JOUR 3010 Article 3

University Career Services – Working for Students

by Morgan Scroggs

If you look for percentage rates of Georgia State University graduates who have successfully landed jobs relevant to their major and career path, you won't find them. But that doesn't mean the school doesn't have reputable job placement – it just measures success differently.

University Career Services director Dr. Kevin Gaw says that placement as an actual process is dead. “Career centers have really evolved,” he says. Job searching is now an international enterprise and the narrowly focused career service programs of the past have had to adapt, just like students in today's job market.

“The more experiences you get from different places, different people, then the stronger candidate you become,” says Gaw who also advises students to be more accepting of relocation when searching for jobs. “What fits your needs most – that's where you want to go.”

Still, the notion of placement has fallen to the wayside in the developing market of career opportunities, which Gaw feels that career services has moved into. Gaw works with a motivated department that works and communicates under one roof – the umbrella of career services. “We don't do placement, but we do work very hard to connect students with employers,” he says.

Gaw tries to get responses from students and alumni, averaging about a 12 percent response rate which he says is hard to generalize, resulting in a lack of quantitative data regarding job placement. “It appears to map onto some of the other data that I've seen … about 75 percent of our students get jobs after they graduate … about 20 percent go to grad school.”

Getting and keeping in contact with students seems to be the largest problem in collecting placement data, but there are some measurement tools available.

“We do assess on-campus interviews,” says Gaw, which provides career services with some data points, specifically about services used through the office. Interviewers then rate the student they interview on how likely they are in moving on in the interview process. “We know …” says Gaw, “63 percent of students who use our services do better in the recruitment process.”

They still have to collect a lot more data to make a generalized statement, but Gaw is confident that students who use any career services will present themselves better to employers, which helps career services influence placement. “It's an alternative to placement,” says Gaw.

Career services offers a number of workshops and career planning resources – from resume writing, interview practice, on-campus recruiting and real-world interviews – as well as job search tools, career fairs, and graduate school planning to name a few.

They work with major employers, continuously expanding business relationships to host major-specific and company-specific fairs, workshops, and site visits. “We want our students to be as prepared as possible … to be viable candidates,” said Gaw.

The movement away from a focus on placement, to a focus on opportunity, explains Gaw, avoids many ethical dilemmas that used to occur. For example, Gaw said, employers in the past would ask universities for their top students in a specific major which barred other students from the opportunity. Now, discrimination does not occur in the process, and students instead are informed en mass of career events and opportunities that employers offer.

The evolution has allowed GSU's career services team to do nearly 14 career events, which has also afforded them the means to do what Gaw describes as “boutique” events, catering to niche groups and majors. This makes it easier to connect students interested in certain employers with employers who are interested in them.