Career Development Center Looks to Expand

Career Services, the primary student job search resource on campus, is looking to expand in order to serve more students.

The Center for Career Development is located in Mattress Factory 106; here staff assist students with assessing and developing their professional goals along with guiding them on the process to achievement. From choosing a major to mock interviews the staff is here to help. CD staff consists of one Career Develop­ment Specialist and two Career develop­ment Assistants who work to serve the UWT community providing guidance to navigate an ever-changing job market. They provide opportunities to sit down and cover LinkedIn basics, letter writing and even resume critiques to best prepare students for what is to follow their edu­cational pursuits.

Career Development Specialist, Jake Nelko, covers things like career planning, self-assessments, graduate school options and applications, and even job offer ne­gotiations. Not only are there the one on one opportunities they also host work­shops and fairs to assist students. Nelko’s advice about “basic career preparedness” is, “Resume yes, you all need a resume but LinkedIn actually is more useful… in terms of creating community, meeting people and networking.”

Now with all of these opportunities to build students skills there is still an issue with being under staffed. As afore­mentioned there is only one Career De­velopment specialist currently on staff. With a proposed expansion, the CD would be looking to hire on more staff or “liaisons” to help further assist students in a variety of ways. For instance, building connections across multiple industries with higher up people in hiring depart­ments, building more job shadow op­portunities and generally being able to service more students as the campus grows.

“Career services at universities have kind of always taken a back seat to aca­demics… the university can no longer just let career services take a backseat to aca­demics. The reason why we are going to school, nowadays, is because we want better jobs,” said ASUWT Senator Seth Lundgaard of the expansion. Working on this expansion and looking at possible growth of career services Nelko said that what he wants to work on on our campus is, “creating an ecosystem of career pre­paredness, meaning that it’s not just the work of the people in the career center to sit down with the students and do this… I want to help prepare our entire campus to be resources because it’s all of our jobs to make sure that people are prepared for careers.” Now even with more profes­sional CD staff the ideal outcomes of this ecosystem effect couldn’t fully be realized as the staff would be delegated to other activities and outreach to build our UWT network.

For career development assistance the CD takes walk-in hours and appointments on Mondays and Wednesdays winter quarter, first come first served from 12:30 p.m. to 1:30 p.m. in 30-minute time slots. Also further assistance can be found on­line on the Student and Enrollment Ser­vices website under career development.