Career Services

The Labor Day weekend is always a prime time for career and employment news items.  Particularly interesting are reports regarding the University of Chicago’s most recent studies related to job satisfaction.  Here are a few highlights and career services observations:

1.   Workers in South Central states (including Arkansas) were most satisfied with their jobs.  (Factor geography into your career planning)
2. People working in helping or creative professions expressed high job satisfaction ratings.  (Consider working with a non-profit or pursuing your artistic ambitions)
3. Job satisfaction increases with age.
    (Your first job may not be perfect, that’s ok, your career path is a progressive journey)
4. Job satisfaction increases with education-those with graduate degrees reported the highest ratings.  (Strongly consider graduate school-the rewards go beyond earnings potential)

 We were planning to use a routine Friday post to highlight a single Jobline opportunity; however, this week there are simply too many great opportunities to limit our blog post to only one. 

-Teach for America has posted their call for 2008 corps members.  This is an excellent service opportunity.  They seek students from all majors: check out their listing on Jobline if you would like to learn more. 
-We also recently received a note concerning an excellent opportunity with DuoShare.  The open position is Software Development Engineer.  Email us as soon as possible if you would like more info.

The great opportunities for this weeek do not end there. Heifer Project has posted a Community Education Coordinator position and ABF Freight Services is looking for an Economic Analyst.  Login or register to check out all the details. 

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to attend the 2007 Fayetteville Shale Symposium.  If you are not familiar with the Fayetteville Shale play, Arkansas Business, the symposium organizer has all of the details you need – they will also have the symposium presentation outlines posted online soon.  The shale play provides a tremendous opportunity for new job creation.  For example, Southwestern Energy, just one of the companies involved in the Fayetteville Shale play currently has thirty job postings in Conway alone.  These jobs include some advanced technical and administrative roles.   Several accounting positions are also posted with Southwestern. 

Some additional reflections on the symposium:
-The extraction of natural gas from the Fayetteville shale offers great economic opportunity to the area and the state through economic investment, community patronage, and the potential for new, high-paying jobs. 
-There are also important environmental concerns and the state environmental agency (ADEQ) is working to make sure there is minimal environmental impact.
- From the company, investment, and legal speakers, I gathered that the enthusiasm for these opportunities should be tempered with realistic expectations: There will be declining values from drilling operations, the operations basically only offset traditional vertical drilling of the past, and energy prices will determine whether continued and expanded operations are economically feasible. 

Comments or Questions?

This article had to serve as the topic of one our first posts. The premise really sums up the mission of campus career services.  The importance of first jobs, internships, hard work, and classroom instruction is huge, yet it is often slighted for sake of a good success story.  That’s what career services offers: opportunities to begin progressing toward your goals.  An internship or entry level job can be the foundation of a really amazing career.  Don’t forget those initial steps, “First, get a job (or an internship).”  Great things will follow.

Welcome to the Hendrix Job Blog!  Hopefully this first post will get the introductions and details out of the way and we can move on to the important stuff! This is the place to find breaking job and internship postings, career and industry news, and advice for your job or internship search.  Our primary audience is the Hendrix community, but we welcome all readers and hope that we provide some insight into college career services for employers, bloggers, and all readers. 

Hendrix Career Services already utilizes a great job posting board, Jobline, and we connect with students and employers in several ways. So why the blog?  This gives a chance to quickly deliver content to our constituents (students, parents, employers, career professionals) – especially if you make use of an RSS reader.  We encourage dialogue, so comments and links are welcome.  Also, make sure you check out our links of interest.  We’ve included a few folks in this list with much more blogging experience than we can boast. They also provide some top-notch career advice and information. 

Those are the basics.  Thanks for reading!