople to offer internships and externships to your students.
- Offering externships to lecturers at local worksites to keep their knowledge and skills current.
- Hosting meet-and-greet events where students, alumni, faculty, and industry leaders can network.
4. Use labor market data
Labor market data is your trade school’s ultimate resource for aligning your programs with the real-world needs and opportunities of the trades you teach. Opportunities to leverage this data include:
- Prioritizing resource allocation in areas with high or growing labor market demand.
- Practicing curriculum mapping to review your programs for in-demand skills.
- Sharing labor market demand statistics with prospects, students, and alumni.
5. Leverage technology for richer learning experiences
As workplaces embrace technological innovations, so must our classrooms. Cutting-edge technologies can enhance student learning assessment, with some of the most exciting developments coming in adaptive learning. Adaptive learning systems respond to student performance in real time, personalizing lessons and assignments to provide supplemental explanations and extra practice where students need it most. Technology also makes e-mentoring programs possible, facilitating virtual interactions between students and faculty or alumni who are practicing the trades students are studying.
6. Provide comprehensive and personalized support
Offer students a full range of support resources, including:
- Mentorship, academic advising, and success coaching
- Tutoring and language services
- Mental health counseling
- Career counseling
- Child care services
- Accessibility services
- Financial aid
Success coaches are well-positioned to recommend the support resources most relevant to a student’s individual goals and challenges. With the student’s consent, they can also collaborate with support staff to tailor support to the student’s needs. For example, a success coach can help a tutor customize material to the student’s learning style and ensure they address areas where the student feels least confident. Prescriptive analytics can also provide data-driven, AI-powered insights about the most effective interventions for each student.
7. Promote belonging and inclusion
Students with strong community ties and a healthy sense of belonging are more likely to perform well in academics and persevere to graduation. Student clubs, community events, and a positive stance toward diversity can cultivate a community where every student feels welcome and supported in pursuing their goals.
8. Address financial needs
Financial concerns are the top reason students consider dropping out of postsecondary education programs, and can be a major distraction from academic work even for persisting students. Ways to help address these concerns include:
- Financial aid to cover fees, housing, transportation, or emergencies
- Sharing information about government and private funding opportunities like scholarships
- Partnering with local businesses that can offer part-time jobs or paid internships
- Financial literacy workshops and counseling
9. Harness and share data
Data is a vital resource for measuring success, identifying improvement opportunities, and making informed decisions to seize those opportunities. For effective benchmarking and sharper insights based on a holistic perspective of student success at your trade school, overcoming any data silos is crucial. Implement a centralized, collaboration-friendly student success software solution to gather, share, and analyze data from across your institution.
If improving student retention is a priority at your trade school, predictive analytics tools can track student progress data, flag at-risk students, and alert faculty to intervene early.
10. Set and monitor relevant KPIs
You improve what you measure, and key performance indicators (KPIs) are fundamental to how your institution defines and measures success. Based on KPIs like year-on-year retention rates, graduation rates, and class average grades, you can set goals and track the effectiveness of your interventions. Student satisfaction scores and graduate job placement rates are also excellent indicators of a trade school’s success.
Improve technical education outcomes with Watermark
If you’re aiming to improve student outcomes at your trade school, data-driven insights are your secret weapon. Arm yourself to support student success with Watermark Student Success & Engagement.
This innovative student support solution provides user-friendly tools to help you:
- Track student success KPIs across your institution.
- Identify students who need early interventions with predictive analytics.
- Create personalized success pathways to help students achieve their goals.
- Facilitate mobile-friendly engagement with support resources via the native app.
Request a free demo of Student Success & Engagement today to improve student outcomes at your institution.
