Meeting the career development needs of our students continues to be the main focus of our office. Our online Job Bank provides part-time and full-time employment opportunities, as well as internships. We service the current student body, SUNY Orange alumni, and members of the community and continue to partner with local employers to provide career development programs for our students. Resume critique, career assessments, and job search assistance continue to be the areas students request the most help with. We will continue to provide all of these services and partner with other offices on campus to reach out to our student body. Use of ambassadors will further help us to promote our office and help increase awareness on campus.
Students frequently do not use our services until the time they are ready to graduate, when they should have engaged with the office from the time they set foot on campus. In order to successfully prepare for life after college, students must take their career development seriously and proactively develop the skills employers seek. Is it critical that we reach students early on in their college career. Partnering with the Advising and Admissions offices provides us with access to students early on in their education and by working closely with the campus clubs we can gain access to students early on. Partnering with the academic departments and co-sponsoring events is one of the best ways to reach students. We will increase our efforts during the coming year to establish more meaningful, lasting relationships with academic departments.
External partnerships with the business community, the One-Stop Career Center, and economic development agencies continue to be nurtured by our staff. We connect students and alumni with local business leaders and professionals to learn about the job market and to gain first-hand knowledge about a chosen industry or profession, to secure internships or jobs. We utilize our CAN (Career Advisory Network), our job bank, and our relationship with the Chamber of Commerce to make those valuable connections. Efforts will be directed to maintaining these relationships and to also connect with smaller town and village chambers and with the Orange County Partnership in an effort to learn of new business ventures.
During the past year, we spent a considerable amount of time evaluating our student goals and learning outcomes. We realized further action is required in order to meet some of the objectives, and that we must create a number of evaluation instruments such as resume rubric and a career action plan to assist students in reaching their career goals. This is an effort that will continue during the coming year.
SUNY has made the Applied Learning initiative a major focus for all SUNY institutions and SUNY Works specifically deals with internships, externships, work study, service learning and community volunteer activities. The Career Services Director serves on the SUNY Orange task force that is charged with clearly defining applied learning activities on campus and with the corresponding parameters. The outcome of this exercise may help to guide the future of our internship activities on campus, which is not consistent across departments.
This past year we designed an online satisfaction survey and recently started using it to gather feedback from students and alumni regarding our services. We will continue this effort during the coming year to determine what changes may need to be implemented to more closely meet the needs of our students.
The CTEA grant supported our Office this past year with a part-time Internship Development Specialist position. This was of immeasurable assistance as we continue to struggle with being understaffed. We serve the Middletown campus and have a presence in Newburgh one day per week. Given the current staffing pattern, it is impossible for us to increase the time in Newburgh and limits the number of new activities and initiatives we can realistically accomplish. We will continue to purse grant opportunities during the coming year.