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 the Elevate Pathway for undergraduates! After many years of seeing students graduate and start very successful careers, we know what students should be doing outside the classroom each year of their undergraduate career to see post-graduation success. We’ll be launching this program with the freshman class this year, but upperclassmen are certainly able to look back and see the activities that we recommend students complete.
We are also busy booking employers for our career fairs and other recruiting events to give each of you great professional networking opportunities on campus this year. As of Labor Day, 82 companies are registered to attend our in-person career fairs on September 25 and 26. We have 4 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. We also have a smaller virtual employer engagement event taking place on October 3rd. You can start to research companies for the career fairs and Bridge Recruiting Sessions on Handshake at https://app.joinhandshake.com/edu/career_fairs.
We are definitely seeing changes in the way companies are recruiting, and it is effecting our on-campus employer numbers. This is especially true in the technology and professional services fields, both of which also are experiencing a temporary downturn in new hiring. While we continue to work to boost our career fair numbers, we do want to work with each of you to make sure you have valuable resources and tools at your disposal to have a robust job and internship search, since the career fair is only one very, very small part of a holistic search process. We encourage you to set up an individual coaching appointment with one of our professional coaches – we really do have a fantastic team! We are also planning to have workshops every Friday at lunch in Hermann Hall on the most pertinent job and internship search topics.
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 wish you all the best as you start the new school year!
BJ Engelhardt
Executive Director
Illinois Tech Career Services
