The uprooting of COVID-19 on traditional campus life means that career services staff have had to move away from traditional methods of delivery and messaging. For career services staff that has meant moving all career counseling online and providing hosting webinars with students on how to navigate their online job board, setting up mock interviews, and learning how to navigate online web platforms. This includes adapting to a blended approach to delivering valuable content from live streams, uploading resources online for reading, and messaging through Facebook, Instagram, and other social media platforms.
Being flexible to these changes ensures that career services staff operate in a safe environment that helps their students across their virtual or hybrid campus. In this new normal, career services staff will need to be flexible in how they help students look critically at the current job market, assess opportunities for now and the future, and assist students in making informed choices. This is the strategy for many career services offices around the world.
In the UK, career services staff are developing their strategies around helpful webinars. In the summer of 2020, there were webinars hosted by Youth Employment UK, Career Pilot, Amazing Apprenticeships, DMH Associates and EMSI with the purpose of providing guidance and collective community to career services staff in the same boat. As Sarfraz Ahmed, a Careers Advisors at Leicester College, wrote for Future Education News Channel:
“Engaging with other professionals can make you feel that you are part of wider collective, especially we are all in the ‘same boat’, and a lot of the issues and concerns we had were similar. Often these webinars led to further debate and discussion on sites such as LinkedIn, as shared our thoughts, articles and findings and collectively we supported each other online.”
Additionally, it will be critical that career service staff proactively communicate with faculty in order to ensure that career preparedness “is being embedded across the curriculum” as Sir John Holman wrote for the Association of Colleges back in July. Finally, Ahmed notes that it will be the role of the career services staff in this new school year to support the students who already face barriers to access and have the most to lose during an uncertain job market.
At Symplicity, we know how critical it will be to ensure that your department and students are supported during this time. That’s why with Symplicity’s CareerHub, universities are empowered as they digitalise their service offerings with everything they need on one platform. Using Symplicity CareerHub, career service staff can collaborate through scalable utilisation across multiple teams, report on everything a career services office requires to operate, while providing tailored services to their students 24/7. It’s because of this that over 100+ universities depend on CareerHub as their central employability solution. With CareerHub, you are guaranteed unmatched training, customer service, and full customisation to best meet your university needs, even during uncertain times.
For more information about virtualizing student services, email info@symplicity.com or schedule a conversation.