Narrative
The FAU Career Center is an innovative hub that works tirelessly to provide all students/alumni with comprehensive & critical career readiness resources designed to help prepare students to acquire internships, entrance into graduate programs & ultimately to secure meaningful employment. Likewise, we work with business & industry leaders throughout the state & the U.S. to ensure that we understand & are meeting current talent needs, & subsequently connecting our students to high-demand positions. Our goal is to ensure that every student gains meaningful employment & achieves lifelong success.
Further, as students are choosing their majors, the Career Center is the campus leader to help them gain internships & understand which jobs will be available to them after graduation. We are the front line of this dialogue with students. We strive to better provide students with a range of information on contemporary career options & potential organizations available to them, & enhancing our technological capabilities will allow us to better reach & engage with more students early, often & in a meaningful way resulting in more significant employment opportunities. These efforts have had a positive impact on the Board of Governor’s metrics 1 & 2.
Over the past 10 years, the Career Center has expanded our reach to a growing number of students. In 16-17, we engaged with over 8,800 unique students. The projections for 17-18 will surpass 11,000. Part of our growth is the offering of a number of career preparatory workshops to support student development of essential career soft skills. In addition to soft skill development, we work to prepare students for other core workshops on career readiness topics. The primary target audience has been students in their juniors & seniors; however, we have greatly expanded our approach to engaging with students in their first & second years, as well as specialized populations.
To achieve the large-scale outreach efforts, the Career Center provides interactive career preparatory workshops year round. One of the challenges/opportunities has been reaching students on the partner campuses & distance education students. The technology in our existing classroom has become antiquated & is very limited in interactivity or video conferencing. The FAU Career Center classroom was last enhanced with technology in 2009.
The Career Center runs an on-campus interview program that brings hundreds of companies & organizations to SU220 each year to conduct professional interviews for internship & full-time positions. This program has experienced high growth each year & provides our students with the advantage of interviewing on-campus, in a familiar environment, with some organizations that would normally require travel. The Career Center has several interview rooms & a dedicated space for students to wait.
With only one classroom we are limited to how many workshops or courses we can offer at the same time. With the right technology, The Interview Lounge can also become an additional educational space for us to deliver invaluable career information. Further, with video conferencing capabilities we can deliver this content to students anywhere, & subsequently create a new educational space that will increase our capacity to deliver simultaneous workshops on a diversity of career topics.
Using the same equipment, within the same space, we can position our students to professionally interview with employers across the country via Skype & other teleconferencing software. The Interview Lounge (with technological enhancement) can provide an ideal space to maximize students interviewing skills. In addition, as students wait to be called for their professional interview they would be able to learn more about the companies & organizations by utilizing the proposed “interactive tech board.” This would allow them to be better informed & align their values & skills with what the company is looking for.
Having the interactive, Multitaction Wallboard will immensely help to connect students to “real-time” & ever-changing career information & opportunities. Our vision for the Multitaction Wallboard is to provide students with the latest employment trend analysis, current labor market information, regional/state company profiles/informational videos, as well as current listings of internships & meaningful jobs. The Multitaction Wall would also allow the thousands of students that check-in to the Career Center each year to fully understand the resources, services, & programs available to them within our walls & beyond.
Last year, there were over 20,000 points of contact including students served during Same-Day Career Advising & individual appointments. Many of these touchpoints occur outside of our physical space as we now station career practitioners in high student traffic areas. Having portable technology such as a Surface Pro will allow for career practitioners to meet students where they are.
Facilities
We need to reinforce a wall to mount the Multitaction Wallboard. We will take off the drywall so we can see the stud box and add additional reinforcement to the wood framing.
In addition, we will need to install Ethernet ports.
Implementing Organization
Implementing Organization-FAU Career Center, Student Affairs Technology and OIT.
