The Key to Professional & Continuing Education Success Starts with Your Systems Data

Systems are the processes, people, and technology that make your university run on a day-to-day basis. There are a thousand of them that make up your infrastructure, from recruiting and enrollment to learning design and continuing education. It’s these systems that dictate the experiences your students, staff, and faculty have within your university. As such, they can be the key to your success or the lynchpin that keeps you stuck in the past. Thus, understanding where and when your systems are blocked and how they impact your strategies is critical to building a successful future. 

One of the most common fallacies that university leaders believe is that their systems are limited to the features of their technology tools. They get stuck on what the tool provides instead of focusing on the experience they want their users to have. When, in fact, technology is a tool by which you create engaging experiences for your students, staff, and faculty. When you limit yourself to what features your technology offers, you also limit your ability to ideate and implement strategies to improve student experiences, increase bottom-line growth, and transform the way your university operates. 

While technology shouldn’t be a blocker to innovation, you can’t unlock successful strategies if you don’t have the right systems in place to support them.

Building the Basic System Structure with Data

To truly transform student and alumni experiences, institutions must first ensure they understand if their foundational systems are built to meet their needs. Having the right information is critical to assessing if your systems accelerate your growth. This is where Noodle’s Hierarchy of Data Needs comes in. Before you can run with the latest cutting-edge technology, you need a thoughtful, intentional approach to building your systems and injecting technology tools into those systems. 

We can break this hierarchy down into three key phases: 

1. Building Your Foundation

That starts with your ability to access historical data and understand how your university got to where it is today. That means having a secure data management foundation for collecting, storing, and analyzing data and behavior from students, staff, and faculty. Only once you have this data management foundation in place, can you forecast and identify trends specific to your institution.

2. Forecasting Institutional Trends

Third party organizations push out industry trend reports and forecasts every year. And, while helpful for understanding macro market changes, they aren’t always relevant to your university or your students’ needs. Creating trend forecasts for your institution both over time and against peer institutions lets you dig into the minutiae of how your students respond to recruitment messages, the blockers that limit student retention, and how engaged your alumni are with your university long after they graduate. If the devil is in the details, your next big idea is in these insights. 

3. Responding in Real-Time

Forecasting helps you develop strategies, but how do you know they’re working in today’s environment? Real-time data-driven insights are a window into the lived experiences of your students, staff, and faculty and how they navigate your university systems. They help you pinpoint and resolve system blockers as they appear, implement cutting-edge technology that actually improves experiences, and rapidly adjust your strategies in the face of changing circumstances. 

It’s these insights about your institution, your faculty, and your students that drive transformative and realistic strategy. Too many university leaders get caught up in the latest and greatest technology tools without first understanding what systems they already have in place, how those systems interact with one another, and how each new technology tool complements existing infrastructure. 

Applying the Hierarchy of Data Needs to Continuing Education

Continuing education is a powerful way to engage alumni, drive lifelong learning, and strengthen university revenue streams—but only if you have the right systems in place. For example, many institutions struggle to track alumni engagement, predict who will return for further education, and adapt to changing workforce needs. 

By applying Noodle’s Hierarchy of Data Needs, universities can transform scattered alumni data into actionable insights, allowing them to personalize outreach and expand continuing education programs.

1. Understanding Your Alumni

In the first phase of Noodle’s Hierarchy of Data Needs, the goal is to ensure your university maintains a centralized alumni data repository and a process for capturing the right kinds of information from students and alumni. The smallest detail can provide insights to transform your current students into engaged alumni post-graduation.

Can you answer these questions about your alumni:

• What’s their current contact information?
• What programs did they follow or courses did they take?
• What degrees (if any) did they achieve?
• Have they engaged with alumni marketing materials in the past? If so, which ones did they respond to?
• Are alumni participating in annual giving campaigns?
• Where are they working?

If you can’t answer these questions, you should focus on building a strong data management solution before trying to implement any additional systems or tools. You should also evaluate the kinds of information you need to make informed decisions about alumni personalization strategies, non-credential learning programs, and other continuing education strategies. 

2. Predicting Which Students Become Lifelong Learners and Donors

Once you have a large enough database of alumni information, you can uncover trends within your community and overlay historic industry data to help you better predict which students might come back for continuing education courses after they’ve entered the professional world. 

What kinds of markers should you be looking for:

• Are alumni receptive to marketing materials from your institution?
• Are there degree programs or certifications that consistently need continuing education?
• Were engaged alumni actively engaged with school-sanctioned organizations?
• Are alumni enrolled in recruitment for their employers?
• Are alumni updating their profile data regularly on your systems?

In the second phase of Noodle’s Hierarchy of Data Needs, you’re able to use the information you have on hand to identify trends that lead to specific outcomes. Once you’ve identified these markers, you can implement targeted engagement strategies like personalized communications or early exposure to graduate-level coursework. You can also get an idea of how different alumni groups will respond to specific continuing education messaging. 

3. Responding to Changing Alumni Needs

From the outset, universities should be instilling the value of lifelong learning into every student who passes through their programs. Every industry and profession is growing and innovating (some faster than others), and professionals need to know how to keep their skills sharp. With industry-aligned data, you can proactively prompt alumni to pursue professional skill development and continuing education with targeted campaigns aimed at reinforcing your university’s brand and reminding alumni why they chose your institution for their undergrad and graduate programs. It is also a powerful mechanism to understand if the programs you are offering align with broader industry needs.

Data helps you build deeper connections with alumni and leverage personalized or triggered recruitment strategies like: 

• Programs to help alumni upskill in emerging tech languages and advancements in science.
• Support for adapting to new federally mandated regulations and industry changes.
• Programs offering CEUs for alumni to maintain licensure with the latest best practices and skills
• Programs enabling alumni to bring their knowledge into the classroom 
• On-site corporate training programs for organizations with a large alumni base

These hierarchical phases build upon one another. You can’t market continuing education certifications about advancements in science to alumni if you don’t know how to contact them or when they completed their programs at your university. But once you unblock your systems and are able to identify trends within your databases, you can unlock exponential opportunities to target alumni for additional course offerings. 

Are your systems blocking your institution’s growth? Join us at UPCEA 2025 to explore how unblocking them can unlock new opportunities for enrollment, retention, and lifelong learning.

Regina Law is Noodle’s Vice President of Partnership Development for Technology Solutions. Noodle is the leading tech-enabled strategy and services partner for higher education. A certified B corporation, Noodle (founded in 2013) has developed infrastructure and online enrollment growth for some of the best academic institutions in the world. Noodle empowers universities to transform the world through life-changing learning. It offers strategic consulting to advise partners as they navigate their futures, provides services tailored to meet their growth aspirations, and deploys technology, tools, and platforms that integrate for scale, making our partners more resilient, responsive, efficient, and interconnected.