The Economic Policy Institute in 2019 notes<\/a> that college graduates have been facing higher unemployment rates since 2000. For career development professional Andy Chan, partly to blame is the outdated notion of colleges\u2019 career services where they\u2019re treated as an add-on to a degree or a last-minute attempt to employment. <\/p>\n\n\n\n His solution<\/a>: \u201cCareer services must die.\u201d In particular, schools must rethink the idea of career services and treat it as a critical facet of a student\u2019s learning experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n He isn\u2019t alone in this sentiment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In fact, a Forbes article<\/a> recently offered a five-point action plan that, if followed, would ideally give college graduates a chance at gainful employment. The points are as follows: <\/p>\n\n\n\n What\u2019s interesting is that while these points remain ideas or suggestions for traditional colleges and universities, they have long been a reality for the students of coding bootcamp General Assembly<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n How? The coding bootcamp leverages a key selling point to aspiring General Assembly students other than skills training: its career services.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Let us be clear: General Assembly\u2019s career services team<\/a> is not a staffing agency. It does not exist to hand out jobs to students. It does, however, help students build on critical job search skills and translate these into meaningful employment through a dedicated team of career coaches.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the words of General Assembly Career Coach Audrey Galo: \u201cWe offer creative solutions for where [students] can find these [job] opportunities and better position themselves to be in front of hiring managers and recruiters.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n With that in mind, let\u2019s see how General Assembly meets the five-point action plan above. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Becoming a General Assembly student means two things. First, you gain access to all the instructional resources you\u2019ll need to be proficient in your chosen tech field. Second, you\u2019ll have access to the resources provided by General Assembly\u2019s career services team when you enroll in an Immersive course.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These resources include a range of interactive in-class programs such as weekly webinars, alumni and employer panels, workshops, and hack-a-thons. Through these, you\u2019ll get a firsthand insight into current hiring trends and industry demands as well as the career paths that you can take after you graduate. <\/p>\n\n\n\n You\u2019ll also learn the following: <\/p>\n\n\n\n Put together, these programs span the entire job search lifecycle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The centerpiece of General Assembly\u2019s career services is the one-on-one career support provided by the school\u2019s career coaches. <\/p>\n\n\n\n As you train, you will be assigned to a career coach who will help you navigate the job search according to your needs, skills, interests, and circumstances. This means that the guidance you get will always be unique to you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, how does this work?<\/p>\n\n\n\n One of the services your coach will provide is the interview prep where you\u2019ll learn how to master both technical and behavioral job interviews. This entails sitting through mock interviews where you\u2019ll get constant feedback on how best to communicate your expertise and experience to your prospective employer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On the personal development side, your career coach will help you address day-to-day challenges so that you stay on track with your goal. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAs coaches, we make sure that we\u2019re thinking about the whole person,\u201d says Audrey. \u201cWe need to consider all the different types of support that someone might need and how we might have to point them in a different direction so they can get that support.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cFor example, I\u2019ve had some students who were dealing with a lot of anxiety over their job search. My role as a job coach was to identify their needs and offer or point them towards the resources that might cater to those needs.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI think that\u2019s something that, as a coach, is completely new and different [since the pandemic began]. I have had to figure out the balance of holding someone accountable but also realizing that the students have a really big challenge happening in their life right now,\u201d Audrey shares. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAnd really, I just have to be creative around reconfiguring that balance, lending them that time, and saying, \u2018You actually do have to take care of yourself. You need to be fully present in this search in order for it to be successful.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Put simply, career coaching at General Assembly is holistic. It doesn\u2019t solely focus on getting your career off the ground but also on making sure that you thrive during your career transition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cOne of the biggest mistakes that a job seeker can make would be to think that sending cold applications out there is going to do the trick,\u201d says Audrey. For her, the trick is in building relationships through networking. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Admittedly, some might shy away from the word due to the images that it typically conjures\u2014awkward mixers, overzealous people, and insincere conversations. When done right, however, networking can be your key to employment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In fact, a survey<\/a> conducted by consulting firm Performance-based Hiring Learning System reveals that 85 percent of jobs are filled through networking. It\u2019s an approach, says Audrey, that\u2019s even more valuable now. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cOne of the things that you\u2019ll see hiring managers and recruiters do when there are crises or slowdowns in hiring is they go to the people that they know,\u201d she says. \u201cThey trust more of the referrals. They trust people who are recommended to them and who they\u2019ve heard are particularly skilled in a certain area.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIf you think about it, there\u2019s a lot more risk for companies to hire unknown candidates right now,\u201d Audrey points out. \u201cWhy? Because if they\u2019ve slowed down hiring significantly, the hires they make mean a lot more to their talent pool. They\u2019re not hiring 20 people a month. Instead, they\u2019re hiring two or three, so they want to be really precise about that.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is why at General Assembly, students are coached about how they can leverage social networking tools and sites to make their skills visible to hiring managers and recruiters. <\/p>\n\n\n\n A few examples, says Audrey, include using teleconferencing tool Zoom for informational interviews and bringing your professional story to life on LinkedIn to attract the attention of employers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Resume review is one of the classic and perhaps most-used services that you can get when you visit a career center. General Assembly amps this feature up by showing how you can optimize your resume in a way that would satisfy not just the employers but also the applicant-tracking systems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n General Assembly also has an ongoing partnership with career marketplace Hired<\/a> that allows students to create profiles, which are available for the viewing of around 8,000 companies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For a hiring manager, the goal is to gain firsthand insight into what an applicant can do and add to the company. General Assembly students make this easy through their professional portfolios, which are readily accessible on GitHub. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The portfolios are a collection of projects that students have built throughout their training at General Assembly. These allow employers to get a better grasp of their skills, thought processes, and how they create technical documentation for their projects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Everything that General Assembly offers from getting into the school<\/a> all the way to graduation is designed to prepare students for the workforce. It starts from a market-led curriculum that helps them get through the doors of the industry and ends with a career coaching program that helps them choose their place in the industry. <\/p>\n\n\n\n General Assembly\u2019s career services are embedded into the students\u2019 education-to-career experience. So instead of waiting for students to come to the Career Coaching Team as is what\u2019s expected in traditional colleges and universities, the bootcamp brings career services to the students and makes it a part of their training.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So far, this strategy seems to be working. <\/p>\n\n\n\n A report<\/a> from General Assembly reveals that hiring for the school\u2019s graduates has been on the rise during the first quarter of 2021. The uptick has to do with the arrival of a hiring boom fueled by the acceleration of vaccine rollouts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cMoving into 2021, we\u2019re already seeing improvements, with companies removing hiring freezes and climbing back toward pre-pandemic levels. As of May, recruitment for tech jobs reached a new high, superseding pre-COVID levels,\u201d says the report. <\/p>\n\n\n\n That said, it\u2019s worth pointing out that while General Assembly appears to be off to a good start in terms of job placement this year, the school has had a stellar run over the years\u2014with or without a hiring boom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A deep dive into General Assembly\u2019s Outcomes Report<\/a> reveals that 91.4 percent of job-seeking students who went through the career coaching program in 2018 hit their goal within six months of graduation. The following year, 90.5 percent<\/a> of job-seeking graduates landed full-time roles within the same period.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Indeed, since its inception, General Assembly has managed to place its students in household names like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, Amazon, Coca-Cola, and IBM.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Amid fierce competition for meaningful employment, having career coaching services to rely on is a powerful differentiator among graduates who are set to join the workforce.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cEveryone is capable [of succeeding],\u201d says Audrey, \u201cbut we all need a support system.\u201d General Assembly\u2019s career coaches<\/a> provide this by teaching and empowering students with the resources and job search strategies they need to increase their chances of landing their dream jobs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Want to know more about this school but don’t know where to start? Read some General Assembly reviews<\/a>. If you want to get a peek at how that support looks, try General Assembly\u2019s free career development workshops and events<\/a>. If you like what you see, explore General Assembly\u2019s programs<\/a>, go through the training, and get your resume fast-tracked into the \u2018yes\u2019 pile<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Higher education is failing to meet one of its top promises to its students: employment. A recent report by job site Monster reveals that among the Class of 2020 college graduates, 45 percent remain unemployed. While a significant part of this is due to the onset of the pandemic, a lot of college graduates have…","protected":false},"author":93,"featured_media":33191,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28859],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-33190","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-partner-spotlight"},"acf":{"post_sub_title":"","sprint_id":"","query_class":"Partner Spotlight","school_sft":"","parent_sft":"","school_privacy_policy":"","has_review":"","is_sponser_post":["yes"],"is_guest_post":""},"yoast_head":"\n\n
![\"Infographic](\"https:\/\/careerkarma.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/5-Key-Features-of-General-Assemblys-Career-Services.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nInside General Assembly\u2019s Career Services: Five Key Features<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
1. General Assembly\u2019s Career Services <\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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2. Personalized Career Coaching<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
3. Building Your Brand<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
4. Resume Review<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
5. Essential Workplace Skills and Experience<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Key Takeaway<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Are General Assembly Students Getting Hired During the Pandemic?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Looking for Job Search Support?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n