Despite many college students lamenting they can’t find jobs, few of them take advantage of an available resource: their college career center.
A survey of more than 5,000 recent college grads shows that only 20 percent of college seniors actively use career services. In fact, almost half say they visit career services "rarely" or "never." Given mounting student loan debt and a still-choppy job market, you'd think graduating seniors would be flocking to career services in droves, says Bob LaBombard, CEO of Minneapolis-based GradStaff.
Writing in the AJC Get Schooled blog, LaBombard says both students and colleges have to work harder in the area of job placement.
He says, “College seniors are sold on the idea that social media networking and job search techniques are the most effective ways to get good jobs. In fact, job seekers are increasingly more likely to conduct a job search from their dorm rooms, than they are to walk the 50 or 100 yards to visit career services. The career services model on college campuses is broken and rapidly losing relevance. This is underscored by the fact that, at best, only about 25 percent of graduating seniors have a professional job by the time they graduate – amazing, given that there is an all time high of 5.8 million job openings and we are almost a decade removed from the great recession.”
To read his advice to students on how to search for jobs and colleges to better assist them, go to the AJC Get Schooled blog.
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