On behalf of Career Services, I hope that you had a great summer full of interesting experiences and personal growth!
Career Services has been hard at work this summer to ensure that you have excellent career development programming and plenty of opportunities to interact with employers looking to hire talented students like you this school year!
We are very excited about the launch of our Scarlet C-Suite program. One thing employers make clear year after year is that human-centered, or ‘soft’, skills are more important to them when making hiring decisions than technical skills. Skills such as critical thinking, communication, and teamwork really ‘move the needle’ for employers, but they are hard skills to master. Our C-Suite program is designed to help you become proficient in these skills through a series of 10 workshops, 8 of which need to be completed live – virtually or in-person. These 8 live sessions are very interactive so that you have a chance to practice these skills with professional coaches and your peers. We hope you join us for a session or two this semester – you have your whole degree program to complete it and get recognized with a digital badge!
We are also busy booking employers for our career fairs and other recruiting events on campus. As of August 24th, 78 companies are registered to attend our in-person career fairs on September 27 and 28, and 12 are registered for the virtual career fair on September 14. We also have 15 companies registered so far for our MTCC Bridge Recruiting sessions, where companies set up a table on the MTCC bridge 11-2pm on a given Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday. You can start to research companies for the career fairs and Bridge Recruiting Sessions on Handshake at https://app.joinhandshake.com/edu/career_fairs.
There are several other initiatives I’m excited about this year, but since they are in the early stages of planning, I don’t have much to share at this time. However, we are always working with Elevate in mind – that hands-on experiences are the most valuable and important experiences you will have at Illinois Tech, so we want to make sure that there is truly a critical mass of hands-on opportunities for our students.
Be sure to come visit us in the MTCC outside of the Commons cafeteria, if you have questions or just want to say hi! We also encourage you to set up an individual coaching appointment with one of our professional coaches – we really do have a fantastic team with lots of experience in industry!
We wish you all the best as you start the new school year!
BJ Engelhardt
Senior Director
Illinois Tech Career Services
