 Think Tech Hawaii. Civil engagement lives here. Welcome to Think Tech Hawaii and Education Matters. Today I'm your host, Carol Mon-Lee. Our show is called College to Career Challenge, finding the resources for success. And we're going to talk about how HPU's Career Development Center supports students and alumni in transition. Learn how you can take advantage of the resources available at your school to increase your chances for a successful career move. If you want to ask a question or make a comment, you can tweet us at ThinkTechHi or call us at 374-2014. With a rapidly changing global workplace, how can college graduates be prepared to transition successfully? HPU's Director of Career Development, Mike Van Leer, shares some of the resources available to meet those challenges. Welcome, Mike. Thank you very much. I'm happy to be here, Carol. Great. So let's start out the big picture. What is the global workplace looking like right now and global, international, national, local? Well, from a global perspective, you're going to look at countries where you have an aging population. So Japan is a good example. So South Korea, that workforce is that, you know, the highly skilled workforce is diminishing. So you need a lot of young blood to get in there and take over some of the work that will be vacated by those that are retiring. Europe also similar, you know, population that's coming in that's skilled. They haven't, but not to the levels that you would like to see like we had from a baby boom population that came through. So Europe is a need of a good trained workforce along with Asia. Some other countries in Latin America are there as well. Brazil is one. Chile is another one. I was looking these up earlier today, so it's exciting to see that it's around the world. When you think just internationally, times are very good for a college graduate right now in the United States. We're looking at unemployment rate nationally, hovering around 4, 4.1%. And compared to, let's say, five years ago? Oh, yeah. We were looking somewhere around seven and a half. Yeah. Yeah. So it's a much better environment than when we went through the Great Recession. And locally? Locally. Well, the numbers are a bit misleading because you have to look at where are the job opportunities. But obviously, construction and hospitality, tourism management, that's a field where there are lots of jobs. But we do have one of the lowest unemployment rates in the nation. We hover around 2.9 to 3.0. So you mentioned construction in the visitor industry. What about education, the STEM, engineering? Definitely that's starting to come about. The thing that I think helps us a great deal from the STEM is Pearl Harbor. And all of the jobs that are available for those with the STEM skill sets. They did a hiring, I think it was about a month ago. It was over at the Blaisdale. And they were looking for the highly skilled STEM majors. But you've got big companies out here like HIKO, the Hawaiian Electric, that are always looking for the skilled labor that comes out of college with that STEM background. Sure. And of course, we have the government, right? The government and all of the Pacific Basin-related defense industry beyond Pearl Harbor, things like that. Well, and healthcare too. Of course. And that's a big one for us here in Hawaii because a lot of people from around the Pacific Basin come to Hawaii for some healthcare that maybe they can't obtain in some of the countries that they're in. And your career development center at HPU. So you service both students and alumni. And I assume our most your students undergraduate freshmen and sophomores are primarily seniors as they are graduating and knocking out the door. We're starting to see more of the freshman and the sophomore than we used to, which has been our big push. We've been driving that message home for the last two and a half, three years now, that don't wait until graduation to come see us because you will have missed out on some golden opportunities to really add fodder to that resume that you're going to be sharing with employers. Yeah. So how do you do that? So how do you support them? Well, what we do is really talk about the value of an internship. What does it look like? And it's not just, you know, is it the most convenient internship I can get? Or is it the one that pays the most? It's really, is this internship aligned with your major that you're studying? Is it something that you have an interest in? Are you kind of in an exploratory path in your field? And you want to maybe do two or three internships during your time at HPU? That's really our goal is to get them to get that kind of experience. But not just internships, it's even working on campus. We have a freshman student. She's going into her sophomore year this year. She started with us in our department. And she has shine. She's been able to apply some of her skill set. She's an integrated multimedia major and has helped me prepare some very nice flyers and promo material. And you know, someone my age doesn't have that skill set. And I like to take advantage of those that do. Of course. Well, so actually for a student, then to find an internship is almost at the end. But in terms of identifying internships, preparing in terms of resumes, interviewing skills, do you take, you handle those? Yes. So we rerun a series of about 10 workshops. And we start off the term, we run them on Mondays. And then halfway to the term, we start them again and we do them on Fridays. And it covers everything from resume writing, job interviewing, LinkedIn profiles, creating. And then we have your general resume writing workshop. But one of the things I'd really touch on is kind of this one that we call the applicants at standout workshop, which encompasses the resume the cover letter and the interviewing part. And it's really about targeting your resume, targeting your responses that you're going to prepare for in an interview to the position in the company you're applying for. And how do you do that? First, is this, I assume it's a voluntary, right? Yeah. It's not a course that they get credit for, but it's an extracurricular opportunity for them. Absolutely. And if I can have my way, we'll make it a course one day. But that's right. We really, one of the things we do in that workshop that I just mentioned is we will pull a job description from an organization. And so if I'm meeting with, for example, I did this with the social work students before career fair that they had. And we pulled up a social worker job description from a local company here. And I had to identify what are the most important points or things that this employer is looking for in filling this position. Really highlight what is it that they most require. So of course, you're looking at the skills that are going to be required and then the ones that are preferred. And then students are going to go, what do I have in that? And you have to start exactly. And then does my resume say that or not? If it does not, then you need to make sure that you're putting that on there. Because that resume, if I'm receiving that resume with the name of my organization on the front of the resume, it's named that way, it's in an attachment. And then the person's last name, that tells me you wrote it for me. And I'm seeing it then when I go through it. I'm seeing, oh, you're talking to my job that I'm posting. That means something to that employer. Have you seen resumes change over the years? From my days when we used to make resumes versus nowadays, you mentioned LinkedIn. Of course, that wasn't even around before. Now make sure people want to put that LinkedIn reference on their resume. In general, you mentioned, of course, tailoring your resume and your cover letter to the particular job. But anything else that you see that's become more important these days in a resume? There has. For so long, it was just a reverse chronological resume. While your most recent stuff, you started at the top, both your education, your work experience, and then you work backwards. And then you restarted seeing, I think this was probably more in the 90s, we started to see the functional resume, which was talking a little bit more in detail, a little bit more narrative about what are the skills that you possess that are transferable from one job to another, like communication, teamwork, whatever that may be. And then there's the hybrid. So giving it a little bit more structure, using that reverse chronological, but still wanting to showcase what you believe you most have to offer. And so you might describe a little bit of an internship experience. It could be a project that you did in college that was really our duets and really put you to the task. And it shows your critical thinking skills. And so that's something that a lot of employers want to see, is that? So I'd say the hybrid or the combination of those two has taken hold. But you mentioned LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a source. You can apply through LinkedIn now. You don't even need to send your resume. If you look on LinkedIn for jobs, you can apply with your profile. So does that mean all employers are on LinkedIn too? Most employers are really on LinkedIn these days. In Hawaii, on internet, everywhere. Yeah, I think LinkedIn is the go-to source when you're talking about an online platform where people can really connect with one another and can look for employment opportunities. And there's ways to make your profile public or not public. Maybe you're searching for work, but you don't want your employer to know. So you have to be careful how you're using it. There are premium features, which can enable you to see who's looking at you. So you can kind of see, oh, this employer, I applied to them, and now they looked at my profile. So that's a good example of when you said, what's different about the resume? You should be putting your LinkedIn profile on there. Because the employer then can look you up right away. And you can find out maybe later, did they check me out? But can you then apply on LinkedIn and then tailor specifically a cover letter and a resume to them through the LinkedIn process? That's a little trickier. You're going to really just be sending your profile on LinkedIn. You're not going to. So if it's a standard profile. Yeah, yeah. So and if you're going to do that, you better have a good profile. Better be up to date. Because that's one of the problems is forget to update all the things that we have. Do you include pictures? Yes. Yeah, you should have a picture of yourself. Not a selfie. Not a selfie. It should be a good. Not in a bathing suit. No, no. Well, unless you're a model, then maybe that might work. And I have seen that. And that's actually something that we talk about when we do the LinkedIn workshop, is we actually give photos of examples of what should be on there. So if you're into photography and you have a shot of you out in the woods taking pictures, then that works. So you have to think about the context of your feel that you're having. And what about interviewing skills? Because of course, once you get through LinkedIn and then you're contacted by the potential employer and they want to talk to you, what do you do a career development center in terms of preparing the students or refreshing the alum on their interviewing skills? I think that's probably the thing I most enjoy doing with our students. And we do mock interviews. We will film the student with our camera. We will play it back to them. We don't necessarily. One-on-one. Yes, one-on-one. And none of us in our department are really prone to saying, here's where you did well. Here's where you did poorly and you need to work on it. We really let the student watch and tell us what do they see in it themselves. Normally, they're going to catch everything that we've caught. They're going to catch the fact that they use too many ums and ahms. Likes. Yeah. I like that. Likes. That is definitely one of them. And it somehow has become contagious because I even catch myself doing it now. I'm using the word like you. But the mock interview, helping the students through that is really that's what gets the job. The resume is going to get you the interview or the LinkedIn profile. But if you can't shine in that interview, you're going to be distinguishing yourself from the many others. Absolutely. We have a couple of pictures that we want to pull up. And what is this picture, Mike? This looks like our speed networking event that we had last year. We had a number of employers that had come in, some kind of higher-level executives that gave up their time to do what we call the speed networking. So it's really making your pitch, you know, that term, the elevator pitch. Yes. It's kind of that concept where you've got, oh, maybe a minute and a half to go around the table, introduce yourself. And what we try to emphasize in that is you need to show where your passion lies in this field. What excites you? You need to kind of show that the bright eyes and the bushy tail that you're ready to go. But you have to think about that ahead of time. We had another networking event last year. And I went in with some technology majors in our computer science and our MIS programs and prepared them on really just standing up, shaking hands, introducing themselves. What point were they in their program? What is it that they really want to do in the technology field? And then kind of open that as a question to the person you're meeting with and kind of say, what recommendations do you have for me? And usually people who are well-versed in their fields can't wait to share that. Yeah. It brings up really small detail. But I always wonder how people feel about handshakes, particularly for a woman to a man or a young woman to an older man. And I always advise when I used to be in education that really I really don't like the little kiss my hand the old fashioned. It's just got to be a real handshake. Absolutely. Right. No matter how young I am and how old you may be or how senior you are, that handshake is really important. Absolutely. I had to tell you, I have cold hands. And so if it's winter time, I'm usually keeping it under my life before I meet you. Warming it up. Yeah, warming it up. I don't want them to feel like they shook hands with a frozen fish. So yeah, you do need to think about that. So you have the clammy hands. And they've got to do a quick wipe before they all those little things. If you know that about yourself, think about it. You've got to be ready for it. Of course, in Hawaii we have a lot of hugging. Yes, we do. What do you suggest for that? I suggest don't push it away, but be warm to it if it comes your way. But don't extend yourself first. Not first. Yeah, especially with the guys. Let that evolve with time. I don't initiate that immediately. But if it's initiated towards you and you're comfortable with it, go for it, because that is our culture here. It is. It's a special thing. The aloha spirit. Yeah, absolutely. Right. Well, we're coming down to our break time. So we're going to take a short break. This is Carol Monlee on Education Matters with my guest, Mike Van Leer, from the HPU's Career Development Center. And we'll be right back. My name is Stephanie Mock, and I'm one of three hosts of Think Tech Hawaii's Hawaii Food and Farmer series. Our other hosts are Matt Johnson and Pamai Weigert. And we talk to those who are in the fields and behind the scenes of our local food system. We talk to farmers, chefs, restaurateurs, and more to learn more about what goes into sustainable agriculture here in Hawaii. We are on a Thursdays at 4 PM. And we hope we'll see you next time. Hey, aloha, Stanley Energyman here on Think Tech Hawaii where community matters. This is the place to come to think about all things energy. We talk about energy for the grid, energy for vehicles, energy and transportation, energy and maritime, energy and aviation. We have all kinds of things on our show. But we always focus on hydrogen here in Hawaii, because it's my favorite thing. That's what I like to do. But we talk about things that make a difference here in Hawaii, things that should be a big changer for Hawaii. And we hope that you'll join us every Friday at noon on Stanley Energyman. And take a look with us at new technologies and new thoughts on how we can get clean and green in Hawaii, aloha. Hi, this is Carol Monley on Education Matters with my special guest, Mike Van Leer, who is the head of the Career Development Center at HPU. And we've been talking about college to career transition and the importance of all of the skills you need to develop so that you can stand out and get a great job and a foot in the door on your next career move. We already saw one or two slides. I think we have one or two more images. And what do we have here? We have a picture of two young people talking to each other. Yeah, the younger one on the left is actually the recruiter. He is a gentleman that did a number of workshops for us a few years back and also recruited at the career fairs that we had. And so I think that was one of our applicants that appears to be dressed right for it. So I'm proud to say that it's the HPU student representing well. Very well. So this is a career fair, right? It is, yes. At the school? Yeah, this was over. That looks like aloha tower. Right. And so how many employers do you have come down and do you do this every semester? We pulled back on the career fairs now. We're finding that really the one-on-one employer information sessions seem to be resonating better for both the students, the alumni and the employers. And that's simply because there's a less investment of their time. They come down and they get sole attention of the students. So it's their session to introduce their company and their organization and the job opportunities and internships they have. I see. Instead of having a large room with dozens of tables, you may have a day set aside for one employer or an afternoon or an hour, and then students can sign up and visit with that employer. Absolutely, yeah. We've probably got 15 of them scheduled already for this fall. Already, starting when? It's September. About mid-September is the first one. We're usually at the first two weeks of the term go by and then restart up with our sessions. All right, okay. And do we have another image there, Rob? One more? I think. Maybe not. Okay. So we have employers starting in September coming to the campus. We talked briefly during the break, of course with the Me Too movement and the awareness now of the growing importance of understanding sexual harassment and the process and procedures for, of course, identifying it, dealing with it and managing it and hopefully reducing it and eliminating it. So how have you incorporated that into what you do with your students and employers and advising? I'd say we just put that all into the context of professionalism, really. It's how do you present yourself around the clock at work? And then think about also, of course, when you're off the clock and what are the behaviors that you exhibit that your organization would be proud to have you as an employee? So it goes from everything with how do you present yourself when you come into work in your dress? But going to the Me Too movement, that's kind of added a nuance to this, that we have to be even more attentive to. Not, I think it'd be easy to say error on the side of caution, but I think that is probably too cautious, really. I think it's just understand how you would like to be treated and do that in return. Do you put anything in writing and give guidelines, for instance, to the employer now or as part of the interview process, do you actually have anything in writing? We don't have it in writing. What we always do when an employer wants to recruit on our online platform or on campus, we're gonna research that employer before we agree to have them on. So we will do a little bit of homework first. Do you see if they have a sexual harassment policy? We check their website, we'll look at, we'll ask if they've had problems in that area. That's gonna be important. So there are times where we've had fraudulent employers that have posted for an opportunity and they've snuck through, not so much from a harassment standpoint, but really more from a standpoint of, send $20 for your uniform. That should not be happening. Nobody should be doing that. So you have to really be diligent when you're approving employers for things. And I think that's an area we can do even more from a harassment policy standpoint because absolutely, every employer should have that. And have you seen a growing interest in from your students about being able to identify or report or learn about these issues? Oh yeah, I mean, we had the Me Too monologues that happened with some students and some professors put this on. So it's certainly gained a lot of attention in the last year. Yeah, Me Too monologues, can you explain that? I didn't attend, so I can't tell you too much about it, but it was really folks telling their personal experiences. It was really revealing themselves in many ways. Sometimes it wasn't so much harassment and sometimes just really troublesome situations that people have come into and they felt uncomfortable but they didn't necessarily identify it as they were harassed but then some were very much harassment and assault. Oh my goodness. Well, let's put that in the bigger context of career, looking for a career. So do you find that locally, nationally, is that something that your students who are alumni could go out and finding jobs across the country have similar issues? Or is it local? I mean, with the... The predominance of maybe sexual harassment issues is it? Yeah, it's not isolated in one region of the country. It's gonna be anywhere from a large corporation to a mom-and-pop shop and really what we've ever said to our students at intern is if there's ever anything that you're uncomfortable with, you need to let us know immediately where you'll get together with your world, talk through what was this. If it's something about you just were uncomfortable with how you were talked about coming in to work late, okay, that's a different thing. But certainly anytime there's any issues of, you know, I mean, we've had some employers that wanted to have an intern out of their house. No. To their house. Yeah, we've learned that. Yeah, so I mean, those are ones where we... Don't go to the house. Yeah, yeah, that's not happening. Don't go to the hotel room either. Yeah, yeah, those aren't gonna happen. Not on our watch. That's right, right, right, right. I know your department, your center also services alums. Yes, yes, we do. How many students do you have right now at HPU and how many alums do you have worldwide? Worldwide, I think we're right around 50,000. It's a big number and student-wise we're hovering around 3,500 to 4,000. 3,500, right. We have a bunch of new students coming in. I think we're looking at somewhere around 800 new students joining us. For the freshman year. Well, they're not all freshmen. Some are transfer. I think about 550 are freshmen. And some of your graduate programs too, right, yeah. And as I mentioned to you, we've been very lucky to have HPU freshmen as interns here for the last two years. That's music to my ears. I know, we're very pleased with them. I give Nicole and Brianna a shout out. All right, good job girls. Yeah, so but your alum, your 50,000 plus alum, so they can take advantage of your services? Absolutely, yeah, make sure they can. In fact, we see them at a fair number of our employer information sessions. So when we have the employers on campus, a lot of times, depending on which employer, that room might have a third to half of them being alum. So do you actually place them in jobs? Part of career development is that, including placement? Yeah, we don't place them. It's kind of a term that we think quite a while back. It's where employers work comfortably enough with placement offices on campuses where they would just say, sure, I'll take this student, but that's not happening these days anymore. So is that term job placement still in use? It is in use in staffing agencies, usually it's for temp help. But not on campus? Not on campus. There's no job placement office? No, you won't hear that term, just because I don't think I have the trust of any employer to say, you're gonna hire this one. They're gonna want to interview him first. But we do help that. I mean, we certainly coordinate with an employer that they say we want to interview some students. We want to have an event where we want to see these students do a presentation. We won't kind of pick some students. They have to kind of apply through us to show us that they're serious. So we did something with Booz Allen, similar to that. It was kind of a shark tank type of event and we had three students compete in that. One is finishing up her internship this summer. One was offered a job anywhere where Booz Allen had a headquarters. Right. So it turned out really well. Absolutely. So do you follow them? Do you keep track? You keep all of the numbers as far as who actually gets hired and in terms of what they're doing. We're working on that. Yeah, we're working on that. Really, because so much of that is voluntary. We surveyed the students when they graduate. The response rates aren't where we want them. And so we have a couple of, we have a task force that are getting together right now to figure out how we can increase that. Because yeah, that's important to us. Sure. The data. Yeah, yeah, the data, it speaks volumes. It speaks volumes. There are some studies, I shouldn't say studies, there's some media outlets like the US News and World Report that they do some of that investigative work and then they'll do a best ROI on your university and reword the best ROI in Hawaii last year by US News. So I mean, there are some good reports coming out but we would like to house that data internally and make sure we know it all. So I know that you have just transitioned to something called Handshake. So why don't you tell us a little bit about that and how that helps your students and alums? Well, Handshake is, in fact, we just went live with it last week for the student side, employers were on in June. And what I most like about Handshake, I've had some demonstrations at some conferences that I've gone to that should an individual that has an account on there, meaning a student or an alum, really create a good, robust profile, really identify what is your field of study, what are some things that stood out in your study, whether you did internships, projects, and then really what you wanna do. And then that profile will be matched with either internship or employment opportunities that had been posted by employers. So you can see, hey, the jobs you might be interested in are these. Okay, so and this is open to all students and alum. Absolutely. They just go online? Yep. Okay. Well, we just have a few seconds left and I'm gonna let you, Mike, look into Camera Four and tell our audience how they can contact you in the department and take advantage of your services. Well, thank you. Yes, you can reach us by phone. That's the old school way, 808-544-0230. That's the Career Development Center office. We're in the Finance Factor Building and that's over at Bishop Street. We're in Suite 122. We're also on Facebook and Twitter and our web address is hpu.edu forward slash CDC. And I think that's it. Great, what does the CDC stand for? Career Development Center. Oh, of course. Okay. Well, this brings us to the end of the program and I really enjoyed talking about this important area, college to career for students and alum of HP, but also it's a great way for all students and people looking for jobs to understand what their options are. So thank you so much. Thank you for having me on. I appreciate it. Okay, well, that brings us to the end of our show. I'm Carol Monly, your host and we've been talking about college to career challenges, finding the resources for success with my guest, Mike Van Leer from HP's Career Development Center. If you wanna see this show again, go to thinktechhawaii.com or youtube.com slash thinktechhawaii where there will be a link to this show and many more just like this one. Thanks so much. Thanks so much to our Intrepid Studio staff and to all the people who watch and contribute to our productions. We'll see you next time. Aloha.