CWU’s new Virtual Career Center connects students with employers, resources
Advisors have a new tool in their proverbial hip pocket at Central Washington University after the school launched its new Virtual Career Center. Above, Career Services program coordinator Dale Larson introduces a CWU student to the new system
COURTESY PHOTO/CENTRAL WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY/GURDIL DARDI
ELLENSBURG — A valuable new online resource is available to Central Washington University students who want to search for jobs, study industry trends, and begin mapping out their future careers.
CWU Career Services, in partnership with the Student Tech Fee Committee, introduced a Virtual Career Center at the beginning of fall quarter to provide students with a user-friendly, individually focused career-planning resource that has proven successful at hundreds of other institutions across the country.
The Virtual Career Center helps Career Services simplify the job search process for students by offering them a central access point to discover a wide range of career resources and services. The platform — which has been integrated into the Career Services webpage — was created in response to the fragmented experience U.S. college students are faced with while trying to navigate numerous websites and job-search tools simultaneously.
“There’s so much information out there, and this tool gives students a way to cut through all of the noise,” said Career Services Event Coordinator Kristen Paton, who helped launch the platform earlier this year. “We are still in the initial phase, and we’re still learning new ways to make it better. But we think this is a tool our students are going to find very worthwhile.”
The Virtual Career Center also provides tailor-made user experiences for alumni, faculty and staff, employers, and families. Student-specific search options include “News and Advice,” “Career Resources,” “Labor Market Insights,” “Featured Jobs,” “Featured Internships,” and more.
Students can use the Virtual Career Center to search for jobs and internships that meet their individual skill sets and experience levels. They can explore careers by college or by industry, and there are additional options to sort by communities, such as BIPOC, first-generation, international, veterans, LGBTQ+, and more.
An added bonus is that students don’t have to log in to search for jobs; they only need to create an account if they decide to apply for a position they find on the platform.
“You can create searches using a lot of different criteria, which is a really nice feature,” Paton said. “But the main thing for us is that it’s so user-friendly. Students can easily find what they’re looking for and then create specialized searches that they use at a later time.”
After rolling out the Virtual Career Center with a soft launch September 1, Career Services saw a significant increase in traffic over the next month. From September 30 to October 29, the Career Services webpage recorded more than 7,000 page views, 1,860 total users, and 3,076 sessions. More than half of those sessions lasted for more than 10 seconds and included two or more page views, resulting in an engagement rate of 62% over the first four weeks of the quarter.
That’s just one reason why Career Services Director Katrina Whitney is so encouraged about bringing this state-of-the-art resource to the institution.
“We are seeing a lot more job listings than we did before, and our students can sort the results however they want so they only see the posts that are relevant to them,” she said. “That way, they are only getting the information they want instead of all of the clutter that you sometimes find on other websites.”