Spotlight for Career Services Professionals

Among the Class of 2017, 85.6 percent of students who had begun the job search had visited the career center—either at its office or on its website—at least once in the past academic year, according to results of NACE’s Class of 2017 Student Survey Report.

As a broader resource for career development, the career center enjoys fairly wide engagement. This is due, in no small part, to career centers’ improving online presence. For the Class of 2017, this high level of engagement means that only 14.4 percent of students who had begun the job search had no interactions with the career center whatsoever.

On the other side, more than half (54.5 percent) had visited both the office and the website at least once in the past academic year. In addition, students who had begun the job search were much more likely to have visited the website than the office, particularly multiple times in a single semester. (See Figure 1.)

Among seven career center services—each available both in the office and on the website—in-office resume assistance was the most widely used and among those considered the most helpful. (See Figure 2.) One of the least used services—in-office practice interviewing—was considered the single most helpful. In addition, students were more likely to pursue career counseling, career workshops, practice interviewing, and resume assistance at the career center office, while they were more likely to view job listings and research employers on the career center website. The only service that students were equally likely to pursue both in-office and online was career skills testing.

NACE’s Class of 2017 Student Survey was conducted from February 15 to April 30, 2017; more than 21,000 students at colleges and universities nationwide took part, including 4,200 graduating seniors. Participating schools will find a complimentary copy of the report in MyNACE > Research Reports; an executive summary is available on NACEWeb.