Employment Resources - Talk to BYU 8th Stake Bishops Welfare Committee

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.

There are a lot of resources that will contribute to the achievement of this objective. They include the BYU Career Center, the Provo Employment Center, Elder and Sister Forstrom, the BYU Career Blog, Stake Presidents, Bishops, Stake and Ward Employment Specialists and other Ward leaders. The most effective wards will employ all of these resources. Sister Forstrom and I are trying to engage all these resources in order to bring as much information as possible to the students and to encourage the students to take advantage of them and to assist wherever possible

Sister Forstrom and I are employment missionaries. We started the first of the year. We are the first employment missionaries ever assigned to BYU. There was no agenda, no roadmap, no program. We receive limited direction from the Manager of the Employment Center and the Director of the BYU Career Center. We are basically needs driven, needs of the students and the needs of the Ecclesiastic leaders. We have the following advantage. Career wise I was involved in computer technology and management of large organizations. In addition, I know how to apply computer technology to management problems.

Located on the first floor on the North side of the Wilkinson is the main BYU career center. It is staffed with professional 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. There are advisors who can help students to develop the skills needed to be successful. 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 center 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 in a five-hour block.
We recommend to all students that they attend these fairs. They will gain experience-interviewing recruiters and will have opportunity to seek internships and employment. Some of the colleges at BYU also have career fairs eg the education and engineering and some have advisement center

The career center presents workshops in the skills needed to gain employment. These include workshops in networking, interviewing, and letter writing and resume creation. It also is a resource of alumni who can provide help. We encourage students to take advantage of the career center and do it with enough frequency to take advantage of what it can provide you.

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 that provide a more hands on set of experience. They will give personal and help for immediate needs. They try 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 a first job but students make up a significant percentage of their applicants.

Sister Forstrom and I are assigned to the employment center but assigned to BYU. The employment centers logs all candidates into the provident living data base and track their job search progress. It is oriented towards applicant with immediate job needs whereas the BYU Career Center is more directed towards longer term careers. The workshops as both are similar because the tools the students need are applicable for both objectives.

When we began our mission, we were trained at the Employment Centers but within a few weeks moved up to BYU 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 our 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 for us to do would be to become a communication link between the career center and employment center and the students and to do this through the over 230 plus wards. We try to be a catalyst and bring available resources to the students.

Sister Forstrom and I view ourselves as facilitators striving to communicate the efforts of the Career Center, the Employment Center and media to members of the BYU wards, and to do so through Bishops and Employment Specialists using various electronic means, eg email, blogs, social media and when requested, through firesides.

Our objective is not to find jobs, but to train everyone in the wards units to use the resources provided to find their own jobs and to guide them in doing this most effectively

When we were first assigned to BYU, we had to decide how to communicate employment information to 30,000 members of BYU Wards. We couldn’t do it one on one as the career center and employment center do.
We concluded that the most effective things we could do was to guide the Bishops and the Employment Specialists, to provide them with information and resources, and to reinforce their efforts.

Creation of the information has been the easy part of this task. Distribution of the information and getting the students has been more difficult. The information comes from the Church, the Career Center, the Employment Center and our own research.

Our research is primarily on the Internet. Google gives me the capability to enter key words, eg resume, networking or interviewing. Google searches all of the news releases and blogs for the day that have one of these words in the title. It then sends me an email with links to all the articles. I then read the articles that are applicable, choose and copy it, edit it as necessary, attribute it to the author and paste it into the Blog

We attend weekly staff meeting at the career center, we are in regular contact with the employment center, we review paper publications, we read employment blogs and we talk to church leaders to identify their needs and the needs of their ward members.

Creation of the information has been the easy part of this task. Distribution of the information and getting the students to use it has been the challenge. To communicate with your and your ward members, we publish the BYUCareer blog at byucareer.blogspot.com containing a great deal of information and encourage Ward members and Ward leaders to read it on a regular basis.

The Blog contains information on resume development, interviewing, networking, internships, job search, social networks, grad school and scholarships. In addition, it contains the schedule of workshops at the career center, links to job boards on the Internet, a list of career courses. It is the spot where all the information we produce can be found or linked to. One of our biggest challenged is to make students aware the blog exists and the get them to read it periodically. I’d like to ask everyone here if they have ever looked at the blog.

We send emails to Bishops and Employment Specialists I. have had Bishops tell me that they have discovered by emails in their spam folder. Do any of you fail to get emails from us?

Another challenger is to get Wards to distribute the information in an effective manner. Wards have approached the distribution of the content of these emails in many ways; some better than others. In a recent survey of BYU Bishops, we asked them how they get the information to their ward members. Here a list of the answers:

Forward emails to members electronically (email.)
Forward emails to EQ and RS Presidents and ask them to pass the information on.
Announce the information in RS and EQ meetings.
Announce the information in Welfare meeting.
Announce the information in PEC.
Put the information in the Sunday bulletin.
Distribute the information through auxiliary leaders.
Forward the information to key people.
Have those in need contact the ward employment specialist
Have those in need contact ward employment specialist
Email the counselors and have them disseminate.
Verbally and ward newsletter.
Ward Newsletter.
Ward Blog.

Each of these has its strengths and weaknesses. We have concluded that electronic distribution will reach the most people with the most information. However, it runs the risk of overload and people ignoring important information. Distribution by people, on the other hand, suffers from the possibility of people not performing or not recognizing who has a need (either perceived or not perceived. Another problem is how to get the students to recognize their needs.

For example, how do you get a young person to realize there are things they need to do years before graduation. Especially when these things compete with school, church callings and their social life. It is a delicate balance.

Bishops, You need to determine what works best in your ward. We think your objective needs to be to get information that is needed into the minds of as many members as possible and get them to apply it. This includes members who don’t recognize that they have a need.We are particularly thinking of underclassmen and underclasswomen who need summer or part-time jobs and who need to be preparing for their careers years before graduation.

They need to understand that internships are crucial in today’s world as is experience that can be gained by various school assignments or volunteer work at school, church or community. They also need to understand that volunteer work is just as important to a job seeker as is paid employment, in many instances more employment.

It is a certainty that being an Elder Quorum or a Relief Society President counts a lot more than most jobs a student will hold. They need to be told this and how to communicate this is a resume or job interview.

If I was a Bishop, I would review these matters with my Ward leadership regularly and find out what they think what distribution method would work best. I think you should use a rich mix of the methods noted by the various Bishops.

The various electronic methods maximize the amount of information the can be communicated to the most people, however I think it is critical to evaluate the frequency and the importance of each method and supplement it with a human input to encourage the application of the information.

I’m sure that you all have ward email lists that you send to. I’m offering to email your entire ward if you so choose if you would have someone send me an Excel or CSV file with names and email addresses. Since we are nearly entering the fall term it might be best to wait until you have a new set of member to start this.
If you would like an efficient way to build a ward list, we discovered one in the process of emailing you a survey in the last few weeks. The technique we used could be used to build new ward list for the fall. It uses the student to do all the work.

It consists of designing a form and having the students fill it in on the Internet. You can choose the data you want to collect, and when the student fills in the data, it is automatically inserted onto a spreadsheet, also on the Internet. The spreadsheet can then be downloaded into a file on your local computer that can then be loaded into a contact manager or email list.

Even though no one mentioned it, text messaging may be another effective technique among your members as may be postings on their Facebook Pages. You may even want a Ward Facebook page. We are advocates of transmitting the most information to the most people, with some special targeting and follow up with those who have a particular need. One ward has its own Blog. They copy the information they think is important off the BYU Career Blog plus add some original postings.

We conduct firesides at both the Ward and the Stake Level to provide much the same information as we are talking about here tonight.

We seek to train Bishops and Employment Specialists on important steps students need to take. We have guidance documents that we email to every new Bishop and every new employment specialist once we hear of him or her. We email both Bishops and specialists regularly with employment information. We especially encourage employment specialists to attend specialist training at the Employment Center We encourage ward members to attend workshops and career fairs.

We want to call attention to one of the most important resources available to your members, the Career Workshop. This workshop is offered weekly on Tuesday and Wednesday at the Employment Center. It is two full days. In addition, the Employment Center in conjunction with the BYU Career Center sponsors a Career Workshop on campus that is a four-hour version of the same program. It is only offered a few times a year. There will be one the Saturday before the next career day on campus to be held September 30.

The most recent workshop drew 125 students and the feedback was excellent. The career workshop manual can be downloaded from the Internet. A link is available in the right column of the Blog. We will announce the next workshop on the Blog in early September. We will include detail information; an email address for registration and a sign up she to we ask you to circulate EQ and Relief Society. We ask you to heavily promote this event. The next scheduling will probably be in late February unless there is an outpouring of demand for one in early December. The session is interactive and we run in multiple rooms in the Wilkinson Center. At the last February session because of heavy publicity, easy registration and strong follow up with the registrants, we more that doubled the best attendance at previous workshops. It is my belief that we can double it again. It touches on all of the important career subjects.
.