Career Services Center at College of DuPage serves students, alumni and
community members and assist them with the job search process. Anything from
resume development, interviewing skills, networking, using social media in the job
search process... We also offer assistance with students seeking internships. It's
important for students to connect with Career Services because we offer such an
array of expertise within our office. We have two career specialists who can help
you with any piece of the job search process whether you're just wondering
how do I even start searching...you've just been laid off and you're looking
for assistance or you're a student and you don't know where to even begin to
find that job, to start networking to really get them into the process of the
job search.
An internship at College of DuPage is the opportunity for a student to
get out in a professional setting and gain practical work experience. What we
want them to do is build practical skills both technical and what we would
call 'soft skills'. So that they're prepared for the workforce. Essentially
what we want to make sure that they're experiencing during the internship is
learning. So we want the projects, the practical work to be the types of things
that they would do in a professional work experience after college and we
want them to be able to build skills that are applicable to a variety of
settings. >>I think it's great because people get so much more hands-on
experience than they do in a classroom and once you're actually doing the work
it's a lot more educational and for me I feel like it's it gives you a lot better
real-world experience that you're going to be using in a job field itself.
We've been working with COD for nine years. Started with one intern in the
beginning they've grown into a nice consistent pattern of a couple of
interns each semester. They come on board with us, they work with us, they learn
about computers. It's a great opportunity for the students to learn more hands on,
how computers work, how they break and how to fix them. We get to go ahead
and mentor students and get them out and started on their career path.
>>A lot of students don't know where to start they don't know how to find an
internship and we really work with them to identify what the resources are at
College of DuPage, who the staff are to help them and identify where the
internships are but also how to potentially find and secure their own
internship. >>Service learning is another piece of what we do in the Career
Services Center and our assistant manager of Career Services helps students
to gain experience in the community through some local community service
work connected to their course. So students will participate in local
volunteer opportunities and connect that volunteer experience back to the course
work that they're doing. So the best way for students to connect with the Career
Service Center, there's a couple of ways: they can look at our website at www.cod.edu/careerservices
On our website, we have an electronic job board
where we have thousands of job postings. Another resource that's available on our
website is a link to our Pinterest page, where we have a number of visual
resources available to students. Things such as what you should wear to an
interview, additional sample resume documents, additional supporting
documents from many of our workshops such as getting on Linkedin, interviewing
skills, those types of things. Another resource we have is through our library.
There's a number of resources there that can help students research an industry,
research a particular position, research salaries for any geographic area in the
country that they're looking for. It's important for students to connect with
the Career Service Center early in their time at College of DuPage because we
want to be involved with them throughout their process. Whether it's graduating
with a major and transferring to a four-year school or whether it's coming
here getting the certificate and jumping right back into the workforce. We want to
help them with that and Career Services can assist students throughout that
process.