Answers for teams deciding how Navio fits into career services, student support, and partner programs.
Will students actually use it?
Honest answer: most campus career tools don't get used — adoption sits in the single digits, and every career office has one or two they've quietly stopped mentioning. Two things make Navio different in practice. It runs under your institution's brand and domain, so students aren't being asked to open an account with a company they've never heard of. And it pushes one specific action each week — apply to this, practice this, message this person — rather than waiting for a student to log in and browse. Across current pilots, 68% of enrolled & onboarded students are active in a given 30-day window.
How does Navio choose recommended paths?
Each recommendation is built from three inputs: the student's own profile (coursework, skills, stated goals), the live requirements of the roles they're targeting, and the real trajectories of people who've made similar moves. Every path shows its reasoning — a student or advisor can see exactly which skills, courses and history produced it, and override any step in one click. Overrides feed back into the model. We'd rather be auditable than claim to be infallible.
What changes for career advisors?
Most of the manual work goes; the advising stays. Intake forms, scheduling, first-pass resume review, chasing students who've gone quiet — Navio handles all of it, and that's the bulk of a typical advising week. In current deployments, manual work drops from roughly 10 hours of manual & monotonous advisory work to under 1.5 hours, and instead of opening a semester with a line of 1,600 students, advisors already know who needs help, who's active, who's stalled, who's a week from a deadline and hasn't moved. Same headcount, more one-to-one advising. The job doesn't shrink. It gets its time back.
What happens to the career platform we already have?
Nothing. Navio isn't a replacement for Handshake, Symplicity, or whatever job platform you run today — those systems give students access to openings, and they do that job well. Navio does the part that happens before an application is worth sending: making sure a student has the skills, evidence and preparation to be someone the employer says yes to. The two sit alongside each other and read the same student data. Most partners keep their existing platform indefinitely.
How fast can a university launch, and what does it take from our team?
Median time from signed brief to a live student cohort is 2 weeks. From your side it takes roughly 8 hours of staff time in total: one data export, one 60-minute configuration call, and a named contact for questions during setup. Not a dedicated hire, not an IT project, not a procurement-length implementation.
Can Navio work under our brand?
Yes — fully. Students see your name, your logo, your colors, your domain, in your language. Navio doesn't appear anywhere in the student experience. For university systems and partner networks, each institution runs its own branded instance under a single contract, so a consortium launches once instead of negotiating seven times.
What reporting do we get?
Four numbers matter most, and they're live without anyone manually pulling a report: what share of each cohort you hold current data on, advising actions completed, median time from intake to first action, placement outcomes by program and much more. All you need is to ask Navio Agent to report on.
Is student data protected?
Yes, and it's documented rather than asserted. We maintain a completed HECVAT — the standard higher-education vendor security questionnaire — available for review before you reach procurement. Access is scoped by role so an advisor sees only their assigned cohorts, Navio staff hold no standing access to student records, and support work requires logged, time-limited approval. Data residency is set per deployment, so institutions in jurisdictions with in-country storage requirements keep records locally. We operate as a processor under your institution's agreement — your DPA governs — and we align to FERPA, GDPR, UK GDPR and national data protection frameworks across many jurisdictions. See full compliance list.
How is Navio priced?
We price per institution rather than from a rate card — a 2,000-student college running one department and a 40,000-student system running campus-wide shouldn't be paying the same way. What stays consistent: you're priced on enrolled students in scope, not per advisor seat and not per module, and onboarding, integrations and advisor access are included. Nothing about the deployment costs extra once you're live. Send us your enrollment figure and the scope you're considering and you'll have a number within 3 business days, in a format you can take straight into a budget request.
Can we start with one department?
Yes — that's how most partners start. A typical first deployment is one department or one graduating cohort, scoped to a full recruiting cycle: six to twelve months, depending on your academic calendar. We don't run 30-day trials, because placement outcomes aren't observable in 30 days — a short trial measures logins, not results. Success metrics are agreed in writing before launch, and if they aren't met there's no renewal obligation.
