A new semester just started and one might think how to use time in college.
One opportunity would be catching up with the offerings of the career center. With the current economic situation, job opportunities have considerably diminished.
The Tampa Bay area alone has an unemployment rate of 8.3 percent , according to tampabay.com, which is even higher than the 8.1 percent of unemployment that Florida has in general.
Before the recession, Florida used to be well below that number.The economy in Florida has taken a complete shift, according to Tim Harding, Director of Career Services.
It is currently more important to become an active jobseeker, then it has ever been before.
While the career center works with a number of local and state employers to build career fairs, there is more to discover.
Furthermore, students have to network with people, rather than sending out electronic r’eacute;sum’eacute;s, which will not help with fostering one’s career.
Job opportunities are still existing and just because one might not be interested to work in a field that the conversation partner is working in, is not a reason to neglect a conversation
Professionals are well aware of the importance of networking and know people in other branches quite good.
Impressing such a conversation partner can easily lead to a job opportunity with a networking peer.The career center does its best to support that effort.
It offers training sessions towards networking, speed interviews, training of how to represent oneself and breakfast with business professionals.
Tim Harding, Director of Career Services also offers a class on how to prepare for job interviews, build a solid CV and sell oneself, which provides students with some necessary tools.
He furthermore delivers useful advices, such as Students attending grad school need to be focused instead of considering it the better alternative in a bad economy.
But in the end it still depends how students are selling themselves and how effective they are able to network with other professionals.
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