uConnect Roundtable: Small Teams, Big Impact

In this Roundtable session, Amy Ballard (Assistant Director of Online Coaching and Programs, Eastern University) and Georgina Bliss (Associate Director, Washington College Center for Career Development) led a peer discussion on managing uConnect platforms with lean teams. Participants joined from Eastern University, Washington College, Mercer University, Fitchburg State University, and other institutions — ranging from six months into their uConnect journey to nearly a decade of platform experience.

Roundtable highlights:

• Team structure and platform ownership: A look at how both established and newly-onboarded teams divide platform responsibilities, especially when staff capacity is limited relative to student population size.
• High-impact, low-effort features: Participants highlighted the Outcomes Visualization module as a powerful tool for admissions and faculty conversations, along with simple design choices — like unified iconography — that improve the user experience without a heavy lift.
• Time management strategies: The group discussed the value of dedicated, uninterrupted "admin days" over piecemeal editing, and how to prioritize platform projects during high-pressure periods of the year.
• Delegating to student workers: Approaches to assigning ownership of specific site sections, content types, or projects to student employees and interns — plus lessons learned from delegating to professional staff versus students.
• Learning from what didn't work: Participants shared real examples, including decluttering outdated content (removing hundreds of unused resources), restructuring communities and categories based on user behavior, and the importance of fully exploring analytics and reporting tools before assuming a limitation exists.
• Cross-departmental collaboration: Creative approaches to sourcing content, such as partnering with academic departments or other campus offices to help maintain sections of the site.
• Looking ahead: Each participant shared a goal for the next six to twelve months — from building out career skills pages, to launching a people/testimonial module, to strengthening faculty–career center partnerships.

The session closed with participants trading insights on data trends, unexpected top-performing content, and encouragement to keep testing and iterating on their sites.

Roundtable Recording:

Watch the full roundtable for the complete peer discussion on managing uConnect with lean teams. All recordings are available in our Career Everywhere Community.