Pausing for a few moments to look back at our achievements and exploits in 2024, we're proud of the work we’re doing here at Pathways and very grateful for your continued support.
I enjoyed writing our review of 2023 this time last year, as it forced me to take a little bit of time to pause and appreciate our achievements that year, when we’re always rushing and moving onto the next big thing.
So here I am a year later, the Christmas tree is already up and I’m wondering where the time has gone. It’s certainly been a year filled with adventure.
Growth
We’re really proud of what we’re doing here at Pathways. We feel there’s lots of value in the tools we’re developing and continue to be incredibly grateful when we hear positive feedback from our clients on how we’re an integral part in helping them achieve more.
We’re continuing our strong growth within the Further Education sector and have been excited to open new Pathways accounts for another 20+ colleges this year, whilst retaining our incredibly high retention rate for existing clients. After hitting the milestone of 100 clients last year, that’s an annual growth of over 20%. So thank you very much to you all.
Higher Education
Our steps into Higher Education with our Pathways Graduate product have seen us visit all parts of the UK, attending a range of HE marketing, content, web and digital conferences.
It’s been an adventure. Thank you to Premier Inn for keeping our costs down!
We’ve met so many fantastic people at universities and other providers working in the sector. We understand the difficulties the sector is facing at the moment, but have been buoyed by the energy and enthusiasm of the people we’ve had the pleasure of meeting.
My highlight was a trip to the Scottish Web Folk Conference hosted by the University of Dundee (one of our newest clients), a place where I graduated back in 1998. Very strange being back in the city, however I received such a warm welcome from Andrew, Pete, Rob and the team at Dundee. It was great to be back!
2024 has seen us partner with 4 new university clients where our Pathways Graduate product has been deployed across all their undergraduate course pages. We’ve very strong interest from other universities across the UK, so hopefully more news on that in early 2025 (watch out for a Welsh language version of Pathways coming soon 😉).
Automation
In my review of 2023, I highlighted that we had some big changes coming to the way we map your courses to careers. We launched our new automatic mapping technology in early 2024 and it has been incredibly successful.
With a single line of code in your course template, we’re now keeping your entire course offering up to date in the Pathways system and mapped to careers, without the need for any manual intervention - even when new courses come online.
It’s been a great achievement by the team here and we’ve received so much positive feedback on this.
On to 2025
System update
Throughout much of 2024, we’ve been working on a large system update that will give the us the foundations for doing so much more over the coming years.
Whilst there will be no functional or visual changes to the Pathways products embedded across your websites, your Pathways admin system will have a visual refresh. As well as many changes behind the scenes.
We’ll keep you updated on this, however look out for the refresh coming in the first quarter of 2025.
Meet us in person
Next year, we’re starting quickly with two conferences in January.
First, we’re returning as a sponsor to the Heloa National Conference on 16th January to showcase our Pathways Graduate product for universities.
Then we’re excited to be back at the College Marketing Network’s Annual Conference on the 27th January, where we’re exhibiting at the conference and sponsoring the FE First Award category for ‘Marketing Superstar’. We have a great relationship with Emma at CMN and look forward to working closely throughout 2025.
We're currently reviewing our conference plans for the rest of 2025, so keep an eye open for announcements on where we’ll be.
Thank you
I said it last year and we’ll continue to say it. Thank you to all our clients for your continued support. Your feedback helps drive the products further and we look forward to working with you in 2025 and beyond.
Merry Christmas.
