As graduation nears, college career centers are under pressure to help not only the Class of 2010 navigate the tight job market, but also graduates of 2009—and even the year before—who are still unemployed.
Many alumni are either unemployed, underemployed, or in positions that do not match their qualifications or professional interests. The job market began constricting for the Class of 2008 and may not loosen until after members of the Class of 2011 begin job-hunting, says Phil D. Gardner, director of the Collegiate Employment Research Institute, at Michigan State University.
“We’re going to have three, probably four classes that are really not engaged or aligned in the labor market at all,” he says. “They’re working in jobs that they don’t have aspirations for, working multiple part-time jobs, or they’re underutilized in their positions.”
In response, students and alumni alike are seeking advice in greater numbers. Colleges are responding with more workshops, career fairs, and field trips for current students. And they are extending the amount of time that recent alumni can access job-search tools.
Increased Competition
At the University of Dayton, about 15 percent of career-service appointments are with alumni seeking jobs, says Jason C. Eckert, director of career services. That is up from about 10 percent before the recession.
“That’s also, unfortunately, complicating the job search for the Class of 2010,” Mr. Eckert says, “because not only are they competing against other university graduates, but they are also competing with young alumni who did not achieve the success they were hoping for upon college graduation.”
Employers, he says, do not seem to have a strong preference for students a year out of college over those who are graduating this year, especially if an alumnus’s job experience is unrelated to the employer’s industry.
Nationally, the number of jobs for new college graduates in 2009 fell by 35 to 40 percent compared with 2008, according to the Michigan State institute’s survey of more than 1,800 employers, released in November.
A more recent survey of 177 employers, by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, found that employers have 5.3 percent more job opportunities for this year’s college graduates than they did last year—positions that could potentially be filled by last year’s graduates.
At Dayton, graduating seniors and those from the Class of 2009 generally need the same types of assistance. The university’s 12 career-service staff members typically give advice on improving résumés and cover letters, and help students and alumni to network on Web sites like LinkedIn and Twitter.
To further help alumni and students, Dayton developed a five-part plan in the past academic year: Add job-search workshops, cultivate partnerships with small businesses, help students learn about social networking, establish an employer advisory board, and add a career fair in the spring, when employers can better gauge how many people they should hire.
Since then Mr. Eckert has seen an increase in the number of companies at Dayton’s career fairs, including the one this spring. Last year 60 employers registered for the event, compared with 70 this April.
“I think there’s been in the last month or so some minor improvements in the job market,” he says. “Maybe I’m looking hard as an optimist, but I have begun to see some good signs.”
Nationally the unemployment rate held steady at 9.7 percent, and about 160,000 jobs were added in March, the most recent month for which data are available from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Susan S. Brennan, managing director of career services at Bentley University, in Waltham, Mass., says the college will help students and alumni for as long as necessary. “We offer lifetime career services,” she says.
Those services include a biweekly job-market newsletter that more than 1,300 alumni subscribe to, and biweekly career workshops, called the Bentley Success Network, that began in May 2009. This academic year, the university started a career-service Web site called BentleyLink, on which jobs are posted for students and alumni. The number of alumni using career services has increased significantly since the campus career-service center offered the new job-search tools, Ms. Brennan says.
Bentley also offers programs specifically for current students. It intensified those efforts last year, adding student field trips to local companies and starting Success in the City, a program in which 25 to 30 students visit alumni who work in New York City, for companies including Bloomberg, L’Oréal, JPMorgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley.
Amanda E. Helfand, a junior who is double-majoring in marketing and business ethics and social responsibility, recently joined a field trip to Overdrive Interactive, a marketing company in Boston. About 20 students went on the half-day trip, meeting with representatives of the company, some of whom are Bentley alumni.
“It was helpful, first of all, in seeing where the marketing industry may be going,” Ms. Helfand says. “They were able to talk a little about the transition from Bentley to the real world and how that worked for them.”
The field trip also helped her understand how she might fit in at the company, she says. Ms. Helfand had attended other career field trips and workshops, and has had career-services staff members assess her résumé and cover letter.
Extended Time Frame
At Temple University, the career-service center allows both current students and alumni to attend its events. Beginning in the summer of 2008, appointments with staff members were shortened to 30 minutes from an hour to allow more students and alumni to get coaching.
As a result, the number of alumni appointments increased to 199 appointments in the 2008-9 academic year, compared with 109 in 2007-8, says Rachel A. Brown, the center’s director.
Temple also extended the length of time that members of the Class of 2009 could maintain access to the online job database, to a year from six months.
The thinking was “that typically in a tough market, it just takes longer,” Ms. Brown says. “We will do that again for the 2010 graduates.”
Members of Temple’s employer advisory board—including those who generally recruit students for corporate training programs—said they were willing to consider hiring graduates from 2009.
Jaclyne E. Hopkins, who graduated in December 2009 with majors in communications and history, used the career-service center both before and after she graduated. In September she received an e-mail notification about a new career-planning group at Temple that would provide students with information twice a month. The meetings in the fall provided career coaching, mock job interviews, tips for writing in a business environment, and networking events.
“Those were wonderful tools—very helpful for us to build confidence and really be able to sell ourselves to an employer,” she says.
After graduating, as Ms. Hopkins applied for jobs, she met with a career-service staff member for advice before meeting with one potential employer. In March she accepted a job at Drexel University as visit-experience team coordinator, planning campus visits for potential students and their families.
The experience, she says, not only helped build her confidence but gave her the time and tools to figure out what she really wanted in a first job. “We are young, and the economy is so tough right now, but there are still options for us.”