Advising & Staff Resources

Resources for You!

Stay to up-to-date! Use the Advising & Staff Toolbox to connect with resources on a variety of topics, processes and technologies. 

Success@UMass Development Series

The Success@UMass Development Series is for anyone working in student success. Join us on Friday mornings during the academic year to learn more about campus resources and strategies for supporting student success. This is also a great opportunity to meet and connect with colleagues across campus doing similar work. 

Academic Alert

Advisors play a key role in supporting students who have received referrals from faculty using the Academic Alert Initiative. The UMass Academic Alert initiative partners with instructors and advisors to connect undergraduate students with the resources needed to meet the rigors of college-level academic work and expectations. Through a coordinated referral network, students are guided towards resources that support mastery of course content and academic skill development. 

Student Success Technologies

There are four primary student success technologies at UMass: Spire, Navigate, Schedule Builder, and Handshake. All work together to support a unique aspect of student success and offer student-facing tools as well as staff tools. 

Spire serves as the official student information system. Spire offers course registration, the academic requirements report (degree audit), management of service indicators (holds), and additional student academic records information. 

Navigate is a student persistence and retention tool. Using the academic record information from Spire, Navigate provides advisors and staff tools to proactively reach out to students, track and monitor student performance, easily connect with students through appointment scheduling, and document student interactions across campus. Learn more about Navigate in our three-minute student-facing video: Your Academic Tech Tools, Navigate. For more information about using Navigate to support your work, including information about obtaining access, view the Advising & Staff Toolbox. 

Schedule Builder is a tool that assists students in building a class schedule that meets their needs. Courses can be selected based on a student's preferences and time can be set aside for work and co-curricular activities. Advisors can use Schedule Builder to suggest courses or sections to a student for enrollment. 

Handshake offers students the ability to connect with career resources through internships and job postings, schedule interviews, review and RSVP to upcoming career events, and create a profile for interested employers to review. Additionally, for career services professionals, Handshake provides a tool to streamline and enhance employer relationships, job postings, events, and on-campus interview scheduling.  

Access to Student Success Technologies: All student academic record information is protected. Anyone needing access to this information through Spire or Navigate must be approved through the UMass Amherst official access request and training process prior to gaining access to academic record information.

Additional Resources

Article from EAB: How Will We Measure Student Success in the 2020s?
A review of how student success metrics have evolved over time—and where they might go in the future.

*Note: to view the article linked above, you may need to log in with your EAB account credentials. Here's how:

• Go to www.eab.com
• Click the orange Login Link at the top right of the page
• If you have already created an account, use your username and password to do so (may be different from your Navigate login depending on how you created the account)
• If you do not have an account, select Create an Account
• Fill out the information on the Register page. Use Amherst as the city to population the “your organization” box correctly. Select “University of Massachusetts Amherst”
• Click Go to Step 2 and fill out the required information.
• Select “Register Now” to finish the process