Editor’s note: The following article was published earlier this month in Kellogg Community College’s Summer 2012 edition of CareerFocus magazine with the headline, “The future doesn’t end at graduation: KCC’s Career and Employment Services Department helps students and alumni find jobs.” View the full CareerFocus publication online at kellogg.mycareerfocus.org or pick up a print copy from the newspaper racks on campus.
Of all the employment-related issues Patrick Casey deals with on a daily basis as director of Kellogg Community College’s Career and Employment Services Department, the two subjects he gets the most questions about are resumé writing and job interviews.
“The resumé, basically that’s your foot in the door,” Casey says, “and the interview is how you seal the deal.”
But while most people need a job, not everyone has the knowledge or the skills they need when it comes to landing one. That’s where Casey’s department comes in, assisting nearly 2,000 students and alumni each academic year with employment assistance, including resumé and cover letter editing, interview preparation, job searching, and networking.
Casey says he looks at his position as a kind of real estate agent, where he helps navigate the relationship between the “home buyers” seeking jobs and the “homeowners,” which he equates to companies in the Battle Creek area looking to hire. His department serves everyone from high school students with little to no work experience to those with decades in their industry who may have had no reason to write a resumé for 30 years or more.
“It’s important to have at any college or university setting,” Casey says of the department. “It’s a valuable resource.”
Casey says the job outlook is improving in the area, which just a few years ago saw unemployment rates in the double digits. Yet in a market as uncertain as ours, with a shaky global economy and rapid advances in technology changing society’s needs at an ever increasing pace, it helps to have a resource that offers employment services with long-term value.
“Once someone gets the foundation of their resumé down,” Casey says, “10 years from now they can still edit their resumé.”
For more information about Kellogg Community College’s Career and Employment Services Department, visit www.kellogg.edu/ces/index.html. To search for jobs in the Battle Creek area, visit www.collegecentral.com/kellogg.
Pictured above, Patrick Casey, director of Kellogg Community College’s Career and Employment Services Department, speaks with a student worker about the future.