9280-26-R-IFBD-00036

The University of Southern Mississippi, through its Procurement and Contract Services Office located in Greene County, Mississippi, is soliciting sealed bids for a Student Career Assessment and Labor-Market Insight Platform under Bid Number 26-34 (RFx 3160007941). The procurement seeks a comprehensive, cloud-based career exploration and labor-market analytics solution designed to support students, job seekers, and institutional decision makers. The platform must include interest-based career exploration tools with skills inventories that match students to career pathways and degree programs, real-time local labor market insights linked to academic offerings, career pages displaying wages and job openings with ten-year projections, and program-to-career mapping utilizing CIP to O*NET crosswalks. Additionally, the solution must feature an exportable resume builder aligned with in-demand skills, embeddable widgets for degree program pages, and continuous implementation support with documented onboarding plans and 24/7/365 technical support for critical incidents. The system must be a hosted, multi-tenant cloud solution with automatic monthly updates for job postings and quarterly updates for regional labor market information, requiring no manual data refreshes. Sealed bids must be received by 2:00 p.m. Central Time on April 6, 2026, at Bond Hall, Room 214, 118 College Drive #5003, Hattiesburg, Mississippi 39406-0001, with vendor questions due by 5:00 p.m. on March 31, 2026, and University responses provided by April 2, 2026. Award determination will be based on evaluation criteria including cost (30 points), requirements met (40 points), and implementation schedule (30 points), with the University seeking a three-year agreement with potential future use for additional projects at equal or reduced costs.

The procurement documents do not specify any set-aside designations or restrictions limiting responses to particular enterprise categories or disadvantaged business classifications. No incumbent vendor or current contractor is identified in the available solicitation materials. The solution must comply with Mississippi Department of Information Technology Services Security Policy for cloud-hosted solutions and include security and compliance requirements such as LDAP, SAML, Active Directory, or Shibboleth integration; granular role-based access controls; encryption at rest; multi-factor authentication; and compliance with GDPR and all state and federal privacy laws. Respondents must provide a minimum of three customer references from implementations completed within the last 12 months, preferably from higher education institutions, and must demonstrate disaster recovery capabilities with nightly backups and 24-hour restoration capabilities. All vendor responses must address each requirement in the detailed specifications provided in Appendix A and include a completed Excel spreadsheet using the specified format. The procurement documents do not disclose a specific award value or budget range for this solicitation.