by sean@higheredcareercoach.com | Jan 26, 2010 | Job Search
Are You Ready for Placement Season?
Springtime…the sun is shining, the birds are singing, and at colleges across the country, a young person’s fancy turns to thoughts of…unemployment?
In Student Affairs, this can only signal one thing…placement season is here. It’s time to brush up the resume, line up the references, check job postings, write cover letters, practice interview, really interview, and hope for the best. One part of this cycle in higher education is the placement conference, where candidates by the hundreds can answer the cattle calls of multiple employers, line up several interviews, and kick their search into a higher gear.
The three-hundred pound gorilla of placement centers these days is the Placement Exchange. A joint venture of ACUHO-I, ASCA, NACA, NASPA, NODA, AFA and HigherEdJobs.Com, this year’s exchange is being held in Chicago from March 3-7, just prior to the NASPA Annual Conference. According to the Placement Exchange’s website, 5070 interviews for 359 positions were held at last year’s conference in Seattle.
Two other larger conferences also offer placement centers: ACPA and the OshKosh Placement Exchange. ACPA hosts Career Central at their annual convention, held this year at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston from March 19-23. The OshKosh Placement Exchange is hosted by the University of Wisconsin-OshKosh and is in its 31st year.
For candidates that have a more regional focus, several regional organizations also hold placement conferences, including MACUHO’s Mid-Atlantic Placement Conference in Lancaster, PA from February 26 to 26 and the Southern Placement Exchange from March 11 to 14 in Memphis, TN. There are more, but these are the ones I could find while preparing for this article. If you know of another, please send it along, and I will make note of it in a future post.
For candidates that have never taken part in a large placement conference, the prospect of competing with several hundred people for positions can be pretty daunting. ACPA offers a great Guide to Demystifying Career Central at the Convention as a downloadable .pdf.
This guide offers steps for success before, during and after the interview, sample questions to help candidates prepare, resources and tips on handling illegal questions, negotiating an offer, planning your relocation, and more. These practical resources should be an asset to anyone in the Higher Ed/Student Affairs job market. I recommend reading it through well in advance of participation in any placement conference. It will give you a great feel for the placement experience.
Best of luck to you if you are a candidate this hiring season! In my next post, I will share some tips of my own. Though I probably can’t be as comprehensive as the ACPA Guide, I have been on both sides of the interview table at placement conferences, and can offer you some perspectives that will hopefully set you at ease and be more confident, and more prepared.
I’d also like to try a Twitter experiment to help keep the conversation going this placement season. If you are a candidate with a question about placement or an experienced professional (or employer) who has advice and perspectives to offer, please hashtag your placement questions and comments with #saplacement. Users can then follow these comments using their Twitter client and those of us with employment-related blogs and websites can post links to the trending topic or incorporate a feed to help others follow the conversations and add in their questions and advice. Let’s see if we can create a huge collaborative conversation that will help our colleagues and students succeed this placement season!
by sean@higheredcareercoach.com | Jan 20, 2010 | Job Search, Take 5
There’s a lot of talk in marketing about “branding,” but it’s also useful to look at your job search in a similar light. After all, you are selling your most important product: yourself. For your consideration, here are five articles that explore the concept of personal branding in the job search.
- Kristi Daeda, a Success Coach and Creator of the Career Adventure blog, has many good articles on her own blog, and I regularly read her articles and follow her on Twitter. She offers a great perspectives on how to get feedback from others about your personal brand in an article she wrote for another site, Brand Camp University. Personal branding: It’s not what you say.
- Brand-Yourself.com has a great 10-step Personal Branding Worksheet to help you define “your unique value proposition.”
- There’s a great article at BrazenCareerist.com by Ryan Stephens on why you should “Stay true to your personal brand” during your job search.
- The Personal Branding Blog is a top resource on the topic of personal branding. Spearheaded by Dan Schawbel, the Author of Me 2.0, it has many articles, interviews and tips to help you build you brand. It was hard picking an article to highlight because there are so many good ones, but I settled on “Brand yourself for the job you want in three years” by Katie Konrath.
- Career Rocketeer has a great article exploring the differences between making an effective presentation and effectively conveying your character before, during and after the interview.
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by sean@higheredcareercoach.com | Aug 8, 2009 | Career Skills, Job Search, life purpose
I’d put safe money down on the possibility that most of us working in higher education didn’t have that dream as kids. As for me, I wanted to be Evil Kneivel , then I wanted to be Elvis.
Growing up in the ’80s, my attention soon turned to the yuppie lifestyles of the day, and I started college with dollar signs in my eyes, and dreams of a BMW. My first two years, I was a management major, but I really studied partying more than anything else. Calculus wasn’t my friend, and first semester my sophomore year, I earned the first “F” I made in anything. (But it was a high “F,” almost a “D,” and one of the hardest grades I ever earned. I was in hall council, because I liked pizza at meetings and cookouts with the women’s halls. By the end of sophomore year, I made two big decisions…changing my major from Management to Political Science, and applying to be a resident assistant.
The change of major was first a nod to the reality that calculus was a pre-req for several other classes later in the curriculum, and I just wasn’t that good at it. I chose Political Science because a.) politics always interested me, and b.) I thought is was a good background for law, and if I couldn’t be part of the big yuppie revolution through the glories of corporate management, I had heard that Political Science was a good background for law, and everyone knows that lawyers make SCADS of money. The RA thing grew out of two interests…doing cool programs and having fun, and the hope that being an RA would keep me out of trouble.
My junior year, I defined myself as an excellent programmer and jumped deeper into the whole student life realm, by becoming a peer health educator. It wasn’t where I saw myself coming in, but it was pretty good. Senior year, I kept enjoying life and the RA job, but somewhere along the way, I lost sight of the fact that I was going to need a job after college. I drank way too much, and one particularly bad evening, I overdid it and ended up getting arrested. Aimless is as aimless does, I guess.
The aftermath of this one event would stay with me, not because it destroyed my future, or caused me to be dismissed from my RA job; neither of those things happened. Instead, I learned that people were there for me, even when I made mistakes, and that some saw potential in me that I didn’t see myself. It wasn’t until this time that I started to understand that these people in Residence Life and other parts of Student Affairs weren’t just holding down jobs, they were answering a call, living out a higher purpose. In giving their time and energy to students like me, even when we faltered and arguably didn’t deserve the compassion, they were perhaps even performing a sacred duty.
Somewhere along the way, this message started to stick with me, and I started to think about going into Student Affairs. I was lucky enough to get an assistantship with Health Education, and I packed those 2 years of my M.Ed. program with activities in Housing, Health Ed, and Student Development; I came to know some great professionals and some great students, many of which I have kept track of in one way or another, as my generation passed into adulthood and another came to college.
There are days I ask myself why I wanted this, when an endless stream of issues waits at my door, or comes barging in, unannounced. It’s then I remember an aimless wanderer, and the people that pushed him back onto a path; I see myself in both, and it’s then I know I was meant to do this work.
So much for being Elvis.
