What is CPD and why does it matter in international education recruitment?
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Many education agents organise their work around a standard recruitment funnel. Enquiries come in, applications move through the system, enrolments are confirmed, and focus quickly turns to the next intake. If this sounds familiar, you are not alone, but you might be relying on an outdated model, developed at a time when options were limited, information travelled slowly, and student expectations were relatively straightforward.
In today’s market, students have a greater deal of choice, and decisions often unfold over time and across multiple channels. Students and parents find institutions through social media, peers, school counsellors, events, agents and direct outreach—in many cases, all at once. They move ahead with parallel applications at different rates, sometimes pausing, sometimes revisiting earlier ideas or changing direction entirely. This ‘journey’ is different for every student, and as an agent, your greatest strength is in your ability to individualise your approach and accommodate each unique student journey.
What makes for a tidy process map rarely reflects how decisions are actually made. This article draws on insights shared by Alejandra Otero, Founder and CEO, geNEOus, during a recent webinar titled “Becoming a Data-Driven Agent – Optimising Recruitment and Performance Through the Student Journey”, and offers guidance on how to anticipate students’ decision-making processes and support them through a more organic student journey.
The concept of the student journey is often framed using work from PricewaterhouseCoopers, which defines it as “the end‑to‑end sequence of all the interactions that a student experiences throughout their relationship with a university, from the first time they hear about it at high school, to completing their studies, graduating, continuing their learning, and keeping in touch as an alumnus.
For agents, that journey often begins well before a formal enquiry is made. It might start with a conversation during a school fair or a casual question at an agent event. For the student, this often feels like a casual exploration of options and possibilities, more curiosity than commitment.
This journey takes the student all the way through the application process and extends far beyond enrolment, incorporating their study, accommodation, part-time work, and their completion and graduation. Often, the student journey doesn’t even end there, with referrals, long-term advocacy and progression to further study potentially contributing to a lifelong student journey. Many agents do not see this bigger picture, often focusing only on the small section from enquiry to enrolment.
“The journey is not only a series of steps,” said Alejandra Otero. “It includes all of the processes and the emotions that a student goes through at different touchpoints.” Excitement, anxiety, hesitation, reassurance, and relief surface at different moments, particularly for families navigating international education for the first time. Students often rely on you as the most consistent point of support across these shifts, even as timelines stretch and circumstances change.
When you take the full journey into account, it becomes easier to understand the student’s thought processes, allowing you to anticipate uncertainty, reduce friction, and build confidence gradually. When you limit your interactions with students to chasing milestones alone, you miss out on developing relationships and do not see many of the forces that shape your students’ decisions.
The student recruitment funnel helps track movement between stages, highlights where interest drops, and supports planning and reporting. It measures conversions, which makes it useful for understanding outcomes at specific points in time.
What it does not capture is how those outcomes are shaped. It offers little insight into what students experienced before a decision was made, what influenced their confidence, or why momentum slowed. “The funnel measures conversions, whereas the student journey not only sees all of the different touch points the student goes through, but also measures emotions,” said Otero.
When viewed this way, the funnel becomes one element within a wider framework. It captures moments, while the journey explains movement over time. Relying on the funnel alone can lead to optimising steps without understanding how earlier interactions are influencing later choices.
This gap becomes even greater when the student journey is understood to be non-linear. Although diagrams often suggest a clean beginning and end, real decision‑making rarely unfolds that way. Students explore, step back, compare alternatives, and sometimes re‑enter the process after long pauses.
Otero described this reality as a “non‑linear student journey,” reflecting fluctuating confidence, competing influences, and evolving priorities, patterns that are particularly visible among younger generations and their parents, whose expectations have been shaped by digital environments where research, communication, and evaluation happen simultaneously rather than sequentially.
Engaging with the student journey this way not only helps you understand why students make certain decisions, but it also gives insights into where they might go next. By considering the whole journey, you can be much more proactive in your counselling.
A key defining characteristic of modern student decision‑making is multi‑channel engagement. Students rarely move through a single, clearly defined path. Instead, they engage in simultaneous relationships, often without distinguishing between institution and agent‑led touchpoints. As Otero explained, “you’re getting students who are contacting the institution directly, but at the same time they’re going to your agency, writing through socials, and attending an event.” Each of these interactions contributes to how the student perceives their whole experience, and how they value your support along their journey.
Since these touchpoints happen simultaneously, emotions accumulate across the journey rather than forming at isolated moments. “The student journey is when we actually get to identify which emotions we’re enabling these students and their parents to feel throughout the process,” said Otero.
This is particularly evident in the early stages. “At the beginning, especially, there’s a lot of uncertainty, then there’s doubt and many other different experiences and emotions that the students and their parents are actually going through,” Otero noted.
When information feels fragmented, when responses are delayed, or messages conflict across channels, that uncertainty tends to grow rather than resolve. A journey‑led approach involves you seeing how these interactions are connected and cumulative, and understanding clearly what students have already encountered and how those experiences shape their expectations as they move forward.
Moving from a recruitment funnel to a student journey ecosystem involves designing experiences rather than simply optimising processes, investing in relationships rather than chasing milestones, and recognising that trust develops over time.
In a market shaped by choice, complexity, and emotion, students rarely remember systems or procedures. They remember the support you gave them and the clarity you brought to their journey.
