Career Development

1. Career Development GBC 2012

2. Solutions Solution Angela (Georgia)- Support networking (evening, alumni) workshops with 1st and 2nd year students job posting and sharing Feedback loop*** (most important part of the process) Structure Improve ratio of students to advisors for more one on one Meet before classes begins with 1st year students Opportunity Day and Evening students Alumni Peers, advisors, and professors Utilize three level of support (peers, alumni, and school administration/faculty) to provide additional feedback to students). i.e. 3 foot stool approach • Matt (Purdue) • Mock career Fair (elevator pitch, resume, interviews) • Pre-Onboard Career Strategy ( target roles, forms, resume, and networking) • Identify the right fit ( internship as a bridge, lining up strengths) • Alumni Outreach ( getting and keeping involvement, mentoring)

3. RECOMMENDATION • Hold Mock Career Fair (elevator pitch, resume, interviews): • Purdue invited 20 companies/alumni to mock career day event. Students walk thru the event to prepare for the conference recruitment environment. Strive for better level of preparation, practice on getting message across to recruiters. Purdue currently holds this event during first week of 2 week orientation. • Suggestions/Comments: • General: Push event to end of orientation process, provide counseling to students so that they can max benefit of participating in this type of event. • Angela: Pre-on boarding process with advisors before class and orientation, one on one career advisement. • Jose: Give some prep on what is an elevator pitch, know what to expect, put them in small groups and give feedback before the mock career event. 2nd yr students should look at resumes. • Mitch: Encourage career coaches to work with students throughout the whole recruitment process on basic elements. • Jose: Provide webinars on career paths, elevator pitch, networking before mock event. • Angela: Give assessment, mock application with deadlines, provide top 20 behavioral questions, and communicate with third stool approach. Hold students accountable. • Varun: Feedback loop is important. Engage students early. Put in efforts and create the feedback loop to learn from past experiences.

4. Elaine • Issue: • Career paths for students are varied for job placement. How do you handle at your school? • Suggestions/Comments: • Mitch: Counselors are broken down by category to help students • Veronique: Career Development Office provides generic sessions and assessment to help students determine the best fit for career path. They also provide general advice. • Christian: School has special interest groups (Career Work Groups) that discuss and prepare students for interview process, share news and prep each other. • Angela: School help students tailor their resume to specific career fields: Record what works best on marketing vs. consulting resume to help customize for keywords. i.e. add memory of what worked really well on resume: i.e. keywords on marketing vs. consulting resume. After interviews, feedback loop about the interview process. Provide insights to help other students.

5. Mitch: • Issues: • How does you school handle technical side prep? • Comments/Suggestions: • Jose: finance and consulting club, list of every technical questions, and framework of what recruiters are looking for in candidates. Second year students offer information based on their past recruitment experience. • Angela: Students go to professors for advice. • Varun: Front load academic courses very soon so that students are prepared for interviews. Change curriculum to cater to recruitment calendar starting at the beginning of academic yr. • Elaine: Brought in consultants to crack the cases prep with students. • Varun: Provided training the street and other technical workshop • Issues: • Quality of Feedback from Career Services • Comments/Suggestions: • Switch coaching so that it is not coaxing students to easiest placement opportunity • Angela: Speak to students about parallel approaches, setting reasonable expectations with students, apply simultaneously on dual career paths, encourage students to start of the process early.

6. Christian • Issue: • What is the best way to provide students resources? • Comments/Suggestions: • Veronique: We store files on dropbox and share with each other. • Angela: Files on interview prep, tech questions are forwarded to Career Services and stored on shared server for all students. Held at school level, career service has class tab to post career services documents on the website.

7. Varun: • Issues: • What resources does your school offer at this late stage in process? • Comments/Suggestions: • Angela: Pitch students to start-up companies for internship positions. Build relationship with alumni and counselor who know of last fill spots. • Jose: Stay in touch with companies and recruiters

8. Participants: Chris Villani (Notre Dame), SantoshMohanram (ISB), Denise Bowen (Foster), Nathan Cregeur (Kelley). • Chris: Do you have someone in the student council that is responsible for coordinating work with the Career Development Services? • All representatives (including Chris) except for Denise (Foster) replayed yes. Denise: At Foster the job is divided by several VP’s • All representatives agreed that the issue of job development is probably the most important issue for students at all business schools.

9. How do student councils help/get involved with the work of the career services? • Chris: The VP coordinating the work with career services at Notre Dame organizes specific events with career services such as a networking event in Chicago with alumni. In addition, she organized a program in which second years assist first years with career related issues. She also organized “Both camps” in which representatives from different companies come to talk to students. • Santosh raised the issue of the level of direct interaction between students and company representatives. He mentioned that in his school students are not allowed to approach companies directly in order to avoid “confusion” and duplications. The school has a career development representative as a point of contact for each company. Other school representatives said they don’t work like this. • Chris added: students are actually expected to contact people and network on their own. • Denise: I understand that Career services are trying to control the networking process to maintain a certain level, but people should be allowed to contact companies for at least for informational purposes. Denise also Mentions a Mentor Program they have in which students work with professionals from different companies as an example of such informational work.

10. How do student councils help/get involved with the work of the career services? • Santosh adds: Career Development at ISB not only controls relations with the companies, but also controls the actual job proposals. He mentions that students get offers through career services and then have only several days to accept or reject the job. He wonders how it works in the other schools? • All other in response to Santosh: It seems that Career services at your school are trying to improve their numbers and are not working with in the students’ best interest. They suggest that He will try and work with the Career services’ staff and explain to them that placing alone is not enough. It is important that placement is done correctly. They suggest that he will check the statistic regarding how many alumni change a job soon after graduation at his school. • Nathan mentioned that in Kelley the faculty is very involved in placement alongside the career development department: we have different academies (marketing, investment banking, etc.) an each has its own style working with students on their placement. For example the head of the marketing academy takes a very hands on approach. The head of the investment banking track is more hands off and let’s students work for themselvess

11. How do student councils help/get involved with the work of the career services? • Nathan adds: The head of MKT is more successful with regards to placement of students. She has strong connections at P&G and uses them to help students. The other side of her style is that some students are feeling left behind if she is willing to help them less than she helps others. • When asked, Nathan explains that GCS (Graduate Career Service) helps you alongside the faculty from the academy (that solves the problem of people who are less helped by the faculty). • Chris: we also have a program named the “Me Ink program”. The main idea is that students are responsible for their own career. The program includes features s personal tests (Career Leader type), writing down a game plan for your career search process etc. • Denise says: that at Foster there is also a focus on students building their Brand and adds that Foster doesn’t have Faculty help to the extent mentioned by Nathan. • Denise asks the group about the Alumni Database at their respective schools? She explained that in Foster for some reason Alums are erased from the career development services Database after 5 years. She doesn’t know why that is the way it works and acknowledges the disadvantages in such a procedure.

12. How do student councils help/get involved with the work of the career services? • Chris: We have an extensive alumni database with a very efficient search engine. One problem we do have is that some alumni don’t update their profile and that brings complaints from students who can’t actually contact the listed Alumni. • Nathan: We a have a group of five (paid) people keeping contact with alumni. • Chris: one additional important feature that career services at Notre Dame uses are several groups of 5-6 alumni that work with career service representatives and reach out to and present the school to HR representatives at different companies. He says that the program helped get several companies to be more open to accepting students from Notre Dame. • Chris: another thing that career services do to maintain alumni relations is to operate a very active LinkedIn group. “They send alumni quarterly updates and it keeps relations with the different alumni”. • Nathan raises a new issue: Students from several concentrations such as Investment banking/management often feel neglected/behind with regards to their career search because typically offers on these tracks come late. • Chris: it is important to use statistics to manage people expectations and provide statistics regarding how many people typically get jobs by each month. He mentions that at Notre Dame they are now trying to map this statistics for each different career track. • Nathan agrees and adds that the update provided to students regarding placement should also include reference foe students regarding what they should have accomplished until this point. He also says that at Kelley they can actually see what jobs/ Internship other students got.

13. Others respond that this might be a problematic as not everyone wants to share their information. • Chris was wondering “how other schools are helping the 10% in the bottom of the class with networking: How do you identify those people and help them without insulting them? • Santosh talked about the different networking/career workshops they have it his school. • All others have them too and Denise says the problem is how to get the people how are struggling to attend those workshops. She say at Foster some of the workshops are mandatory and the problem with that is that people who have already attended those workshops (did their homework) have to attend the workshop instead of using their Fridays for actual networking. • Santosh: at ISB the workshops are voluntary, but people who fail receiving an invention for interview, or in the interview itself usually chose on their own to attend to sessions as they are motivated to know what went wrong. • Chris: One why is to have mock interviews with career service and alumni, but it is important career services gather the information from these interviews and work with people on their weaknesses.

14. Santosh mentions another way the students’ council in his school helped the students prepare for interviews: The student body prepared a “Knowledge Bank” including a short summary for each of the core courses. This way, students can go over the relevant part of the Knowledge Bank before they go for an interview. Says people found this very useful. • Chris: the student body started a database in which people share information and impressions from interviews they have been to. • Nathan: We also make a list of the people who have yet to secure an internship position and with the help of the career services match them up a peer coach. The important thing here is that a career executives who knows which is student will per up well together is involved in the matching process. • Chris summarizes: The student council should help Career services and direct them regarding student needs. (Clarification (Chanan): serve as a tube between the students and Career Services and make sure they know which of their tools is currently in demand among the students).

15. Opportunities for international students. What is the role of the CMC? How are opportunities improved? • Immigration team (part of CMC) interacts with international students at the beginning of the school year. Provides ideas and sets expectations with incoming students. • Indian students look at career options internationally (India). Career advancement service has business development team that focus on specific industries, including international opportunities. For Indian visas, it’s not a problem to work in India. These are both Indian and international students. • Companies are hesitant to employ international students because of Government policy changes with regards to visas. Companies, although they say they won’t hire international students, they will eventually. You just need to push hard enough and make the whole process easier for the through visa assistance, etc. • CMC should highlight those companies who have shown to hire international students. • Manage expectations better to help international students find appropriate positions. • Incoming students are asked to respond to a survey asking them which companies they’d like to work for once they graduate. They CMC then start working on connections and building relationships with those companies. The CMC then provides feedback to the students about how the outreach is going and which companies are likely to recruit on campus. • CMC arrange days at companies that have a lot of international business and then the students travel to those companies to spend a day interacting with the companies. This is often arranged through the clubs. Costs are often covered by the clubs but mostly the students pay for themselves.

16. Structures of CMC helping students find internships/job. • Large rush when students first start, and then again right before the summer and graduation. Start school in September, and then immediately have to have your thoughts in a row with regards to their future employment. This is an issue. • As soon as students are admitted to the program, the school sends out a questionnaire and consequently develops a profile book. Learning and Development team schedules mock interviews and evaluate students to determine whether students are prepared to interview for the jobs they are interested in. A profile book is then updated and made available to companies/recruiters. This way, candidates are more likely to succeed with their desired direction. • Kelley School has an initiative called Me, Inc. with the goal to make students take ownership of their job search activities earlier. Over the summer (after admittance), students are sent questionnaires that they need to complete before school starts. This is an ongoing process and concludes during the first week of school where things are tailored to people’s interest and opportunities.

17. The issue about grading and GPA was brought up. Some schools communicate to companies that they should not focus on GPA/GMAT. • Tough line to walk. Some industries (consulting, finance) will still be focused on grades, but other opportunities care less about grades. • Does students vote whether grades should be disclosed? • In Canada, no. Bargaining power is on the employer side. Have to cater to the customer. • With less of a focus on grades, students feel that the learning opportunities are greater. • Still have distribution, but no GPA. • We discussed the issue of whether schools should have grades or not. This can be to the advantage and disadvantage of students. • As the average age of the class is greater, grades matter less. With less experience, there is no resume depth, so grades may be the best way to differentiate.

18. CMC emphasize internship search first before full-time job opportunities. Find your strengths, and. The idea is that 35% or 40% find a job through their internship. Others use the experience from their internship to find other positions. So the CMC needs to help students navigate this approach. • Different industries recruit in different cycles. • Strike a careful balance to allow people to figure out what they’d like to do and getting out there and just interview and network.

19. Where do people find opportunities • In Canada (Rotman School of Business), the students mostly do recruitment. Alumni pay it forward through relationships with student clubs. • March/April drop-off and a huge spike towards the end, May/June. • Correlation between valuable experiences does not necessarily pay well. • Finance/Consulting recruits early. The more formalize the program, the earlier they recruit. • If you do on-campus recruiting, you have to do a class to prepare you. Also, 2nd years who work in specific areas coach first years during the first two courses. Tells 1st years everything they need to know. This is a great supplement to the CMC. • Through clubs, have all sorts of educational opportunities. Brand Manager, Consulting 101, volunteers in charge of career development or training. Case practice, mock interviews, etc. Partial students/partial staff • Career coach for 2 years. Once you start, you belong to academy for connections. Peer coach through academy.

20. Is the market open for career-changers • Think about industry plus job function when you are a switcher. • Harder to be a double-switcher. • This brings us back to managing expectations. • Mentoring and coaching from CMC who is well connected in the local job market. Alumni also assists.