The Career Office

College career centers are vital resources to any student looking for employment. Career coaches help soon-to-be-graduates find internships, practice interviewing, and polish their résumés. But how can career centers help students who already have jobs?

“All of our students have work experience, with very few exceptions,” says Kathryn Carlson, assistant dean of MBA programs and the graduate business career center at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management. Full-time Carlson MBA students average six years of professional experience.

Career centers in local graduate business schools focus on helping students further their current careers, or even find new ones. “Given our student body, the biggest request is from career changers,” Carlson says. “We help them reframe their past experience and make it applicable to a brand new area or field.”

She says Carlson offers special services, such as workshops that help students apply their previous experience to a new career, for those students who are looking for a change—like an engineer looking to land a job in marketing. “We do have some students that are making that radical of a change,” Carlson says.

Career changers aren’t the only students getting help however. At both Carlson and the University of St. Thomas’s Opus College of Business, all full-time graduate students must visit the career centers at least once. “We do require that they have a résumé on line on the job database, and in order to do that they have to work with us to get it ready,” says Linda Sloan, director of industry relations and career management for the Opus school’s graduate business career services. She says there are workshops, on topics such as interviewing techniques, that students are required to attend.

All Carlson full-time students have a résumé review meeting with a career coach, and students must do a mock interview before they can participate in on-campus recruiting. Beyond the requirements, both directors say the majority of students use their services for help in other areas, such as networking.

Both Carlson and St. Thomas have services tailored toward their part-time and executive MBA students—those who work while attending school—such as tips on negotiating compensation offers or even life coaching to help students decide how to progress in their careers. “Quite often, people are just looking to move ahead within their companies, so they come in and talk about how to position themselves to move forward,” Sloan says.