Executive Summary
Peer-to-Peer Learning
Over the last year and a half, Handshake has made a significant investment in democratizing access to information. With the varied backgrounds of students and alumni on Handshake, we recognized that there was a lot of valuable experience that could be shared. To tap into this source of information, we identified the need to remove several barriers - we not only needed to make it easy for users to share, but we also needed to highlight the most valuable details and make it easy to find. Our first major foray into peer-to-peer learning was the launch of two features - Reviews and Q&A.
Both features have been optimized to highlight the most pertinent details to users and are displayed across schools and throughout the product - from the student homepage, to employer profiles, to individual job postings - so that students can easily access and act on the information. Both features have seen enormous success since their launch. We highly encourage you to read through student engagement outcomes from these peer learning features in our official Reviews and Q&A Success Report.
Peer Messaging
After we launched Reviews and Q&A, we started hearing directly from students, alums and career centers about wanting to engage even deeper. Students not only want to hear about their peers’ experiences, they want to foster their network and ask more specific follow-up questions. With this in mind, we’re excited to announce the beta of Peer Messaging. This will empower students and alumni to opt-in to making their Handshake profile visible to peers on their campus and beyond, allowing them to message students across all Handshake schools. To illustrate, a First Gen Freshmen majoring in Psychology who may not have an extensive network of family or friends can now connect with another student from across the country to learn more about a new industry interest. The number of connections our students will be able to cultivate will be amplified with peer messaging.
We’re incredibly excited about the impact these features will have on increasing student engagement, democratizing access to career-related information, and complimenting the education your teams already provide. This article is designed to give an overview of these new features - how they'll work, what they will look like, and what policies we’re putting in place to continue to ensure that Handshake is a safe space for our users. We will be releasing these features in beta later this spring, with a launch to all schools planned for summer 2019.
Read more about how Peer Messaging works here!