The Career Fair’s dated structure needs a tune-up and a new direction that will better benefit job-hungry students in liberal arts fields.
About 132 companies are attending the fair, including Brady Corp., Briggs & Stratton, Ernst & Young, General Mills and Deloitte.
Wanted: financial managers, mechanical engineers, IT project managers, tax interns and team leaders.
Unwanted: editorial interns, philosophers, writers, history majors, sociology researchers and publishing interns.
Even Milwaukee Radio is looking for account executives, not for writers or media personalities.
With such a huge segment of the student population excluded, what’s the point for liberal arts students to attend?
If Career Services could set up career sessions for liberal arts majors at the Career Fair, it would give these students more impetus to attend and tools to stay afloat after graduation.
Career Services could have resume and cover letter sessions for history majors, interviewing tips for PR majors and workshops on branding oneself in the gloomy job market.
Even local companies that aren’t hiring could meet with liberal arts majors and provide them with advice on how to find jobs.
These tips would give students a big leg up.
About 900 students are expected to attend Marquette’s Career Fair. With 11,623 total Marquette students, Career Services isn’t reaching many.
In our century’s second worst economic downturn, students should be receiving as much help as possible. The one-page outline of tips for liberal arts majors in the Career Fair packet isn’t cutting it, although it’s a start.
Although many companies are recruiting all majors, most of these companies are financial or medical entities like Wells Fargo, M&I Bank and Medical College of Wisconsin.
Companies who do want students in majors other than engineering and accounting are primarily demanding communication majors, especially corporate communications.
Granted, recruiting is down in all job fields this year. Last year, 217 employers attended the Career Fair. And the number of employers attending Career Fair’s Technical Day is 50 percent less than last year.
But excepting careers in nursing, accounting, finance and engineering, the rest of the field has seen better days.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicted a 2 percent job growth in communication between 2006 and 2016, which is considered to be a minor change or no change in employment.
With such a bleak forecast, Career Services should be doing everything it can to bolster students’ confidence as they head into the communication and liberal arts fields.
Clearly the Career Fair isn’t conducive for many. It’s time they made a change to reach out to more students in a new format, in a new way.