Emphasizing Real-World Experience: 3 Strategies for Your Website

Real-world experience and hands-on learning opportunities are hallmarks of the college experience, especially for private, liberal arts schools. As the long-term economic effects of the current pandemic take hold, schools who can link student investment to outcomes provided through hands-on learning will be in the best position to succeed.

Are you emphasizing real-world experience and hands-on learning on your website in a well-designed, engaging, and effective format? These qualities present the opportunity for a school to uniquely engage with prospective students and showcase certain experiences. We have identified three strategies for emphasizing real-world experience on your website to better engage prospective students.

Help Students Visualize Their Experience

It’s key to make sure students understand what it means to have access to resources, amenities, and opportunities that can prepare them for a successful career after they graduate. Of course, the exact opportunities and resources that will matter to them will look different depending on the student’s area of interest.

Regardless of the opportunity or resource, consider presenting them on your website in a way that helps students imagine what it would mean for both their academic experience and their career. A student may know they want to get into nursing or music, but not fully understand how clinical rotations or internship opportunities directly relate to this end goal.

Experience in Action

Biola University has done a fantastic job of taking this into account for prospective students in the sciences with a longer-form video about their new Lim Center. The video features three current students—from biology, physics, and nursing—touring the large and impressive science center. But what makes this video so effective is that the three students explain exactly what types of hands-on and real-world experience students will gain at Biola University.

The students are detailed and concrete with the examples they share. They talk about using high-end scanning electron microscopes for research purposes. They describe the center’s technologically advanced mannequins that can “speak, bleed, and even give birth” as well as how nursing students will work in areas built to emulate that of a real hospital. And prospective students are able to see what these three students are talking about visually, thanks to the well-designed and informative video.

In other words, Biola effectively helps prospective students interested in the sciences visualize what gaining real-world lab experience will look like should they attend.

With a future that feels more uncertain and tenuous due to the current pandemic, make sure you can provide concrete benefits in your marketing so that prospective students can easily understand how these experiences position them for success.

Balance Quality with Quantity

To emphasize breadth, it’s important to delineate the specific type of real-world experience or experiential learning opportunities your school provides. Highlighting a single internship that students did five years ago or two dated capstone projects is not going to necessarily set your school apart.

Students who have access to a variety of experiences are going to be in the best position to succeed due to technological innovation, economic uncertainty, global health concerns, and other factors that will greatly influence the future. This means more experience is important—but so is quality.

Quality and Quantity in Action

TCU has done a good job of highlighting the various types of experiential learning opportunities to which students will have access. This includes opportunities to work for the consulting firm Neeley & Associates, participating in an integrative project that simulates real business problems and more. The webpage also features multiple videos illuminating what these experiences have been like for students in the past, helping prospective students, again, “visualize their experience.”

However, the user experience and design of the page could use some work. And this may prevent students from actually navigating the page and engaging with all of the content. In fact, having fewer examples but presenting them in a more compelling format online could be a better approach.

Of course, having quantity and quality would be the optimal choice, though this admittedly requires more effort and resources. But starting with a few examples that are more compelling and adding more as you have time is likely better than throwing everything onto one page with little attention paid to user experience and design.

Elon University’s dedicated experiential page combines both quality and quantity of their opportunities for students. The school presents a very well-designed and user-friendly webpage revealing a number of experiential learning opportunities for students in a format that is pleasant to engage. Also included are high-level, scannable stats to quickly convey how many of their students have worked with a mentor on a research project, held a leadership position, completed internships, or finished a senior capstone experience.

Tie Real-World Experience Back to Career Outcomes

Ultimately, the most amazing real-world experiences and state-of-the-art facilities—as nice as they are—only matter if they lead to actual career outcomes. In other words, make sure to link how access to hands-on learning opportunities leads to tangible jobs, graduate school, or careers.

Experience + Outcomes

Lipscomb University provides a longer-form article featuring two students who worked as interns at a local engineering firm in Nashville. In addition to detailing the interns’ experience, the article also highlights how a Lipscomb alumna who recently graduated earned a full-time role at the same firm. In other words, the article subtly reveals the school’s relationship with an organization that can translate to both real-world experience (an internship) and career outcomes (a job after graduation).

Another example from Seattle Pacific University shows how they have devoted an entire webpage to career outcomes. The page features impressive facts to put students' (and their parents') minds at ease, such as the percentage of students employed or in graduate school a year after graduating and the average salary of alumni five years out of school.

These snippets work in tandem with the content lower on the page, which highlights how SPU’s valuable real-world experiences helped students secure a career after they graduated.

What’s Next for Your Website?

Does your website highlight real-world experience and hands-on learning opportunities for students? Are you linking these opportunities to tangible student outcomes?

If you’re interested in visiting about this type of content on your website, let’s set up a time to talk!