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LAST UPDATED: 14 FEB 2023

This guide is designed for school IT administrators to be able to set up Career Central within their school. It provides an overview of Career Central, and the key decisions to make about the implementation of Career Central.

What is Career Central?
Career Central is a digital platform that supports Careers Advisors to develop and manage student career plans. Career Central is integrated with CareersNZ to keep the database of occupational information always up to date. The program is web based for anywhere, anytime access. Careers staff can customise pages to suit your school and tailored to suit different year levels. Career Central can be used school wide for both career counselling and academic conferencing.

Requirements to run Career Central
Before we get started, you must ensure that your school meets the following requirements:

Your school has a fast, reliable internet connection.
Students are able to access the internet in some manner (i.e. from their own device, or from a school based computer).
Students have access to Google Chrome (preferred), or Safari.
Your school has some way for third parties to authenticate users (Google / Microsoft).
Your school is able to provide IT support to ensure that students and staff are able to access the internet.
You use KAMAR and your school uses Google or Microsoft SSO for Authentication (if you use a different SMS, then you are in the wrong instructions!).

Career Central & Your School’s Data
Career Central requires student and staff information to run. This includes basic student information, such as Name, User ID, Username, & School Email. It also requires staff information such as Names, Titles, Emails, Usernames, Group-classes and more. Additional features of Career Central, such as timetabling and NZQA result analysis require relevant information.

The process to send this data to Career Central is normally an easy one, and is normally achieved by using a listening service within your school management system. Photos can be sent to Career Central to be used on dashboards, to help staff identify students. This is similar to how you have photos on your cloud SMS, or on your library system.

Authentication
Students and Staff need to be able to login to Career Central using their existing school credentials.

We have found that almost every school in NZ & AU are now using Google or Microsoft online, which means we can easily authenticate users into the system. This doesn't require setup on your end (although we need you to do the steps below).

Step 0:

In KAMAR Teachers, please ensure that all staff (who are teachers, or management) have a school email for the school email field. This should be their staff email address. Each staff member should have a unique email address.

Step 1:

Open KAMAR and navigate to
Main Menu => Setup => Server => Directory Services

Step 2:

Check

Stop - if you can already see a Career Central service, and you have two schools in KAMAR then please contact us before proceeding. We will need to load into our system that you have two schools installed in one KAMAR instance. Once we have done this, we will let you know. You can tick school 2, and then send a full update. If this is the case - reply to the email we sent you to inform us.

Create a New Service (Press New Service, then Create)(if you already have Career Central setup, then just edit the existing service).

Fill out the fields with the information below:

JAN 2023 Change

KAMAR will now no longer send passwords, so don't tick this box. You'll need to either authenticate students using Microsoft or Google (more about this in step 6). Please ensure Event Updates box is unticked.

Name: CareerCentral API
Address: kamar.data.cc.school.nz
Port: 443
Timeout: 30
Username: careercentral
Password: Enter the KAMAR Authentication code from support here
XML: Press this circle if not pressed.
Event Updates: Unticked
Full Update: Set this to be the time in your area below

Your Area	Daily Update Time
Upper North Island	5am
Lower North Island	3am
South Island	4am

Days of week: Tick every day of the week
Include NSN (if you can see it): You can tick this box, if your Careers Team want to use the Gateway Management Tool built into Career Central. If you are unsure, leave it unticked for now (it can be ticked at a later date if they request it).

Then, press 'Check and Enable'

Step 3:

Tick the boxes indicated in the diagram below.

If you can't see the pencil, simply click the tick box, and the options should appear, you may even need to click, un-click and click again.

Student Fields to Tick

Please tick the fields indicated.

Note: Schools: Tick the school number your school uses (normally 1)
Note: Passwords: 2023 update - untick this box if it is visible. You'll either need to have students and staff use Microsoft or Google accounts to login to Career Central. In 2023 we will only support Microsoft or Google Authentication (due to KAMAR changing their authentication methods!)

What do we need these student fields for?

Unique ID, School Index - these are used to be able to update the student, and used to uniquely idenitfy the student for data updates sent from KAMAR

NSN - This is used if the school uses Gateway Module to be able to generate reports to send to TEC/MoE

Gender - Used for Careers Advisors to be able to search by gender (for example, to send a specific opportunity to students that only apply to a certain gender).

Login - Username and Password - these are used to let students login. Note - if you use 365 or Google for Auth, then we don't need the password field.

Student Mobile and Email - Sending emails to the student (Only Careers Advisors can send emails, we will never contact students directly). Advisors can also text students (if enabled), mainly used for event management in Career Central.

Date - Start - used to stop the student from appearing in Career Central until they start. This avoids random students or test students appearing in Career Central.

Leaving - Date - used to flag the student for deletion into Past Students

Caregivers - Used for the Parent Portal - lets parents login via their email (magic link), to see the parent portal and career dept. info.

Ethnicity - Used for Advisors to search, so specific information can be sent, and for reports (often produced for BOT etc)

Tutor - Used to let tutors see their students

Staff Fields to Tick

Note: Untick login - password if it is still visible. It is in some versions of KAMAR but will be removed in 2023.

Step 4:

Press check and enable to make sure the connection is working.

Step 5:

For this initial Full Update, ensure that you are sending all of the data. Click on the checkboxes for Student Photos, and Assessments, and click the Send All button for each of these. (note - if you are updating the settings from a previous set of settings (e.g CCL support has directed you to this article, then please re-send all data as well).

Note: The update process is run on the server and may take a while to complete before you see anything happening.

You will get warned about sending photos - from Career Central's perspective, we don't mind if these get sent or not. Only authorised logged in staff` from your school will be able to see them.

Generally, depending on your enrolment policy, you will be fine to send photos (for example, if another cloud hosted system is already using them such as 365 / Atheneum / KAMAR Cloud Hosted) - but please do check before sending them.

You can always leave photos off for now, and turn them on at a later date.

Now press the Run Now button. This will send the first full update.

Step 6:

Now it is time to let Career Central Support know that you have completed the setup. You can reply to the setup email they sent you.

You need to let them know if you either use Microsoft 365 / G Suite / None.

Sample of email to send

Hi,

It is <<your name>> from <<school name>>. I have just sent the full update through to your service, and no errors appeared.

For Students, we use G Suite by Google, and all student emails end in myschool.school.nz

For staff, we use Microsoft 365, and all staff emails end in myschool.school.nz

Thanks,

IT Support.

Step 7 (optional, but recommended):

Sometimes, KAMAR doesn't actually send the full update as expected. One day later, you could log into to the Maintenance Scripts section of KAMAR, and check the Career Central API row. It should not show any errors (example screenshot below of KAMAR working). If there was an error, then try following the instructions above again, or contact Career Central helpdesk for a remote session so it can be fixed.

Please read additional notes

I HAVE COMPLETED THE GUIDE - WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?
Click here to read what happens next.

PASSWORD SECURITY
Career Central recommends that you develop a strong password policy for your school. This includes enforcing a minimum length policy. Ensure that students do not know staff 365 credentials, or KAMAR credentials.

DATA INTEGRITY WITH KAMAR
We encourage you to check that the correct data is loaded into KAMAR for key users.
For example, ensure that the ‘email’ field in a staff user contains the work email of the staff user, if this is what they use at school. Another issue that sometimes occurs is if you have multiple KAMAR schools (i.e school 1 and 2), there might be muddled up results between the schools.

Creating links to Career Central

Creating Links to Career Central

We encourage you to create a link in one or more of the following places:
• Learning Management System (e.g. Moodle)
• Desktop Shortcut
• Homepage of Student Landing Page
• Start Menu Icon
• School Website
• Parent Landing Page (for Parent Portal)

USING OUR LOGO
https://careersstudio.s3.amazonaws.com/brand/Normal.png
We ask that you always reference this image. This way, if we wish to update our brand
assets in the future, you will not have to reupdate the logo.

You should link the logo to https://cc.school.nz/
Please consider our branding guidelines. Do not alter, modify or stretch the logo.
For brand usage questions please contact Tim (tim@careercentral.school.nz).

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