uConnect Product Pulse: The Virtual Career Center's Next Chapter, September 2026

In this session, David Kozhuk (CEO) and Jess Kitt (VP, Customer Success) introduced uConnect's new quarterly Product Pulse series, designed to keep uConnect customers up to speed on what's shipped, what's coming, and the thinking behind it. The conversation centered on uConnect's evolving focus: moving beyond growing engagement with career services toward measurably improving student outcomes.

Product Pulse highlights:

• Why outcomes, why now: David shared data connecting meaningful career services engagement to stronger outcomes — including higher first-year retention, higher graduation rates, and higher median earnings — and explained why student ROI is increasingly central to campus strategy and policy conversations.
• The AI landscape and what makes uConnect different: With more students turning to tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude for career advice, David discussed why generic LLM responses fall short compared to the localized resources, employer relationships, and outcomes data career centers have already built — and how uConnect is designed to surface that institution-specific knowledge.
• Live demo — AI Search in action: Jess walked through recent AI Search improvements, including better handling of typos and casual phrasing, a built-in career tools glossary, community-aware responses, proactive follow-up suggestions, and outcomes/labor market data (including Lightcast insights) feeding directly into student answers.
• Admin controls for outcomes data: A recap of the ability to import outcomes data, preview it internally, and temporarily hide it from AI Search while looping in institutional stakeholders — plus the option to display outcomes as percentages instead of raw counts.
• Smoother login experience: An updated login screen designed to better explain the value of logging in, plus an upcoming single sign-on enhancement so students who are already authenticated elsewhere on campus won't need to log in again separately.
• What's next — Admin Agent: A first look at an AI-powered admin tool that will let staff prompt the system to surface relevant, uncurated content already sitting in the platform's back end — with the ability to eventually schedule recurring content prompts.
• New content partners: Additional third-party content is coming from Pro Resumes, Menlo Coaching, and Leland, expanding the external resource library available to students.
• What's next — AI Search Analytics: A preview of a new dashboard showing how students are using AI Search, including usage trends by user type, top-referenced content, CSAT (thumbs up/down) sentiment, and content gaps based on unanswered student questions.
• What's next — Engagement Scoring: A preview of a new dashboard for identifying individual and cohort-level engagement — including at-risk, curious, and highly engaged student segments — to support more targeted, strategic outreach.
• Labor market taxonomy update: An upcoming shift to Lightcast's newer occupational taxonomy (LOT), designed to better reflect emerging fields like healthcare, AI, and climate-related careers.
• A reminder on outcomes data: David encouraged partners to keep importing historical outcomes and subscriber data, noting that even limited data can meaningfully inspire students — and flagged that the customer education team is available to help audit platform content.

Product Pulse Recording:

Watch the full session for the complete strategic overview, live AI Search demo, and roadmap preview. All recordings are available in our Career Everywhere Community.

Stay tuned for future Product Pulse events each quarter with more exciting uConnect updates.