College leaders need to recognize that they play a critical role in the employment success of their students. If students do not receive ongoing, high quality and comprehensive job search preparation training and counseling throughout the entire (2, 4 or 6 year) college experience, it is highly unlikely that they will conduct and effective search for employment.
No college leader should expect students to miraculously transform into efficient job search engines simply because they enter the senior year of college. Like any course of study, job search preparation requires students to become proficient in hundreds of subject areas, before they can conduct an effective search for employment.
Meeting with a Career Services Counselor once a year and regularly visiting the Career Services web site does not in any way constitute quality and comprehensive job search preparation training and counseling. Even worse, many students do not even receive this amount of assistance.
Too many colleges have delegated the employment needs of their students to a single, tiny, understaffed and underfunded department. They call that department Career Services. However, when a single Counselor is responsible for 500 to 1,000 students, comprehensive and quality assistance is impossible. No college that is truly concerned about the employment success of their students would handle job search preparation this way.
College leaders know that they are not doing a good job in this area. However, they do not believe that job search preparation should be expected of them. And yet, most colleges take students in at the age of 18 and graduate them at 21 or 22. Exactly where along this line do college leaders think that students learn the tools and techniques necessary for job hunting success?
Parents and students want colleges to do a much better job of preparing students for the senior year job search. They understand that a student's job search capability is only as good as the training received. Since most colleges are letting their students down, any college that makes a special effort to greatly improve the employment outcomes for their students will be welcomed and celebrated by students and parents alike.
How can something that is so important to students and parents be ignored by colleges? Is there any college out there that already puts student job search preparation at the top of its list of priorities and has achieve great success? If there is, other colleges should use it as a model. If there are none, shame on you.
Bob Roth, a former campus recruiter, is the author of four books: The College Student's Companion, College Success: Advice for Parents of High School and College Students, The College Student's Guide To Landing A Great Job -and- The 4 Realities Of Success During and After College. Known as The "College & Career Success" Coach, Bob writes articles for College Career Services Offices, Campus Newspapers, Parent Associations and Employment Web Sites. Bob has created The Job Identification Machine™, a system that colleges use to identify thousands of employment opportunities for students.
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