Fireside Talk

In the past year, the brethren have expressed concern that LDS college students are not preparing sufficiently to embark on a career. They believe that there needs to be more emphasis on developing the skills necessary to obtain employment that will be both personally satisfying and financially rewarding. For the brethren, your college years are the time to prepare for a life of productive work, work which will provide the resources to support family. For the sisters, it is a time to prepare to be a wife and mother and if necessary, to assist in providing while at the same time being the primary member of the marriage responsible for teaching and rearing the children. I am here today to discuss the providing responsibility and getting ready to take on that responsibility.

I are not going to discuss what career to pursue but instead how to pursue it. You have many career options and the choice will be very personal, different for different persons. How to pursue it, on the other hand, will be similar for everyone. It will take dedication to develop the skills and knowledge to prepare for and procure a job, which will allow a successful career. These skills are what we are here today to discuss.

The Church has provided a number of resources to assist each one of you. However, it cannot make you take advantage of these resources. Each one of you must decide on your own what your priorities are, whether to attend workshops that help you develop interviewing skills, resume creation abilities, networking techniques, job search skills, or whether your time is spent playing video games or posting pictures or messages on your Facebook pages. Now there is a time to do many of these things but the question is how much time and to what benefit.

Now I would like to acquaint you with the resources the church provides. I will name each of these and emphasize what each provides and how to use each of them. Located on the first floor on the North side of the Wilkinson is the main BYU career center. It is staffed with profession career employees whose responsibility is to train students in the skills necessary to get started on successful career. It is also responsible to bring employers onto campus to interview students for possible employment. You can make appointments with one of these advisers who will be happy to direct your efforts to prepare for future employment. The career center workshop and event schedule is posted on their web site with a link on the BYU Career Blog, which I will discuss later.

An important activity run by the career cent is the general career fair, held twice a year in the fall and in the winter. At this fair, between 100 and 200 companies come to campus to interview students for subsequent employment. These fairs are held in the Wilkinson Center ballrooms for a five-hour block. All students are advised to attend these fairs. You will gain experience-interviewing recruiters and will have opportunity to seek internships and employment. Some of the colleges also have career fairs eg education and engineering

The career center presents workshops in the skills needed to gain employment. It also is a resource of alumni who need help. I encourage you to take advantage of the career center and do it with enough frequency to take advantage of what it can provide you. Many of the colleges in the University have advisement centers. These are oriented to specific majors and you should find out if your major has one and see what it has to offer.

When sister Forstrom and I began our mission, one of the first things we did was visit the career center to determine how we could be of assistance. This was the first time employment missionaries had been assigned to BYU and the first objective was to determine how we could help. After meeting with the career center staff and a group of stake employment specialists, we decided the best thing would be to become a communication link between the career center and the students and to do this through the over 230 plus wards. I will return to this later.

Provo Employment Resource Services located above DI is a second resource available to students. The Employment Center provides counseling and workshops similar to those offered by the on campus career center and advisement centers. It is staffed with employment missionaries and volunteers who have been trained to provide employment services to the entire community including members and non-members, students and non-students, professionals and non-professionals. The staff includes a number of people with extensive employment history as such provide a more hands on set of experience. They will provide personal and more immediate help. Generally, they too are trying to train applicants to be self sufficient in their job search. The majority of those using the employment center are non-students who have lost their job or are new entrants to the job force seeking the first job. Sister Forstrom and I are assigned to the employment center but assigned to BYU.

Now I told you I would return to how sister Forstrom and I are facilitators striving to communicate the efforts of the Career Center and to some degree the employment to you members of the BYU wards, and to do so through your bishops and employment specialists. When we were first assigned to BYU, we thought how do we communicate with 30,000 students and other members of BYU Wards. It was easy to conclude were couldn’t do it one on one as the career center and employment center do. My personal background is technical, having first programmed a computer many years ago while I was graduate school. How many of you know about punched cards? I’ve followed the development of the Internet, of web sites, email, social networking and blogs ever since they began. These tools seemed solutions for communicating with a large student population. We are using all of them.

We have created and maintain a blog, located at byucareer.blogspot.com. . The Blogs contains information posted on resume development, interviewing, networking, internships, job search, social networks, grad school and scholarships. In addition, it contains the schedule from the career center, links to job boards on the Internet, a list of career courses .

In conclusion, I want to mention the most important employment workshop offered at BYU. The employment center in conjunction with the BYU Career Center, sponsors a Career Workshop on campus which is a four hour version of the two day workshop presented in career centers around the world. It is only offered a few times a year. There may be one near the end of July and for sure there will be one the Saturday before the next career day on campus in late September. The most recent workshop was drew 125 students and the feedback was excellent. If you can fit it into your schedule, I recommend that you attend. It will be announced in your ward and posted on the Blog several weeks ahead of time. If you plan on attending, please register either on a signup sheet that will be passed around in your ward or by email to the address that will be provided. We have the ability to handle a larger number of attendees but we need to know ahead of time approximately how many wish to attend. The career workshop manual can be downloaded from the Internet. A link is available in the right column of the Blog.