Career Services will hold a workshop on Conducting a Successful Job Search on Tuesday Oct. 15 at 5 p.m. in AL 205.

Career services offers similar workshops on different topics throughout the semester, including, “Got the Job: Now What?” on Oct. 22, and “Resumes: The Art of Storytelling” on Nov. 5.

BJU’s Career Services department primarily seeks to instill “career readiness” in students.

Natalie Smith, assistant director of Career Services and speaker for most of the workshops, explained what she hopes these workshops will accomplish for students. “My goal is that it’s providing a big-picture of the idea of how to do these certain things and hopefully inspire [students] to work on this and come by the career center to get help for their needs,” Smith said.

Shawn Albert, Career Services director, said the skills taught in these workshops are important to all University students, not just seniors or those looking for an internship.

Both Albert and Smith recommended starting the process as soon as possible. “The idea here is that the earlier [students] begin the process, the more time they have for this to be well-developed and the better prepared they’ll be when the time comes to apply for a job,” Albert said.

Smith said she’s excited that the workshops this year are held in the Career Services Center rather than elsewhere on campus as they have been in the past. “We’re trying to host it here so that students will come into our space and see where it’s at and get connected to us that way,” Smith said.

Albert explained that the topics for the career workshops are chosen based on what skills are the most universally critical to career readiness and can be reasonably conveyed in a 20-minute workshop.

Smith also explained how Career Services determines topics for workshops. “We try to think throughout the semester what students need,” Smith said. “There are littler things we can help students within the Career Center, but these are the big things that they’re going to need first and foremost throughout the semester.”

In addition to workshops, the Career Services Center also offers advice on resumes, LinkedIn profiles, job search strategies, internship planning, interview preparation and more.

The Career Services Center offers handouts on many of these subjects and will also help students in more hands-on ways such as reviewing their resume with them or conducting a mock interview. The next upcoming workshop is “Conducting a Successful Job Search.”

“They estimate that your generation will change jobs about 17 times in your lifetime, so conducting a successful job search really needs to become a life skill,” Albert said.