Mag: Welcome to Skills Soup jobpod. My name’s Mag and jumping in the bowl with us in job pod is Carol Brown, senior career consultant at the ANU Careers Center.
Mag: But today we are getting under way with how ANU Careers Center works and what the career center can do for you. Welcome Carol to Skills Soup jobpod.
Carol: Thanks for having me on the show, Mag.
Mag: Carol, can you tell Skills Soup a bit about what you do at Careers, do you help students of all levels? Where are you located exactly?
Carol: Well, Mag, the Careers, what I do at Careers is, I’m employed there as a senior careers consultant, so I spend my days working with students in interview sessions, in counseling programmes, in workshops. I also write resources for our students and work erm, do a lot of projects for the broader careers community and with people at ANU. I do help students at all levels as do all their career consultants. And we are very keen, of course, to see students from the time that they start at the university to the time that they finish at the end of PhD. So we encourage all students to use our services when they can. The Careers Center is very conveniently located, actually. You would all probably know the God’s cafe; well we are directly opposite the God’s. If you ever drop in for a coffee, do come and see us.
3 Mag: Well Carol, let’s talk a bit more about how Careers Center works. If I’m looking for some careers advice, this is a biggie* way, where should I start?
Carol: Okay. There are several places you can start with. First, you can just come and browse through our library and our resource collection. We’ve got a lot of resources that will help you with getting started with career planning. Erm, if you want to talk to a counselor you could make an appointment to do that, in addition, we have drop-in sessions three time a week that you could take advantage of. Erm, many students do all of those things and sometimes for those who are particularly confused or unsure about what their future might be career was they spend some additional time going through our computer assisted Career Guidance Package Code New Directions. So we’ve got a whole range of possibilities, so if you are looking for some careers advice I recommend first of all you come into the Careers Center or you start with our website.
4 Mag: Carol, could you tell us a little bit more about the “New Directions”? It sounds exciting.
Carol: Yeap, sure. Well, “New Directions”, it’s a very comprehensive programme which aims to assist people to identify their key career values, their interests, it asks you about your personality preferences or your major occupational choices and interests and brings that all together into a pot. It takes about an hour to do and we always recommend that once the students have done that, they make an appointment to speak with a counselor for an hour or more at some stage after that. And often it provides just a framework that’s needed to get started with really thinking about what’s important to you, whether you are in the right course, what kind of options there might be available, so it can be a really useful starting point for some students.
5 Mag: And you run seminars and workshops. Can you tell us a bit about them?
Carol: We sure do. We have a regular workshop programme called “Career Essentials” which we run every semester, erm, which covers the basics of resume preparation, interview skills, going for assessment centers, erm, this a very popular topic at the moment, a graduate recruitment term. We run specialized programmes for those as well. So they are the kind of the workshops we run every time, then we run more specialized ones in the colleges for various lectures who invite us this to do, specific things for their students. So we do a lot of targeted workshops, you know, within their colleges as well as the generic* ones.
6 Mag: I can also get individual career advice from you, you’ve mentioned that. What can you help me with exactly?
Carol: Well, erm, really, I think, people come to us for individual careers advice for a number of reasons. One could be that, you know, often in their first - second year students find themselves in the wring course. They really need to work out if it’s worth changing course at that point and if so, what would be the career implications of that. Erm, our career consultants can help you work out what the opportunities and options are, how strong the labour market might be for the particular field they are interested in, have they got the sources for international opportunities. Many student come because they’re absolutely confused and have no idea what they want to do, erm, they might be happy with their degree but really can’t see the future. And so there are rather more complex issues that we talk about over an extended period often with students. Sometimes the advisory sessions are very quick and sharp, but usually they are covered in drop-in sessions where you don’t need to make an appointment to come along to. In drop-in sessions commonly students will bring a resume or application for us to check or for some interview coaching.
Mag: And Carol, Career Hub is an important thing for the Career Center as well. Can you tell us about that one?
Carol: Yes, Career Hub, of course, is our online system and something like, I think, 75% of students that I knew registered on Career Hub, if you are not one of them, please do register through our website. Career Hub will give you access to part-time, casual work opportunities, to graduate vacancies, to vocation work, internship opportunities, all of those get put up there. If you are looking for employment opportunities, you really need to be checking up pretty regularly, because we see more preferred, interesting and exciting jobs go quickly. But in addition, it’s a great resource in terms of offering articles, links to important websites that we think will be really, will really add a way to your own career planning, career development as well as, you know, as I said, resources, articles, news items, staff that we try abet* through Career to keep students up-to-date with what is going on. It’s a sort of multidimensional resource.
Mag: So Carol, with Career Hub I’ve registered, but do you keep a separate register of students looking for work?
Carol: No, we don’t. The way the job situation works is that, an employer, let’s say, somebody who wants a tutor for mathematics for the 11 year-old child, they will call us up, we’ll take the data as large as the vacancy on Career Hub and then it will be a matter for students to contact the employer directly and negotiate the terms and conditions of their employment as well as whether they…, when they start, whether they are suitable. So we just put the information up there for the students and we don’t match jobs to students or the employers to students, or any of that kind of thing. But we hopefully provide a really helpful conduit*, clearing house* for jobs.
Mag: Carol, thanks for a great overview on how ANUs Career Center works.
*abet - ïîääåðæèâàòü, ïîîùðÿòü, ñîäåéñòâîâàòü
*conduit - êàíàë, ñðåäñòâî ïåðåäà÷è,êîììóíèêàöèè
*clearing house - çä. èíôîðìàöèîííûé öåíòð
