Missouri Online's Student Lifecycle Support team seeks a student support coach who is passionate about helping others achieve their educational goals. Your gift for conversation and listening will help prospective students explore online degree programs, processes, costs, and career-oriented outcomes. Your work with individuals at the inquiry and application stages will support a larger vision of online student enrollment and persistence across the University of Missouri campuses.
Our trained coaches work with students to help them reach their desired academic outcomes. We do this through exploring student goals and key underlying motivations and identifying objections and difficulties. Ultimately, we seek to empower students to take ownership of their academic success in a way that leads to a fulfilling academic career.
Key Responsibilities:
- Provide exceptional customer service to prospective students seeking enrollment in online degree programs.
- Employ holistic coaching methodologies for online student success, seek to understand individual definitions of academic success, and guide current students toward ownership of their educational journey.
- Ensure frequent, quality interactions with a nimble and timely approach to student needs.
- Explore key academic and personal focus areas to develop positive, actionable plans that support long-term student success.
- Help prospective students develop self-sufficiency and self-direction; provide opportunities for critical thinking, problem-solving, collaboration, communication, and self-reflection.
- Make proactive and intentional connections with prospective students through a variety of communication methods (primarily phone calls) to create and maintain positive relationships with students.
- Help inquirers and applicants understand campus admissions processes, degree and certificate outcomes, and more via phone, email, text, chat, and at online and in-person events.
- Identify and facilitate connection when a student needs specific resources (e.g. financial aid, disability services, program-specific support).
- Incorporate diversity, equity, and inclusion as critical components when developing processes, policies, and communications.
- Develop your own strengths uniquely focused on online student success.
- Take time for thoughtful decision-making, reflection, and learning from our mistakes.
- Track and use data strategically.
- Record information about each prospective student interaction in the appropriate software system(s); report on daily, weekly, monthly, and annual interactions and metrics.
- Collaborate with the coaching team and student support team on communication and outreach strategies.
- Maintain documentation of workflows and look for opportunities to optimize workflows.
- Some travel to education fair events and trade shows may be required as conditions allow.
As with all positions, there may be additional duties and responsibilities required to support the mission and purpose of Missouri Online.
Skills and Talents:
- You are genuinely interested in people.
- You are curious, have a strong drive to excel in your work, enjoy opportunities to grow and develop, love learning new things, and have a desire to understand the inner workings of the university system.
- Missouri Online attracts online students from all over the world from a wide variety of backgrounds and career situations. You must value and appreciate the differences among all people.
- You excel at explaining complicated processes in both verbal and written form.
- You are proficient with technology, and you are not afraid to train to become an expert in multiple systems that will allow you to optimize student support.
Our desired outcome is a successful student. Our definition of success is more than the academic outcomes of the student, it is respecting the intersectionality of student lives and their academic pursuits. It is examining the myriad life roles students have, and how those come together to support their goals in the classroom and in the wider scope of their lives.
We add value by working alongside our student, program, campus, and system partners to layer in a personalized, high-touch, developmentally-focused approach to student empowerment. We work individually with prospective online students at UM-System campuses in order to learn more about their backgrounds and unique situations; by understanding their stories we can inspire them to reach their academic goals.
About Missouri Online:
Missouri Online provides the academic technology and digital learning services for all students in all modalities systemwide. We provide an administrative structure for the delivery of more than 350 fully online and hybrid degree and certificate programs by providing marketing services, prospective and current student coaching and support, program coordination, research, enrollment and learner analytics, instructional design, academic technology, and distance education state authorization coordination. We work with colleagues from all four Universities (the University of Missouri-Columbia, the University of Missouri-Kansas City, the Missouri University of Science and Technology, the University of Missouri-St. Louis) to enhance educational experiences, advance technological services, and increase efficiencies while pursuing continuous collaboration between the four institutions.
