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Hours spent scrolling through Indeed, stacks of cover letters, and another job demanding five years of experience are a stress many face. Luckily, the Aggie Career Studio (ACS) provides help for students looking to make navigating the job market easier.
The ACS team says one of the number one problems students make when trying to find employment is all in the resume. The solution? First, make sure to revise.
“For resumes I would say just the formatting,” A Career Resource Coordinator with ACS, Marisa Vialpando, said. “And making sure you’re using proper grammar and being able to make sure that everything’s consistent.”
However, once you’ve revised your resume and made sure you used the correct there, their, or they’re, there’s no guarantee your work will be read by a human. The ACS team advises that if you don’t include certain phrases, it won’t even pass an initial “AI reader.”
“Right now, I think that the biggest career challenge students are facing is the over reliance of AI with employers,” ACS Operations Tech Daniel Montoya said. “They’ll put your application into an AI system, it’ll read your application, and if it doesn’t have the key phrases that they’re using in that job description, your application will never see a human being.”
But what are those ‘key phrases?’ ACS suggests using ‘corporate speak’ along with copying words found in the job description.
“Whenever you see a job description – a lot of people – they have requirements and they have skills and they have competencies,” Vialpando said. “So, in that area alone, it tells you what should be reflected.”
Another common issue is the experience requirement. Coming out of college, many are bound to not have it, and for that, the ACS suggests being on the lookout for any internship opportunities.
“A lot of places are hiring, like, the upper management, and they want to have experience,” Vialpando said. “So, some students don’t have experience, and that’s why we push a lot for internships…it opens a lot more doors for employment in the future.”
One big way to find these internships is at the career fairs held by ACS at least three times a year. For these, one piece of advice, don’t make the mistake of dressing casually – dress to impress.
“It is more of a professional event just because of the level of employers that are coming,” Montoya said. “It’s not like a high school job fair where it’s your McDonald’s, your local mom-and-pop shops. We have giant government contractors. We have Raytheon, we have Honeywell.”
Along with your collared shirt, bring a good elevator pitch.
“One big thing is the elevator pitch,” Vialpando said. “It not only introduces yourself, it highlights your skills, and you’re able to connect with them on a deeper level and make connections outside of just their first initial impression.”
The ACS shared that their career fairs have a good success rate for students in any major. At their career fair on Feb. 3, a wide range of employers such as musical revue Medora Musical, vehicle rental company Enterprise Mobility, poultry producer Bachoco USA, and multi-mission laboratory Sandia National Laboratories were present.
Finally, the ACS says: “Visit!” From their mock interviews to reviewing resumes and networking with employers, the team helps students build skills they might not learn elsewhere.
“The career studio was created to help with student needs, as far as helping them find work, study positions, and jobs after college,” Corporate Relations Program Manager Kena Carriere said. “…But in addition to that, it was also to teach them skills that they weren’t maybe learning in the classroom; kind of like business etiquette and, like, what are you going to do?”
More information on the Aggie Career Studio can be found on their website.
